Singers: The Welcome Interloper

Lotte Lenya owned Kurt Weill’s music long before she became his widow. Her ravished soprano perfectly matched the temper of his Berlin theater songs—tough, bragging, wicked, hopeless—and no one could have done more with Bertolt Brecht’s lyrics than a singer whose voice combines the chilling qualities of sober screams and drunken laughter. Even now—years past the peak of her career—Lenya’s artistic claim frightens other singers off her turf.

Wicked Wise. It did, that is, until last fall, when Martha Schlamme recorded a full album of Weill’s best compositions. The album includes songs from Weill’s days with Brecht, as well as his later and sweeter French and American music (J’attends un navire, My Ship). Last week Interloper Schlamme extended her welcome trespass by turning up in a Bowery theater-café called The Howff with a show devoted entirely to Weill. The show and its setting would have been just right for Lenya, but Schlamme could hardly be better.

She sings from a stage bare of any decoration but the evening’s credo, Für Weill, written in chalk against a black wall. With an excellent Weillian pianist named Abe Stokman to accompany her, she approaches each of Weill’s many moods, relying only on her powerful gift for expression to keep the chameleonic program together. Will Holt, a showman who shares the stage, does his bit in the wicked-wise style common to Weill-Brecht productions, but Schlamme’s dulcet performance enriches the irony Weill’s Berlin songs depend upon. Her voice never sugars the music or weakens the words. Even at its prettiest, as an English critic once noted, “the force of her grip is the feeling that she is also fighting down a terrible melancholy.”

Dead Laughter. Soprano Schlamme was born in Vienna, but the Nazis chased her Orthodox Jewish family to England in 1938, and she spent two years interned in a British camp on the Isle of Man. She had an international repertoire of folk songs by the time she left England, but when she came to the U.S. in 1948, she rarely escaped the Borsch Belt and Hadassah-club audiences that wanted a strictly Kosher diet of Hebrew and Yiddish songs. Since then, she has made four albums of international folk songs, but record stores are still likely to keep her in the Jewish bin; when she packed Town Hall for her first New York concert, a friend who had followed her Catskill career asked, “What did you do—give away free matzoth?” Her latest album is a return to the Yiddish repertoire, and she sings the songs with relish and ease.

Schlamme’s trained voice seems a bit too genteel to audiences accustomed to the guitar-bound school of folk singers—they tend to write her off as a lady Richard Dyer-Bennet. But in her Weill program, her emotional command over her audiences is unshakable. The nervous laughter that always greets such songs as Seerauber-Jenny and Barbara’s Song dies in the throat under the weight of her sad eyes. “It’s easy for me to feel like a rejected woman,” she says, “and I think I can make it clear that I’m not joking when I sing.”

The suffering of the Jews is very central to her—and central to her songs. She finds Weill and Brecht cultural soul mates, but last summer when she tried out some Weill on a Jewish audience, Brecht’s German lyrics caused a near riot. Many in the audience stormed out, and one man began to scream at her, “Stop singing German!” Schlamme left the stage, soothed herself with a deep breath, then returned to the spotlight to freeze her remaining listeners with one final line. “I haven’t been so frightened,” she said, “since the Hitler Youth chased me down the street in Vienna.”