Ute Lemper

Ute Lemper (born July 4, 1963, Münster, West Germany [now in Germany]) is a German singer, composer, and actress considered to be the foremost modern interpreter of the music of 1920s Germany.

Lemper’s mother was an opera singer, and she started her daughter on piano, voice, and ballet lessons at an early age. Lemper took children’s parts in operettas and plays, sang in jazz and piano bars as a teenager, and later studied acting and music in Cologne and Vienna. Although she made her stage debut in Stuttgart, performing in plays by Anton Chekhov and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lemper made her musical theatre breakthrough in 1983, when she appeared in a Viennese production of Cats. She later took the title role in Peter Pan and the role of Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Her first recording (1988), of the music of Kurt Weill, rose to number one on Billboard magazine’s crossover chart. Lemper later released a second and then a third recording of the music of Weill and appeared on recordings of The Threepenny Opera (1988) and Mahagonny-Songspiel (1989), among Weill’s best-known collaborations with playwright Bertolt Brecht. Lemper’s other recordings included Illusions (1992), an homage to Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf that was another best seller.

During the late 1980s and early ’90s, Lemper appeared in a revue of Weill’s music and wrote the script for a musical biography of him, danced in the ballet La Morte subite, created for her by Maurice Béjart, and took the role of Lola in a stage production of The Blue Angel. She also appeared in films, including Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear (1994). Her paintings were shown in Hamburg and in Paris, and a collection of her essays and reminiscences was published as Unzensiert (“Uncensored”) in 1995.

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It was as a songstress, however—and particularly as an exponent of the popular music of the Weimar Republic—that Lemper achieved renown. Critics agreed that she brought the right kind of theatricality to the music, an ironic and sardonic art of political and social satire—and one that was unusually frank in matters of sex. She was sometimes called its best interpreter since Dietrich and Lotte Lenya. Lemper’s recordings reintroduced the distinctive music of an era. Her Berlin Cabaret Songs (1997) included songs by a number of composers who had been banned by Adolf Hitler. The recording was a vivid re-creation of the German cabaret music of the period and was part of Decca/London’s Entartete Musik (“Degenerate Music”) series, which documented works that had been banned in Nazi Germany and, as a consequence, sometimes forgotten. As a way of reaching a larger audience, Lemper recorded each song in both German and English, with the versions in the two languages being released separately.

That same year, following a hiatus from the musical theatre stage, Lemper took a starring role in the London revival of Chicago. She received a Laurence Olivier Award for best actress in a musical for her turn as the murderess Velma Kelly, a role she reprised in her 1998 Broadway debut. In addition to her appearances on such television programs as Tales from the Crypt (1996) and the made-for-television movie Aurélien (2003), Lemper starred in a number of televised concerts. Her later recordings included Punishing Kiss (2000), which features the compositions of collaborators such as Tom Waits and Nick Cave, and Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (2009), the first of Lemper’s discs on which she was the sole composer.

In 2012 she issued Paris Days, Berlin Nights, a collection of cabaret songs by such composers as Hanns Eisler, Astor Piazzolla, and Jacques Brel. Lemper then worked with Marcelo Nisinman of Argentina to set the poetry of Pablo Neruda to music on Forever: The Love Poems of Pablo Neruda (2013); the album features songs in Spanish and English. She later wrote a song cycle based on Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s novel Manuscrito encontrado em Accra (2012; Manuscript Found in Accra), which she recorded, with Coelho’s collaboration, on The Nine Secrets: Words by Paolo Coelho (2016). In 2018 she created a show in homage to Dietrich and began touring with it. The album Rendezvous with Marlene (the same title as the show) appeared in 2020.