Europe and America of the 20th centurye century trembled in his voice. She sang the German avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s as well as the songs of Jewish prisoners of the Holocaust. She hums the words of Piaf, Brel and Ferré, the music of Astor Piazzolla, the poems of Pablo Neruda. Nick Cave and Tom Waits wrote for her, but today she sings her own lyrics to her own music.
On Sunday, the German icon Ute Lemper will be at the Maison symphonique to retrace the thread of his career in song in the company of the young conductor Francis Choinière and his orchestra, the FILMHarnique. It is from New York, where she has lived for 25 years, that the legend calls us. In interviews, she switches easily from French to English. Oddly enough, she hasn’t written many songs in German, although her recent autobiography was written in her native language.
Born in Munster in 1963, Mme In the 1980s Lemper became the voice that carried the music of Kurt Weill and the words of Bertold Brecht, this tandem banned by the Nazis, the first because he was Jewish and the second because he was Marxist. “These cabaret songs, from the Weimar Republic, are really spicy political satires,” she says. It was very progressive at the time, and today it’s still amazing. »
During the Weimar Republic, dislodged by Nazi Germany, “women fought for their emancipation and for equality, there was a search for freedom of expression and sexual freedom,” she recalls.
Discomfort and beauty
For a long time, Ute Lemper felt uncomfortable with his native Germany. Because, in everyday life, his country of origin was reluctant to speak openly about the horrors of the Holocaust. “I was uncomfortable having a German passport, and I saw a lethargy in German society and a refusal to openly discuss the past,” she admits. It is in this context that she made it her mission to make known these texts and music banned by the Nazis.
Today, she says, things have improved a lot. “The new generation has given new impetus to Germany. »
But the diva still lives in New York, without an American passport. “New York is a city where you don’t need to transform to conform. But I don’t feel so comfortable with the rest of the United States. I don’t really feel American, but I really like living here. I am still very European at heart, but not necessarily German. I also feel French,” she explains.
From Germany, she likes to highlight beauties.
She put on a whole show around Marlene Dietrich, with whom she once had a long telephone conversation. Fundamentally free, she refuses to venerate icons, and she did not hesitate to attack the world of entertainment in her first biography, Uncensoredpublished in the 1990s.
The show she put on around Marlene Dietrich actually saw the light of day after she refused to play in a play about the relationship between Dietrich and Piaf, The Angel and the Sparrow, which filmed in Montreal and Toronto. “I found that the play was poorly written and that the research into the characters of Piaf and Dietrich was incomplete. I spent hours on the phone with the show designers trying to give them ideas. Ultimately, I decided not to come to Canada, because my children were in school here in New York, and I decided to write my own show about Marlene Dietrich. »
Art on display
If she loved playing in musicals, Peter Pan has Chicago Passing by Cats And The Blue Angelshe says she has chosen less commercial productions since the turn of the 2000s, which also highlight her own songs.
Over the years, her rebellious spirit has largely protected her from the abuses denounced in the cultural sector by the #MeToo movement. “I worked in the cultural world of the 1980s, which was completely dominated by men. […] But I was a robust woman, almost tomboy. I had a rebellious spirit. I didn’t have the romantic type in the cast. Then, I always had the courage to speak up when I didn’t like something,” she says.
That didn’t stop her from experiencing power games and feeling commodified in an unworthy way when she became better known, which she denounces in her new biography.