Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya

They were an unlikely couple. Kurt Weill was a German cantor's son, cerebral, well-educated. Lotte Lenya was two years older, an Austrian Catholic coachman's daughter, waif-like, less than beautiful but always appealing to men. She survived the abuse of an alcoholic father, escaping to Zurich and finally Berlin, working as a would-be dancer turned actress. When they met, she was a domestic worker in the home of the playwright he had come to recruit as a librettist. Much to his family's dismay, they married in 1926.

Fiercely independent and yet codependent, Weill and Lenya spent twenty-five years discovering a way to live together after realizing that they couldn't live apart. Weill gave music to her voice, Lenya gave voice to his music. Their correspondence—first in German and later, after their move to America, in highly flavored English—is uninhibited, intimate, and irreverent. It offers a backstage view of German music and theater, the American musical theater in the late thirties and forties, and Hollywood. The letters are candid, vivid commentaries on world events, the creative process, and the experience of exile.

Never before published, this collection reflects the vibrancy of Weimar culture in the Golden Twenties and the vitality that èmigrès brought to American culture. Lenya's unfinished autobiographical account of her life before Weill is also included, along with a prologue, epilogue, and connective commentary. Immensely touching as well as informative, Weill and Lenya's letters preserve a portrait of a memorable love that somehow survived its turbulent surroundings.

Lys Symonette began her collaboration with Weill and Lenya in 1945 as Weill's musical assistant on Broadway. After Weill's death, she was Lenya's accompanist and musical adviser and now serves as Musical Executive of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York. Kim H. Kowalke is Professor of Musicology at the University of Rochester and President of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. He has edited two collections of essays about Weill and authored numerous essays on twentieth-century music and theater.