Ute Lemper Interview 8/28/08

Do you remember your first time coming to Carnegie Hall as an audience member?

Yes, I do remember. That was very long ago; it was in 1987. It was one of my first visits to America. I was just blown away by the city. (It was very hot in the summer, I remember.) I’d never seen anything like New York before, so it was a big thing. We went to Carnegie Hall to see Liza Minnelli, believe it or not. My agent, because he was representing Liza Minnelli in Germany at the time, said, “We’re going to see Liza tonight!” It was a great performance, and very interesting. But since then I’ve seen many beautiful concerts here of classical music:  Mahler concerts, Thomas Quasthoff, beautiful singers, but also Keith Jarrett last year with a solo piano performance that was very interesting. This is a great, very magical space. I like that it is a very established concert hall, yet it really still offers the whole array of world music, jazz music, and of course classical music. The acoustics are fantastic in this hall, I have to say. 

How has it changed from being an audience-member, then going on stage, from ’87 to when you first performed with the Pops?

Well, in ’87, I already was very much at home on stage. I played big concert halls in Europe. Once the lights go out and you go out there to do your job onstage, there is no purpose in trembling and getting soft knees just because you are on one of the most established stages in the world. You just have to go out there and tell your story. It’s a very beautiful, focused, meditative consciousness when you go out on stage. You open the door (and you’ve worked many, many years to tell the story with your instrument, with your craft), and you go out and just try to eliminate all those disturbing emotions like too much adrenaline or cramping because you are too frightened. All of that goes away, and you tell your story inside the musical domain, and you try to take people on a journey. On a journey through time, a journey through various repertoires, a political journey sometimes, or a cultural journey. And it’s also a journey that is full of surprises for myself sometimes, because I don’t always plan out everything in a concert. It depends. If you’re working with a symphony, yes, everything has to be planned out; there are 80 people behind  you, and you can’t surprise them with a sudden ritardando or a sudden improvisation. But if I’m with my band (usually I do travel with my four-piece band or my trio, or just my pianist in a recital situation), I don’t have everything sketched out. Certainly not the way I connect the songs, the way I connect the story-lines. But also musically it’s beautiful to leave things open for improvisation, and to have the moment onstage as a moment of  birth. You don’t only create in the moment the actual musical path but also sometimes the musical temperment. You have different dynamic aspects to the interpretation different every night, because you feel them differently, or, throughout the interplay with the musicians, the music develops to a climax there where you didn’t expect the climax before. I like this. It’s an experimental, exciting journey to be taken onstage. And it has to be overwhelmingly beautiful from all aspects; you want it to be beautiful and you want it to be a real life experience, so you just have to trust the moment, trust the impulse, trust your intuition, trust your instrument, and go out there and tell your story.

Your journey started in Germany, obviously.

The physical journey, yes, the geographical journey started out in Germany. 

You started out in musicals there?

I was trained first as a dancer, then as an actress. I was in drama school in Austria at the Reinhardt Seminar. And I always had the singing dimension; I was studying voice, too. I was taken from my drama school, like a crane just lifted me out of there and set me straight onto a stage with a musical. That was 1981 or 1982, the first moment in time where you had German-speaking musical productions, the “clone” productions which are now so popular all over:  the first Lloyd Webber shows, for example, where they created the tour productions (the “clone” productions) all over the world. My first was the first German-speaking production of Cats, and then I also continued. I went to Berlin, after Austria, to do Peter Pan, Guys and Dolls, the first big Kurt Weill revues, and then later on the Blue Angel, and so on. But I was never really happy in the musical world. It was not what I wanted to do. I came from an acting school; I wanted to be onstage, speaking the words of Chekhov or Ibsen or Strindberg, and I did not want to be a damn cat. In the beginning I was not happy. But then again, I was one of the few German-speaking people at the time who had the triple formation of singing, dancing, and acting, so I got chosen to do this, and it took me a couple of years to speak out for myself and say, “This is not what I want. I need to do something else.” I did find my own musical identity through the first recitals of Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht, my own recitals where I told the life story of Kurt Weill as a composer, as a human being, as a Jewish man in that time (and along with that story, obviously the musical story, the revolutionary new creations with Berthold Brecht and the years of the Weimar Republic, then after he got kicked out by the Nazis the new musical identities he found through the French exile, and then the years in America with a new career).

Your focusing on Weill basically has stayed with you throughout your entire career. Now, what makes this particular piece, The Seven Deadly Sins, different from all his other works?

Yes, as you said, the Weill-Brecht is my root repertoire. So are the Berlin cabaret songs. They will always stay with me, wherever I go with contemporary music, my own compositions, my own songs, all the French repertoire, the Yiddish songs, or the Astor Piazzolla songs; this is my root repertoire, and it created my musical identity as a performer. Now, The Seven Deadly Sins is the last collaboration between Brecht and Weill. It was 1935, and it was in Paris (they had already gone into exile; the Nazis already were in power in Germany). It was a ballet which was created for the Champs-Elysees, and it was choreographed by Georges Balanchine. It was a very interesting piece. Anna I, the narrator of the story, was interpreted by Lotte Lenya, and then there was Anna II, her alter-ego, who was interpreted by the dancer. It is a satire on the capitalism of the United States, and the “seven deadly sins” are not the Biblical seven deadly sins but rather a satirial seven deadly sins of the immorality of a capitalist society, of course all written with the Marxist eye of Brecht in those years:  it’s about making a career, making money, selling your soul, selling your body, not having a relationship for love but rather with a rich man for success, to get money as quickly as you can, starving yourself because this is the aesthetic of modern society (a very contemporary aspect), going to Hollywood, making a fuss there, and not succeeding because you have talent but rather succeeding because you have a scandal. The whole thing sounds very contemporary, but the images that were chosen for The Seven Deadly Sins by Brecht are still very antiquated, because it was 1935. There are Indians and cowboys on horses, the family of Anna lives in Louisianna (a very conservative place) and waits for Anna to travel across America to succeed in this capitalist world in order to bring home money so the house can be built. It’s a very crazy journey, with a lot of humor, a lot of funny moments. All in all, because it was written so long ago, it sounds a little antiquated, but if you get to the real center message of this journey, it is still very contemporary. 

I was listening to a little bit of your new recording, and I noticed the ideas, or the content, behind each of the works. It seems like you are inspired by all different aspects of the human experience:  politics, nuclear love. I remember the “Nevada” song, too, was very interesting to me as an American. But can you talk a little bit about how you go about taking your experiences, or your ideas, and focusing them into your new works? 

I just tried, on this album, to take (as I usually take) a trip across my life, across what has influenced me, what had an impact, what made me stop breathing for a second, what really shattered me, and memories or images or moments of reflection that I held onto. I have a big book with scribbles, texts, poetry, stuff I’ve collected over the years, articles I’ve read in the papers that shocked me for a second (or hopefully longer than a second). And I just sat at the piano. The stories are very cinematic. I take people and I transport them through the musical harmonies and the musical moods into the situation of looking with a close-up camera at the landscape of the story. So of course one center story of the album is a story about Berlin in the years of the Cold War, Berlin with the Wall, the separation between East and West, and Berlin as a little island in the middle of the East Bloc. The image of this time that got locked in my head is a movie, a Wim Wenders movie. There is the feeling we all had those years living in Berlin, and of course there is the overwhelming contemporary aspect to it. Berlin is such a different place now, being a glamorous capital. Progress happened so quickly, faster almost than the artists could write about it or invent theater plays; progress was so fast that you almost couldn’t swallow and digest as fast. So “Berlin” is of course a center story to my storytelling. Then there’s “New York.” September 11th, that day, which started out as a normal day for all of us:  it was after Labor Day, the kids had their first school day, there was a blue sky; it started out as a very normal, peaceful day in the new semester, and look what happened. How cinematic was that day? But I didn’t make the song as a political portrait. It’s more like a poetic impression of that day, put into music. And then, yes, the story about Nevada is really inspired by this article I read on an airplane. Obviously, the nuclear experimentations in the ‘50s underground and overground were very frightening, a very strange time, where it was not a transparent thing; we didn’t really know what was going on, and yet we knew that the experiments were very dangerous and on a large scale, and that a very powerful force was about to explode (or not explode). Those years of the Cold War were frightening. I read in this article the names of these bombs that were exploded in the desert, and they were so strange:  Fox, Apache, Underdog. They just had these funny names, and I just kept the article. It’s really strange, but I thought, “What strange information and what a strange language! What a strange physicality to put into a song.” So that’s how the song happened. And it kind of fit into the journey. You know, it’s a Cold War story, and “Berlin” is a Cold War story. And then of course “Nomad” is a very imporatant song. It’s a collage and a poetic impression of the Middle East conflict. Yet again, it’s not in a political dimension, but rather a poetic one, because it’s based on a poem about religion written by an Islamic teacher ([Ibn al Arabi]) in the 12th century. As a teacher, he defined religion as a place for all kinds of temperments. Prairie to the gazelles, temple to the idols, monastery to the monks, Kaaba to the pilgrims, and table to the Torah and the holy book of the Koran. It defines religion to be a place for love, and for this to be a centerpiece for religion. I thought what a beautiful idea this was, originally, in this teaching, and how far religion and dogma had unfortunately grown away from this and separated from this original idea of religion as existing to make people understand each other better and to be tolerant. So I put this in a beautiful little musical collage. 

Your career has spanned a couple of decades. Has what you’ve taken to put into your own work (all these influences) changed how you’ve interpreted, or your performance practice with, cabaret and concert stage music?

I am a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the music I actually listened to as a teenager was of course not Brecht and Weill; that was far too abstract and theatrical for me. I listened to Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, the great R&B. It was a great decade of music. But it wasn’t music from my country. There was a cultural vaccuum in Germany in the ‘70s:  there were one or two rock performers and the rest was improted from Britain and America. But I loved singing, and I did have a jazz trio (I sang the old Fitzgerald standards like Cole Porter and Duke Ellington and all that, but I sang it as a German, and probably like a stupid club singer). But I was looking for repertoire I really could bite my teeth into. Brecht was a fantastic poet. He was a man of intellect, even though he was politically colored by being impressed by the book by Marx, but he was really a humanist. He just wanted to find a world that was just, a world where everyone had equal values and where nobody was privilidged, a society with no class and no corruption. He just had a dream, like Martin Luther King had a dream, but unfortunately reality would never get to be a realization of that dream. Probably in a little kibbutz where you have 400 people living together (and one grows the vegetables and one is the butcher, and all the people share everything at the same time so everything belongs to everyone), in a very little society like that you could realize this dream of Brecht to have a Communist structure where nobody is worth more than the other people, where the doctor serves the peasant and the peasant serves the doctor in the same way. But obviously in a larger-scale society it’s not possible, because people are hungry for power, and hungry for possessions and status. Anyway, his poetry was overwhelming and I loved it. The poetry includes also knowledge of the failure of his intent and his mission, and it takes a humble attitude towards it. And of course it includes the outrage about Hitler taking over, the outrage about Fascism and anti-Semitism and racism and prejudice against gays and people who were not plain Aryans like the Nazis wanted. I was aware that he was a very great poet, and I loved to speak the words of this poet. It made me awake as a young German; it exactly fulfilled this attitude of rebelliousness I had, this wish to speak out against the establishment and the conservative crowd. This was a perfect territory for me to bite my teeth into. So it did form my style as a performer, and as a person, too. And there are other poets like that, too (Eisler, and Mitterling, and Hollaender, and Spoliansky), other poets who had the same bite like Brecht had, so it realy did form me. And it was my own language, which was very imporatnt, because you can’t do that in a foreign language wehre you don’t understand its subtleties. And then, later on, when I lived abroad (I lived in England for many years and Paris for many years), I started to want to find the same integrity in the French repertoire, and it was possible because I did speak French fluently, and I could find the same depth that I found in the German repertoire. So I was able to find it in other repertoires, and I was searching in the same way. But I would say, all in all, I always stayed a rather Expressionist performer, due to this repertoire. 

Great. Now, your time with musicals here in New York. You’ve performed with Chicago for quite a bit of time, and it looks like you were have a few shows at the Carlisle Club.

In New York, I’ve performed in so many different spaces. The reason that I moved to New York was Broadway, so after the West End I came to Broadway for one year in Chicago, and after that I performed at Joe’s Pub, which is of course one of my favorite places in New York, because Joe Papp was the one who really brought Berthold Brecht over, and translated him with [Mark Littstein] for an American audience. The Public Theater is a great place for me, where I’ll always have a home. And then beyond that I’ve performed at Town Hall, the Bottom Line (I have great memories of it, but unfortunately it’s closed; it was a great club at the University downtown), Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and Merkin Hall. And then yes, I started to come every year to the Carlisle three years in a row. It was fun, but all in all a conservative crowd. Too conservative for me; I’m much better off downtown with the freaks, the open people, the free spirits. 

Do you have any amazing stories about that? 

Well, if I perform downtown, it’s great. The audience has a lot of generations:  young people in their teens or their 20s, and very old people also, 70- or 80-year-old people who come because of the memories and the repertoire I sing. There’s a large gay crowd, and they’re always up for fun and interaction; they just want me to go out there and get them a part and kiss them and shred them to pieces, and they love it. And most importantly I have an intellectual crowd there; they understand German, English, Yiddish, and they are interested in this whole European chanson universe. It’s just very much fun down there. They’re always up for jokes. And yet, as I’ve said, when I perform down there I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s an experiment for me, and I go out there, and I take the vibe of the evening or the hour or the minute, and I improvise. The schtick, the cabaret, the fun stuff, the jokes, most of it is improvised, and I just take it as it comes. They certainly enjoy this European repertoire very much. The other great joint here in town is the Neue Gallerie, the beautiful Austrian gallery on the Upper East Side, which presents the paintings of Klimt and Egon Schiele and George Grosz and the Expressionist period I adore so much in the musical horizon.

The Weimar Republic era. 

Yes, and the pre-Weimar. The Expressionists started really much earlier, at the beginning of the century. And the experience of the First World War, the bloodshed and the cruelty, really then brought the Expressionism to a point where it included not only the artistic experience of the rough painting style but also the political aspect.

When you come in front of a symphony orchestra in a collaboration with a conductor (or even with Orpheus without a conductor), how does that work?

It’s more formal. First of all, to perform with an orchestra is something very powerful, because you stand right next to the conductor in front of the string section, and you are in the middle of a very powerful body (if it’s a chamber orchestra, 45 people, or a large orchestra, 85 to a 120 people), which is put together by all these people making music at the same time. It’s like a puzzle that grows so large and powerful, in its beauty and in its spirit, that you live inside this body and you are allowed to find your own voice inside this very powerful body. It’s a fantastic thing, and it often gives me the shivers; they just come right over my back, all over the back of my head. I let myself fall into that energy. So I love it very much. But in its structure it is more formal. You have to be very well-rehearsed; the conductor has to keep everything together. The time is a lot more loose than with a band. With a band, the time is timed rhythm, exact groove, and all that. With an orchestra, every bar has an accelerando and a ritardando at the same time, so classical music breathes through a much more humane interpretation than I do when I perform with my band. And I always have to tell my band, which is used to playing jazz music and Brazilian music and so on, that time doesn’t have to be stiff like a click track, but every bar can breathe and incorporate a ritardando and an accelerando, like every breath or every heartbeat has a slightly different blood-flow. This, with an orchestra, is very evident and beautiful, this open time experience. Also, it’s always a delicate thing to do a performance with orchestra with amplification, because in the classical world, you don’t amplify; that is sometimes a balance act to get right. But I enjoy it very much. 

Have you worked with the Toronto Symphony before?

A couple of years ago. I think it was a selection of Piaf songs we did with a different conductor, Larry Foster. As for The Seven Deadly Sins, I just did them in Spain (in Barcelona), I just did them in Prague (with the Prague Symphony Orchestra), and I performed this work all over the world; it’s a real piece of establishment in 20th-century music. It’s a very beautiful piece of orchestral work. Musically, I would say, it’s one of the best works of Kurt Weill. It combines the past with the future. It has elements of the Three-Penny Opera, of Mahogany, of Happy, of everything he composed in Germany prior to the Nazis, and it encorporates the melancholy during his years of exile (not knowing where to go, being lost as a human being and as a composer, not knowing what the future would bring), yet it has this incredible energy, this drive of going for a new future. It really is a great bridge piece in his life. 

I think I’m about done. Did you want to say anything else? 

No, I think we did a lot. 

Thank you very much for coming in. 

Thank you. 

We really appreciate it.