Lotte Lenya

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Lotte Lenya, photographed by Carl van Vechten in 1962

Lotte Lenya , also Lotte Lenja , (born October 18, 1898 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary as Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer ; † November 27, 1981 in New York City , New York ) was an Austrian - American actress and singer (mezzo-soprano /Old).

Life

Youth and successes in the Weimar Republic

Lotte Lenya grew up in a working-class district of Vienna ( 14th, “Penzing” , Ameisgasse 38; memorial plaque since 2003) in poor conditions. The mother was a laundress, the alcoholic father was a coachman. In 1913, when she was 15, she came to Zurich to live with an aunt, but she did not take her in permanently. Nevertheless, she stayed in Zurich and first became a ballet dancer, then an actress. She lived in Zurich until 1921, where she stood on stage with Elisabeth Bergner, who was almost the same age , shared a cloakroom and then went to Berlin .

She also adopted her stage name in 1921. However, the hoped-for successes were a long time coming. Through her friendship with the playwright Georg Kaiser , she met the young composer Kurt Weill in 1924 . Shortly afterwards, Weill and Lenya began a love affair. She worked as a singer in the world premiere of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's first joint piece , the Singspiel Mahagonny , in 1927 in Baden-Baden . She played the role of Jenny at the premiere of the Threepenny Opera in 1928. She was also seen in this role in the film adaptation of GW Pabst in 1931 and became known for her interpretation of the song of the pirate Jenny ; she also appeared as an actress in plays by Wedekind and Feuchtwanger . In 1930 she also recorded the Alabama song on record. Another success for Lenya was the Berlin performance of Mahagonny in 1931. In 1932, she also played this piece in Vienna, where she met the tenor Otto Pasetti , who was her lover until 1934. This led to the temporary separation from Weill.

Marriage and emigration

Berlin memorial plaque on the house, Altonaer Strasse 22, in Berlin-Hansaviertel

In May 1925 Georg Kaiser offered Lenya and Weill his apartment at Luisenplatz 3 in Berlin; this was the beginning of their life together. In 1926, they married to put an end to the gossip, as Lenya later told.

In early 1933 Lotte Lenya filed for divorce from Kurt Weill. In June 1933 Lenya appeared together with the tenor Otto Pasetti in the Paris premiere of the sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins by Weill and Brecht. Weill emigrated to Paris in the same year; Lenya was able to save some of Weill's possessions from confiscation by the Nazi regime. She lived with Otto Pasetti on the French Riviera until the summer of 1934, when the affair came to an end .

Lenya then had a brief liaison with the painter Max Ernst , but returned to Kurt Weill in April 1935, expressly to stay with him. At first you lived in London. In the summer of 1935, Weill took up an engagement in Salzburg, from where he informed Lenya of his decision to travel to the United States. He invited her to come with him.

In the United States

In 1935 Weill and Lenya left Europe together from Cherbourg . They reached New York on September 10, 1935 on the RSS Majestic . They were married for the second time in January 1937 at the Westchester County Registry Office .

Lenya sang in nightclubs in New York, starred in The Eternal Road , a monumental drama for which Weill had composed the music, and toured the United States on theater tours while her husband worked on musicals with Maxwell Anderson and Ira Gershwin . She also starred in plays by her neighbor Maxwell Anderson, who was one of the most successful playwrights of the 1930s. After a failure in Weill's operetta The Firebrand of Florence in 1945, she largely withdrew as an actress, as she saw no further chances of success because of her accent.

After Weill's death in 1950, Lenya took care of his estate. Her second husband, George Davis, persuaded her to return to the stage. She played Jenny again in the Threepenny Opera , this time on Broadway , in English, and with just as great success as in Berlin in the late 1920s. Leonard Bernstein had this new translation achieved in a concert performance in Boston.

Return to Germany

In the mid-1950s she returned to Germany to perform, including the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny , the Threepenny Opera , The Seven Deadly Sins and many individual numbers for the record. Compared to her first recordings around 1930, her voice had sunk very deeply into the old register, and she could no longer perform many songs and songs for high voice in the original version. The conductor of the recordings was Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg , who among other things reorganized the part of Jenny in the opera Mahagonny , actually a soprano part, for Lenya. At the Ruhr Festival in Recklinghausen she appeared as Mother Courage in the 1960s .

Later years

In later years, Lotte Lenya also made a name for herself as a film actress in Hollywood . She starred opposite Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty in the film The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone , for which she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. She became particularly famous in the role of ex-KGB officer Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film From Moscow with Love (1963). In the theater she played the role of Fräulein Schneider in the premiere of the musical Cabaret in the 1960s.

In 1978 she had her last appearances. At that time she was already suffering from cancer, from which she died three years later in New York. Lotte Lenya's grave is next to the final resting place of her husband Kurt Weill in Mount Repose Cemetery in Haverstraw , New York .

Commemoration, reception

In 2002 in Vienna's 14th district , the quarter of her childhood, Lotte-Lenya-Platz was named after her; in Berlin-Charlottenburg the Lotte-Lenya-Bogen (along the Stadtbahn opposite the Theater des Westens ).

The piece Lalena of Donovan is an allusion to Lotte Lenya.

broadcast

  • Deutschlandfunk , Long Night , August 10, 2013, Beate Bartlewski: Alone for two - a long night about Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill .

Filmography

  • 1931: The Threepenny Opera
  • 1961: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
  • 1963: James Bond 007 - From Russia with Love
  • 1964: Bertolt Brecht: Exercise pieces for actors (short film)
  • 1965: Mother Courage and Her Children - A Chronicle of the Thirty Years War (TV movie)
  • 1966: Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (TV movie)
  • 1969: A touch of sensuality (The Appointment)
  • 1974: CBS Daytime 90 (TV series, episode Trio for Lovers )
  • 1977: Two savvy professionals (semi-tough)
  • 1980: Mahagonny (voice only)

Publications

literature

Web links

Commons : Lotte Lenya  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ wien.gv.at , Wiener Rathauskorrespondenz , May 27, 2003
  2. ↑ knerger.de: Lotte Lenya's grave
  3. ↑ dradio.de (October 27, 2013)
personal data
SURNAME Lenya, Lotte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blamauer, Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte (real name); Lenja, Lotte (other name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American actress and singer
DATE OF BIRTH October 18, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1981
Place of death New York City , New York, United States