Ute Lemper sings Kurt Weill

About the production

Kurt Weill's 125th birthday and the 75th anniversary of his death will coincide in 2025. The Lausitz Festival is honouring the double anniversary of the great composer, who was born in Dessau in 1900 and died in New York City in 1950, with a brilliant closing concert for this year's festival edition:

In an intimate song recital, world star Ute Lemper, accompanied on the piano by Vana Gierig, presents vocal works by the composer from the time of the Weimar Republic, his French exile and the years following his emigration to the USA in the Great Hall of the Deutsch-Sorbische Volkstheater Bautzen / Budyšin.

The variety of Weill's arias, songs, chansons and songs reflects a life that tells of democratic hopes, fleeting melancholy and success. Musically, Weill found his own unmistakable path between avant-garde and assimilation to the popular. Weill set libretti and texts by Georg Kaiser, Franz Werfel, Langston Hughes, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Maxwell Anderson, Yvan Goll and Ogden Nash to music. He achieved world fame through his work with Bertolt Brecht. »The fact that my music for the ›Threepenny Opera‹  has been industrialised does not speak against it from our point of view, but for it, and we would fall back into our old mistakes if we were to deny a piece of music its artistic value and significance just because it has found its way to the masses«, the composer noted.

It is not only the sound of the Weimar Republic that is closely linked to the sound of Kurt Weill's music. He also processed the experience of exile in France and his success as an American citizen in a hauntingly musical way between opera and jazz, musical and song. The sociologist and musician Theodor W. Adorno, who was very averse to anything popular in music, wrote about Weill: »He composes his new melodies, interpreting the old ones, even in fragments, joining together the ruins of phrases that time has shattered.«

Ute Lemper has been singing Weill on the world's major stages for 40 years and has released several albums of his works. Her art and career are also closely linked to her life in Berlin, Paris and New York. She knows how to breathe new life into Weill's music in her own unmistakable way. She takes her audience on a fascinating journey through the life and work of Kurt Weill, who left the world a wealth of unforgettable songs.