Songs are always about time and place. The time and place where the composer conceived them, with a new set created when a new person hears them and associates them with a place, lover, or friend. You can say the same about a cover version.
Kurt Weill’s best-known songs come from a place of emotional turmoil, at a time of national confusion and fear. There was some resolution on the former, but the wider issue turned into an international catastrophe. This is always the challenge of covering the songs of interwar Germany. How can you capture the sense of the time and place that the songs came from, when you know the disastrous outcome?
For instance, Alan Cumming played Emcee in Cabaret hundreds of times in London and New York, and even at the Kennedy Center. He knew how the show was going to end. The reason that he won a Tony Award for the production is that he could hide that knowledge from the audience at the exuberant start of the show, but could still generate the necessary pain at the end. When Ute Lemper recorded her wonderful Weill album in 1988, she was doing so in West Berlin before the Wall came down. She does not hide that she knows where the chaos of the Weimar Republic led, and how the story had gone. She saw it every day, and that is what drives the album’s emotional intensity.
Rufus Wainwright, a Canadian citizen, has chosen to release an album of Weill songs from a period when an angry but complacent nation wandered mistakenly into disaster, without seemingly seeing it for what it was, until it was too late. Perhaps because some of them were having too much fun, or were too selfish to care about others. Who knows why?
Wainwright clearly knows these songs very intimately, and feels them closely and strongly. He may have been listening to them since before he was born. His parents would be familiar with one of the greatest songwriters of the period, and both he and his sister Martha have performed versions of them over the years. He has said that Canadian Opera singer Teresa Stratas’ interpretations were his touchstone in developing his love for the songs. He has exquisite musical knowledge of the genres that Weill operated in, having written operas, worked in jazz, and lived in the home of the Moritat. Also, he has a huge linguistic advantage, having loved in three of the languages that Weill created songs for, and has lost in at least two of them (his marriage to a German seems solid).
All of this means that, whatever the driver for doing it now, we are on solid ground. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Wainwright Does Weill features a series of tracks with the Pacific Jazz Orchestra, recorded live, with occasional guest artists. It is a marvel and a joy.
When he presents “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” there is disingenuity; he is no ingenue, but a middle-aged expert on music and life. He has known the songs for decades, albeit without a talented jazz orchestra partnering him. His voice is suited to the material and setting, and the whole thing does not weigh heavily.
Wainwright’s voice is an exquisite tool. On “Youkali,” the richness of the material is matched only by the warmth and depth of the voice presenting it. He makes the “land of desires” so much more attainable than so many other presentations.
Throughout the album Wainwright moves effortlessly between English, French and German, as he sees fit, to set the emotional tone required.
He loves the song “Surabaya Johnny,” and we get two wonderful takes on it. The tale of a feckless man who steals your heart, and then your money, clearly means much to Wainwright. The cover of the album probably features Weill, but the rogue Johnny also has a pipe. Is Wainwright hinting that, as well as lovers he has been disappointed by (and he may have disappointed himself), Weill is someone who cannot be trusted with your heart? Or is he merely targeting bile at someone from his own past?
The overall impression is one of appreciation of the art, not allowing any messaging to overtake the form of the pieces, not letting what happened later impinge on what they meant at the time. Love songs are about love (or a version of it), and the emotion comes from there. Nevertheless, Wainwright and his collaborators have a message. “Lost in the Stars,” recorded with Metropole Orkest, sounds beautiful, but Wainwright emphasizes in a press release that “The dramatic and troubling message of ‘Lost in the Stars’ is sadly far too relatable in our day and age, but the music always gives hope.”
There is a more ominous message in “Mack The Knife.” Wainwright presents the first part of the song in the original German, and it has the unsettling tone of the Murder Song about it. The orchestration has a hint of Teutonic stridency and menace. Then the arrangement softens and the words turn to English, and we get the more anodyne version that many of us are familiar with. Worrying words presented as comforting. A knife covered in a velvet sleeve. A country not hearing the words because the artist presents them familiarly and comfortingly. Can that be the reason why this is the time for Wainwright to present this music?
Mack the Knife is superb.