My Eyes Hear Something
Today’s formative-album replay: Teresa Stratas, The Unknown Kurt Weill. Teresa Stratas’s throaty soprano doesn’t just convey character; on this striking collection of lieder by the 20th century’s greatest composer, her voice is a character, embodying the intimate dramas, bleak poetry, and protest dioramas conjured by a series of lyricists ranging from Maurice Magre to Oscar Hammerstein, all strutting and fretting on the starkly lit stage set by Weill’s music. This endlessly expressive voice-character cajoles, brays, insinuates, exults, resigns, such that you don’t need the lyrics translated to understand intuitively what’s going on. The downcast glow of “Nanna’s Lied” evokes paradoxical nostalgia for an ugly past even before you know it’s a wizened sex worker’s lament; the bittersweet tango of “Muschel von Margate” bespeaks a mounting outrage, fitting for a song that begins on a quaint seaside boardwalk and ends up as an indictment of blood-for-oil petro-imperialism. We are witness to wrenching breakups and alternately bleak or glittering cityscapes; there’s a Dada caper (“Klops Lied”), a utopian prayer (“Youkali”), a sneering Nazi parody (“Schickelgruber”), and a more sober warning about same (“Und was bekam des soldaten weib”). Rosie the Riveter even makes an appearance (“Buddy on the Nightshift”).
Perhaps the song that best sums up the record’s mercurial emotional verite is “Der Aschiedsbrief,” the scribbled diary entry (the lyric is by Erich Kästner) of a jilted lover, whose alternating bouts of pique, curiosity, anger, and nonchalance are mirrored perfectly in Weill’s springy, waltzing major-minor chords and meandering melody, and in Stratas’s heightened-conversational delivery. Liltingly gorgeous and smilingly equivocating, it's the sound of someone thinking out loud to themselves.
The whole thing is a kind of scrapbook that way, though that makes it seem too desultory; for all the angular rises and falls of Weill's music and Stratas’s eerily symbiotic rendering of it—I’m tempted to call it her identification with it—there is a consistent if luxuriously rubato heartbeat to the record. Though she would later do a lavish orchestral album of (slightly) better known Weill tunes, this 1981 piano-and-voice record—essentially a trove of barely heard trunk songs spanning the years 1925 to 1944 which Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, wisely entrusted to Stratas—makes the case for them as canon alongside the composer’s theatrical masterworks. Seldom has the human voice sounded so beautifully, complicatedly human.
Previous Weill replays: Die Dreigroschenoper, The Songs of Kurt Weill.
Perhaps the song that best sums up the record’s mercurial emotional verite is “Der Aschiedsbrief,” the scribbled diary entry (the lyric is by Erich Kästner) of a jilted lover, whose alternating bouts of pique, curiosity, anger, and nonchalance are mirrored perfectly in Weill’s springy, waltzing major-minor chords and meandering melody, and in Stratas’s heightened-conversational delivery. Liltingly gorgeous and smilingly equivocating, it's the sound of someone thinking out loud to themselves.
The whole thing is a kind of scrapbook that way, though that makes it seem too desultory; for all the angular rises and falls of Weill's music and Stratas’s eerily symbiotic rendering of it—I’m tempted to call it her identification with it—there is a consistent if luxuriously rubato heartbeat to the record. Though she would later do a lavish orchestral album of (slightly) better known Weill tunes, this 1981 piano-and-voice record—essentially a trove of barely heard trunk songs spanning the years 1925 to 1944 which Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, wisely entrusted to Stratas—makes the case for them as canon alongside the composer’s theatrical masterworks. Seldom has the human voice sounded so beautifully, complicatedly human.
Previous Weill replays: Die Dreigroschenoper, The Songs of Kurt Weill.
In its roundup of the decade, Time magazine named this one of the best albums of the 80s. It took me at least ten years of listening to appreciate, not the songs--some of which are indelible and instant classics--but Stratas' artful, wise, careful, and entirely committed renderings of them. I think I was too young, too green, to understand what she was doing. She is considered one of the (if not the) foremost singing actresses of the twentieth century, for reasons that seem obvious to me now, for good reason. You really captured so much about what makes this album essential and unique. Bravo, Rob.
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