Lotte Lenya

Lotte Lenya earned a Tony Award as an actress and vocalist whose principal work unfolded on stage across five decades beginning in the 1920s, though she also cut records and made scattered forays into cinema, radio, and television. Her artistic identity remained bound to the output of composer Kurt Weill, the man she married, through repeated appearances in his theatrical scores and through her involvement in multiple recorded surveys of his music. That same association with Germany between the wars shaped later casting choices, among them her selection for the Broadway staging of Cabaret. The Tony itself, however, recognized her 1954 performance in Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, the identical role she had originated at the work’s 1928 Berlin premiere.

She entered the world as Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer in Vienna on October 18, 1898. An early affinity for singing and movement surfaced when she joined a local circus at age five. In 1913 she relocated to Zurich, where ballet and acting classes occupied her time, before settling in Berlin in 1921. She and Weill wed on January 28, 1926. The following summer, on July 17, 1927, she took part in the Baden-Baden premiere of Mahagonny Songspiel, Weill’s settings of Bertolt Brecht poems; the cycle later grew into the full opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. On August 31, 1928, she appeared in a supporting capacity when The Threepenny Opera opened in Berlin. She reprised the part for a studio-cast disc cut in December 1930 and for the screen version that reached theaters in February 1931. Although absent from the original Berlin run of the Brecht/Weill musical Happy End, which began September 2, 1929, she preserved several of its numbers on record. She did perform in the Berlin production of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny that opened December 21, 1931.

With the rise of the Nazi regime, Lenya departed Germany. From a base in Paris she recorded selections from Weill’s 1933 musical play The Silver Lake and headlined the Brecht/Weill ballet The Seven Deadly Sins, unveiled June 7, 1933. She and Weill sailed for the United States in September 1935, ostensibly so he could compose the Biblical pageant The Eternal Road, scheduled for New York with a part for her; both later took American citizenship. The production reached the Manhattan Opera House on January 7, 1937, and completed 153 performances.

Lenya made her nightclub debut at Le Ruban Bleu in New York on April 7, 1938. On October 22, 1941, she opened on Broadway in the play Candle in the Wind, which ran for 95 performances. Bost Records engaged her in 1943 for the album Six Songs by Kurt Weill, issued as three 78-rpm discs. Her next appearance in one of her husband’s works came when she starred in the operetta The Firebrand of Florence, which opened March 22, 1945, yet closed after only 43 showings.

Weill succumbed to a heart attack on April 3, 1950. Lenya returned to Broadway in Barefoot in Athens, which began its run October 31, 1951, and lasted thirty performances. Greater impact followed from her participation in Marc Blitzstein’s English adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, presented in concert at Brandeis University on June 13, 1952. That event prompted a full Off-Broadway revival that opened March 10, 1954, and continued until December 1961. Lenya remained with the production for two years, recorded the cast album, and received the 1956 Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical.

The visibility she gained from The Threepenny Opera enabled recording agreements with Columbia in the United States and Philips in Europe for a sequence of new Weill projects taped in Germany and sung in German. The initial release was the solo collection Lotte Lenya Sings Berlin Theatre Songs by Kurt Weill, issued in November 1955. Next came a recording of The Seven Deadly Sins released in March 1957, followed by a studio-cast version of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny that appeared in 1958. Columbia then commissioned an album of Weill’s American theater songs, resulting in September Song and Other American Theatre Songs of Kurt Weill, released February 1958. Back in Germany she joined a studio-cast Threepenny Opera disc issued later that year. Having completed most of her later Weill recordings, she added one further album for Columbia and Philips by taping the Happy End songs in July 1960.

Later in 1960 she traveled to London for her first film in three decades, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Although she did not seek additional screen roles, she accepted a handful more, appearing in From Russia with Love (1964), The Appointment (1969), and Semi-Tough (1977). She resumed New York stage work in the Off-Broadway revue Brecht on Brecht, which opened January 3, 1962, ran more than two hundred performances, and was preserved by Columbia on a cast album. Continuing her advocacy for Weill’s lyricist, she starred in a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage presented in Recklinghausen, Germany, during June and July 1965.

Lenya returned to Broadway in Cabaret, the musical drawn from Christopher Isherwood’s stories and set in Weimar Germany, which opened November 20, 1966. The show became a major success, playing 1,165 performances; Lenya appeared in most of them, received a Tony nomination for best actress, and performed on the original-cast recording. Her final stage engagement was another run of The Threepenny Opera at Florida State University in Tallahassee in April 1972. She died of ovarian cancer in New York on November 27, 1981, at the age of eighty-three.