Harriet Murphy
One Woman or Another, What’s the Difference?
Known primarily throughout her life time as a singer, Lotte Lenya’s recordings commemorate for posterity her unique role in many successful productions. They are genuine cultural artefacts, which, if they cannot do justice to her magnetic stage presence, project a voice which attacks us with a brittle kind of sexiness, overwhelming us with its uncompromising attitude to survival.
Donald Spoto’s biography shows how deeply the voice expresses the essence of her personality. It charts her experiences as an independent woman from her birth in 1898 in Vienna to her death in New York in 1981, through her years in Zurich and Berlin. Curiously but not surprisingly it does not examine her development as an artist because it implies, by default, that Lenya possessed a talent to perform which did not evolve, let alone mature, over the years. Instead, her absolute gift was exploited periodically by some of the great creative talents with whom she was associated, namely Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Compared to Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel, the far more successful interpreter of the role of Mutter Courage and a woman whom she disliked, Lenya clearly lacked the drive, conviction, purpose and above all ambition which we normally associate with the committed professional. She emerges, in this study, as one who at a very deep level was a creature of circumstance.
It is all of a piece that Lenya never received any kind of formal musical or dramatic training. She consistently resisted external constraints and always relied on her inner resources. Spoto’s theory is that her willed excellence in the art of survival had its origins in the childhood abuse –
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back