Echo from Berlin

Glamour, in the despairing Berlin of the early '30s, wore the face of "a disillusioned child singing outside a public house." The voice was husky with melancholy, the song a loose shrug of defiance: // someone's going to kick, it's going to be me And if someone gets kicked, it'll be you.

The "child," as Observer Margot Asquith described her, was Singer Lotte Lenya. The song was by her husband, Composer Kurt Weill, who celebrated the mood of his German generation in such gorgeously tawdry musical plays as The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny. Last week, in Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium, Singer Lenya, fiftyish, stepped before a microphone again and rekindled the feeling of those darkly cynical days. The concert was a tribute both to Composer Weill's remarkable durability and to Lotte Lenya's own great gifts as a singing actress.

Dreaminess & Hate. The program included selections from Weill's later works written for the Broadway stage--Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus. But what the crowd had turned out to hear was a concert version of the Marc Blitzstein adaptation of Threepenny Opera, which last week marked its 1,200th performance at the off-Broadway Theater de Lys. Dressed in a royal blue frock, her carroty blonde hair drawn loosely back with combs, Lenya appeared in the role she created in Berlin in 1928 and made famous--that of Jenny, the bitter, dream-haunted London prostitute.

She demonstrated again her remarkable capacity to seize and hold an audience with the sparest of motions. Under the glaring lights of the orchestra shell, her face, with its thrusting nose and red-gashed mouth, looked in repose like a mask of quiet despair. Her voice is untrained--she does not read music--and she has a limited range ("I have no high, only low, lower, lowest"). But she sang with a smoky, wistful quality that transformed the ballad Pirate Jenny into a shivering mixture of dreaminess and hate.

Poverty & Corruption. "I hear all my melodies," Kurt Weill once said, "sung in my inner ear by Lenya." The daughter of an illiterate Viennese coachman, she started singing at four in a neighborhood carnival; she still recalls being hauled at night out of the coal bin where she slept and made to warble sentimental favorites for her drunken father. Having mastered the techniques of standing on her head and walking a tightrope, Lenya enrolled at the Stadttheater in Zurich, worked up a dance act and moved on to Berlin. There she played the subway circuit, usually in Shakespeare. The year was inflation-ridden 1923; her weekly salary was 3 billion marks ($5). After she married Weill and became a star in Germany, U.S. Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson wrote: "She is beautiful in a new way, a way that nobody has vulgarized so far." Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya fled the Nazis in 1933 and went to Paris--after Lenya gambled away much of their savings in Monte Carlo. Two years later they settled in the U.S. After Weill's death of a heart attack in 1950, she remarried (Editor-Novelist George Davis, who died last year) and set to work to secure Weill's reputation. Although he had insisted that he despised posterity, she succeeded so well that he is now enjoying a major revival in the U.S. and Europe.

The Weill renaissance is a strange phenomenon, for in many of his scores he simply echoed himself. Moreover, the lyrics by the late Marxist poet Bertolt Brecht, while brilliant in their own guttersnipe way, carry little of their original meaning for the U.S. in 1958: harsh cynicism can date as easily as gaslight sentimentality. Yet there is in the music--and in Lenya--a quality that defies time. "Threepenny Opera," she says, "will be good a hundred years from now. Corruption and poverty don't go out of fashion."

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