The letters, diaries and music of Lotte Lenya & Kurt Weill

Originally presented at Lost Nation Theater – Montpelier, VT

In the late 1920s, after the popular success of such shows as The Threepenny Opera, composer Kurt Weill and actress Lotte Lenya were Berlin’s artistic power couple.

But within a few years, as Hitler rose to power, the two had to flee Germany and reinvent their lives and careers in America. Their relationship was a complex one, indeed. Weill said that when he wrote his music, he heard Lenya singing it. But they were an unlikely couple from the start. He was the button-down musical prodigy from a German Jewish family; his father was a cantor. She was the free-spirited actress from an Austrian Roman Catholic family, a victim of child abuse who’d been a teenage prostitute.

And yet when Weill and Lenya met, each found a soul mate. Through all the affairs and all the time separated, the one thing that seemed to keep them together was, yes, their affection for each other — but it seemed also to be Weill’s music.

Speak Low spans a period of more than 25 years, from Lenya and Weill’s first meeting as little-known artists to their triumphs in Europe and America to Weill’s untimely death of a heart attack at age 50.