Lotte Lenya - Career

Career

In 1922 Lenya was seen by her future husband, the German composer Kurt Weill, during an audition for his first stage score Zaubernacht, but because of his position behind the piano, she did not see him. She was cast, but owing to her loyalty to her voice teacher who was not, she declined the role. She accepted the part of Jenny in the first performance of The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) in 1928 and the part became her breakthrough role. During the last years of the Weimar Republic, she was busy in film and theatre, and especially in Brecht-Weill plays. She also made several recordings of Weill's songs.

With the rise of Nazism in Germany, she left the country, having become estranged from Weill. (They would later divorce and remarry.) In March, 1933, she fled to Paris, where she sang the leading part in Brecht-Weill's "sung ballet", The Seven Deadly Sins.

Lenya and Weill settled in New York City on 10 September 1935. During the summer of 1936, Lenya, Paul Green, Cheryl Crawford and her husband rented an old house at 277 Trumbull Avenue in Nichols, Connecticut, about two miles from Pine Brook Country Club, which was the summer rehearsal headquarters of the Group Theatre. It was here that Green and Weill wrote the screenplay and music for the controversial Broadway play Johnny Johnson, which was titled after the most frequently occurring name on the American casualty list of World War I. It was also during this time that Lenya had her first American love affair with playwright Paul Green.

During World War II, Lenya did a number of stage performances, recordings and radio performances, including for the Voice of America. After a badly received part in her husband's musical The Firebrand of Florence in 1945 in New York, she withdrew from the stage. After Weill's death in 1950, she was coaxed back to the stage. She appeared on Broadway in Barefoot in Athens and married influential American editor George Davis.