Sprich leise, wenn Du Liebe sagst

In the organizer's words:

"Speak softly when you say love -
A musical journey with Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill"

Marie Oser (voice) and Boris Gurevich (piano) take you on a musical journey that follows the life stages of the Jewish composer Kurt Weill and his most famous interpreter and wife Lotte Lenya.

In songs and texts, the program takes you from the brilliant start in Berlin in the 1920s to exile in Paris and Broadway. It tells the story of the couple's love through Kurt Weill's compositions, a love that had to withstand persecution and flight.

Entertaining and vivid, it brings a piece of contemporary German history to life and also focuses on the fates of female artists in the Weimar Republic and in exile. What is also special about this program is the variety of musical styles performed, which reflects Weill's transformations and opens up a repertoire beyond the well-known Brecht/Weill songs.

With the Bilbao song, Oser/Gurevich take us directly back to the 1920s, when Weill as a composer, Brecht as a poet and Lenya as a performer were suddenly successful. With "The Threepenny Opera", "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" and "Happy End", they brought a new musical theater to the stage that captured the feverish mood of the time and addressed the living conditions of people in the big cities.

Oser's interpretation of "Nanna's Lied" and the "Barbara Song" reveals the inner conflict of women who emancipate themselves and yet remain trapped in dependent structures. In "Matrosen-Tango" and "Cäsars Tod", Oser impressively sings about the threat posed to Weimar democracy by the National Socialists, including the ban on performing Weill's works after Hitler came to power.

Threatened by the Nazis, Weill fled to Paris in 1933. In exile in Paris, the pain of irretrievable loss and the longing for a better world gave rise to compositions of great melancholy and serious beauty. With "Je ne t'aime pas" and "Youkali", Oser fragilely and permeably touches on the abyss of abandonment in every human being, but also evokes the power of utopia and the belief in one's own ability to take life into one's own hands and shape it again and again. In his new home, the USA, Weill composed musical plays that took up contemporary themes, completely American and yet also completely "Weill". Oser/Gurevich transport us to the cabaret atmosphere of the legendary Ruban Bleu, allowing the audience to breathe a sigh of relief, rejoice and sing along after emotionally profound passages. Weill was only 50 years old, and Lenya began her second career after his death with a memorial concert in New York Town Hall.

Let yourself be whisked away to a world that is both past and present!

Price information:

Advance booking: 20€/ 15€ Box Office: 22€/ 17€