Lemper, Ute

▪ 1998

      With the release in 1997 of the recording Berlin Cabaret Songs, Ute Lemper confirmed her standing as the foremost modern interpreter of the music of 1920s Germany. Including songs by a number of composers banished from the country by the government of Adolf Hitler, the recording was a vivid re-creation of the German cabaret music of the period. The release by Decca/London was part of its Entartete Musik ("Degenerate Music") series, documenting works that had been banned by Nazi Germany and, as a consequence, sometimes forgotten. As a way of reaching a larger audience, Lemper recorded each song in both German and English, with the versions in the two languages being released separately.

      Lemper was born on July 4, 1963, in Münster, W.Ger. Her mother was an opera singer, and the girl began piano, voice, and ballet lessons at an early age. She took children's parts in operettas and plays, sang in jazz and piano bars as a teenager, and later studied acting and theatre in Stuttgart, W.Ger., and in Vienna. In 1983 she appeared in a Viennese production of Cats, and she later took the title role in Peter Pan and the role of Sally Bowles in Cabaret. After several years away from the musical theatre, she returned in 1997 in a starring role in the London revival of Chicago. Her first recording (1988) of the music of Kurt Weill rose to number one on Billboard magazine's crossover chart. Lemper later released a second recording of the music of Weill—also a best-seller—as well as recordings of The Threepenny Opera (1988) and Mahagonny-Songspeil (1989), among Weill's best-known collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. Other recordings include Illusions, an homage to Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf that was another best-seller and that led to Lemper's being named the Crossover Artist of the Year in 1993.

      During the late 1980s and the early '90s, Lemper appeared in a review of Weill's music and wrote the script for a musical biography of him, danced in the ballet La Morte subite, created for her by Maurice Béjart, and took the role of Lola in a stage production of The Blue Angel. She appeared in films, including Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991) and Robert Altman's Ready to Wear (1994). Her paintings were shown in Hamburg, Ger., and Paris, and a collection of essays and reminiscences was published as Unzensiert in 1995. She received a number of awards, including the French Culture Prize in 1993.

      It was as a songstress, however, and particularly as an exponent of the popular music of the Weimar Republic, that Lemper achieved renown. Critics agreed that she brought the right kind of theatricality to the music, an ironic and sardonic art of political and social satire and one that was unusually frank in matters of sex. She was sometimes called its best interpreter since Dietrich and Lotte Lenya. Through her recordings Lemper helped audiences become acquainted with a music that, although banished two generations earlier, continued to speak to the human condition.

ROBERT RAUCH

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