Patrick Bade
Ladies on Both Sides: The Merry Widow, Madame Butterfly and Lili Marleen

Patrick Bade - Ladies on Both Sides The Merry Widow, Madame Butterfly and Lili Marleen

- So Patrick, hi. Yeah, no, I-

• Hi, Wendy.

• I was so overwhelmed and I was so… It was just such a beautiful tribute, and, you know, to you too, to all of us. I mean, this is a team effort. So what can I say? I know, I loved it. And then when I saw that wall, oh, my goodness, and I just could not stop crying and it was lucky that Allan Morgenthau started swearing, because that was too much.

• Yeah, yeah. That was a great moment, yeah.

• That I found extremely entertaining, so I was able to put myself together then and have a good laugh. But then it was, became very… No, I was very, very touched. Did you enjoy it?

• I enormously enjoyed it. I mean, the variety, everything was good in its way, but it was just an amazing variety of things.

Visuals are displayed and audio clips are played throughout the presentation.

• It was fabulous. No, I agree. Everybody went to a lot of trouble. And I got this incredible… So first of all, I want to say hello, everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and thank you for all your wonderful messages. I’m doing my best to respond to them. There are lots, so, but thank you very, very much and I certainly will try and get to them. But I got this wonderful song from Peter Savitz and his wife, and, Judi, please send it on to Patrick, because it features Patrick too, to “Hallelujah,” to the tune of “Hallelujah,” and it’s just so charming, lovely. So thank you very much. How are we doing for time? I can see that Judi has opened up. Oh, we’re three minutes over. Okay, Patrick, over to you. Thank you. Looking forward to today.

• Thank you, Wendy, and welcome, everybody. We’re going to look tonight at the wartime careers of three female musical characters, the Merry Widow, Madame Butterfly, and Lili Marlene. They did good a service, one could say, on both sides, but I’m going to start with “The Merry Widow,” “Die Lustige Witwe,” which was the breakthrough operetta of Franz Lehar and it’s always seen as the piece that launched what is often called the Silver Age of Operetta in the early 20th century. And it was first performed on New Year’s Eve, 31st of December, 1905, at the famous Theatre an der Wien in Vienna, which was the leading operetta theatre in the German-speaking world, and Lehar was the house conductor. He’d had some modest successes, but was by no means famous at that point. And the management had been offered an exceptionally clever libretto, and I emphasise this because most texts of operettas are pretty silly, really, but “Lustige Witwe” is witty, it’s clever, it’s really touching at certain points.

So they thought, “Well, we might have a hit on our hands” and they went to a composer called Richard Heuberger, who would, he may not be known to you, I’m sure that most of you will know just one piece by him, which is the song “In’s Chambre Séparée” from another operetta called “Der Opernball.” So he sat down to compose it and then disaster struck. He realised the worst thing had happened to him that can ever happen to an operetta composer and that is that he had run out of tunes. You know, operettas depend on really good tunes. So he went back to the management and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this.” And they were kind of desperate because things were tight and they needed to get it done and they had this gap. So somebody said, “Well, shall we try our house conductor, Lehar?” And they said, “Well, maybe.” And they went to him and they said, “Right, we’re going to give you a test. We’ll give you a little bit of text and you have to ring us back tomorrow on the telephone,” this was on the telephone, “with the tune to go with the text.” And the text was “Dummer, Dummer Reitersmann”.

So overnight Lehar wrote this little ditty, ♪ Dummer, dummer Reitersmann ♪ ♪ Da da da da da, dum dum ♪ and he rang them and they said, “Okay, the job’s yours.” But they then actually lost confidence in him and they tried to buy him off, but he was sure that he was on to a good thing, and how right he was. And so the first night was only really quite a . It wasn’t really a sensational success. It was a bit of a slow burner. But if any piece could be said to contain earworms, it’s “The Merry Widow.” So people, they went back home and then they had these wonderful tunes going through their heads, so they went back to see it again, and it built up and built up and built up sensationally and it conquered the world within a couple of years. And two years later, in 1907, there were five theatres in the city of Buenos Aires playing “The Merry Widow” in five different languages. And so I’m going to play you a tiny excerpt with what you could describe as the original cast recording, ‘cause we’ve got Louis Treumann here as Danilo and Mizzi Gunther as the widow. It’s a rather primitive recording from 1906.

• So partly through the great success of “The Merry Widow,” those two, Louis Treumann and Mizzi Gunther, became the greatest stars of that period of operetta, and I’ll come back to Louis Treumann and his very sad fate later. So it has become the most performed of all Viennese operettas. I think it surpasses “Fledermaus,” and although operetta, sadly, has so much fallen from favour since the Second World War, “The Merry Widow” endures and has been made into a film repeatedly. One of the best versions I recommend to you in lockdown is the 1934 Hollywood version with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, and actually, they filmed it twice at the same time, in English and in French. Jeanette MacDonald is surprisingly good in French and here she is singing the “Vilja Lied” in French from the movie.

• That was of course not the “Vilja Lied.” It was again the “Merry Widow” waltz. But, so that would’ve had a huge international success in the '30s. Operetta was very dear to the hearts of the Nazis, as I shall be telling you in a week or so, 'cause they hated American popular music. They hated jazz, they hated swing. They really wanted to promote operetta as a popular music form in the German-speaking world. But there was a problem, and the problem was that nearly all the living operetta composers and nearly all their librettists were Jewish, Oscar Straus, Emmerich Kalman, and so on. Lehar was really the only important one as was Robert Stolz, but Robert Stolz had made it very clear that he was very anti-Nazi and he went to America. So it was just Lehar. And they revered Lehar so much, they were even willing, in his case, to overlook the fact that most of, all of his librettists were Jewish. Now, I think if you really got an honest answer from Adolf Hitler, he really preferred “The Merry Widow” to “Gotterdammerung,” and just on the eve of the Second World War, there was a run of performances in Berlin of “The Merry Widow” with the Dutch singer Johannes Heesters, who you see here, and Hitler, can you imagine, you know, the world’s on the brink of catastrophe and Hitler goes to see “The Merry Widow” six times in a row. Now, Johannes Heesters, very controversial figure in his native Holland. He was one of the big, big stars of Nazi Germany, made lots of movies. He lived to the age of 108, and at the age of 105 he caused an absolute firestorm of criticism in Holland. He went on television, did an interview, still apparently compos mentis, and told the interviewer, “Oh, oh, Hitler, people got him wrong. He was really, he was a good guy, really.”

And around the same time it also emerged that evidence came out that Johannes Heesters had visited the Dachau concentration camp to cheer up and entertain the hardworking concentration camp guards. So I hope that’s not going to put you off his singing too much, not that I think it’s all that wonderful, but it’s okay singing. I’m going to play Johannes Heesters singing Danilo’s entrance song. And I love, I said the text is very good. It’s brilliant. It’s so witty. You know, people, English people have a big misconception about the German language. I think it’s all based on old war movies. German can be charming. It can be witty. In some ways it’s wonderfully flexible in ways that English isn’t, and you hear it in this little excerpt where he’s talking about going to Maxim’s, and then you have this wonderful couplet, “Dann wird champagnisiert, und häufig cancaniert.” I think I’ve mentioned before that in German, you can take a noun and you can turn it into a verb. So you can’t really translate that into English. It was, “Then it will it be champagne-ized and frequently can-can-ized.” It would be the literal translation of what he sings.

• So Lehar was also in a predicament. He was Austro-Hungarian by origin, but like so many leading cultural figures of Vienna, he moved to Berlin in the 1920s. But when the Nazis came to power, he promptly moved back to Austria, I think probably chiefly because his wife was Jewish and she was very, very threatened, of course, throughout the whole Nazi period. But Lehar could count on the support of Goebbels. Goebbels told him, “If you have any problem with your wife, all you have to do is telephone me,” and Goebbels gave Lehar his private telephone number, and there were, in fact, two occasions in Vienna when the Gestapo came to take his wife away and Lehar was simply able to ring up Goebbels and hand the phone to the Gestapo and say, “Would you like to talk to Dr. Goebbels about this?”

So there you see Lehar with Goebbels on the left and with his wife on the right. He actually ceased composing. His last major piece, “Giuditta,” was permeated in Vienna in 1934, and he retired to his Schlossel, his little Schloss, in Bad Ischl, but he was very much used, as Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic were, as a cultural asset for Nazi propaganda. And what you see here is actually an article from one of those French propaganda magazines I mentioned earlier. It’s called “Signal,” which is, as you can see, it’s a visit to Franz Lehar in his little Schloss. Now, Lehar, his most important thing, of course, was to protect his wife, but he did his best for other Jewish friends and colleagues. Two people he tried very hard to save, and in the end failed, were Louis Treumann, the original Danilo, who you see on the left-hand side, and his later librettist, Fritz Lohner-Beda, who you see here on the right-hand side, who, for instance, wrote the libretto for Lehar’s biggest hit of later years, which was “The Land of Smiles.” Here you can see a wonderful photograph. Oh God, I would love to have been there. It’s Lehar, Richard Tauber, oh God, what’s the name of her, the very famous Hungarian soprano who went to America, it’ll come to me in a minute, and Fritz Lohner-Beda. So they’re obviously having a very good time there.

This is actually from a newspaper I found in a Paris flea market, and this dates from 1939 and it says, presumably, yes, a company’s performance in Paris of “Land of Smiles,” and it says, “The author of 'Land of Smiles,’ Dr. Lohner-Beda, has committed suicide in the concentration camp of Buchenwald.” In fact, that was not true. He survived until 1943 and he was murdered in Auschwitz. He wasn’t murdered in a gas chamber. There is an account of his death, and he was beaten and kicked to death for making a joke in Auschwitz. This is, again, Louis Treumann, and Lehar succeeded once in getting him released from imprisonment, but he was rearrested and sent to Theresienstadt and there he died, and there is his certificate of death. Always so amazing, really, that the Nazis were so precise in their record-keeping. So I know many people who’ve been able to find the exact circumstances, day and hour of their relatives’ deaths in this way. But anyway, “The Merry Widow” went from strength to strength everywhere.

This is New York, the Majestic Theatre in New York, and we see the husband and wife pair, Jan Kiepura and Marta Eggerth. Jan Kiepura, very popular Polish tenor of Jewish origin who was starring at the Metropolitan, but he wasn’t getting a lot of roles and he decided, you know, “Well, blow this lot.” So he resigned from the Metropolitan and he and his wife took the Majestic Theatre and they presented a production of “The Merry Widow.” This is 1943. I had a very interesting conversation with my friend Sam Popper. I’ve mentioned her before. She’s the daughter of the baritone Alfred Drake who was offered a contract by the Metropolitan in New York, but he was a very handsome man and he realised that he could make an awful lot more money appearing in Broadway musicals, hence “Oklahoma!” and all the things that he appeared in, leading man of Broadway for a decade or so, and was constantly employed instead of just waiting around for the odd role from the Metropolitan. Well, Kiepura and Eggerth made the right decision.

It was a smash success in New York, and actually, they must have got a bit sick of it, ‘cause they didn’t stop singing “Merry Widow” till the end of the war. They took it on tour around the United States. And the same for another husband and wife couple from Australia. This is Cyril Ritchard and Madge Elliott, and they starred in a production of the “Merry Widow” in London at Her Majesty’s Theatre that, again, was a sellout and very successful, and it was a similar story. They toured it round Britain and then they toured it all the way across the Mediterranean theatre of war and travelled eastwards, getting as far as Cairo, as you can see here, and then finally ending up in Palestine. And that must have been, what an experience that must have been for them, singing to audiences of refugees from Middle Europe. Now, moving on to “Madame Butterfly,” which was one of Puccini’s greatest successes, of course, after its very disastrous premiere at La Scala. The premier was really sabotaged at La Scala in 1906, but it went on to conquer the world. And considering that Japan was one of the combatants, it’s then rather strange that “Madame Butterfly” was one of the most performed operas pretty well everywhere throughout the Second World War.

As far as I know, there were only two cities where it was dropped from the repertoire. It was dropped in New York at the Met, I think for pretty obvious reasons, because the hero, “Leftenant” or Lieutenant Pinkerton, hardly does credit to the American Navy, so that was a bit embarrassing. And the other place where it was dropped from the repertoire was Marseilles. It was due to be performed in the winter of 1942 to '43. There were three operas… When the Torch landings happens in November, 1942, that’s the Americans landing in North Africa, the German army then moves into the Vichy part of France, so-called Free France, and they moved into, here you can see the German army arriving at the wonderful Art Deco opera house in Marseilles. And they took one look at the repertoire coming up and they banned three operas. They banned “Boris Godunov,” 'cause it was Russian. They banned “William Tell,” because it’s about an insurrection of an oppressed people. And they banned “Madame Butterfly,” because the hero goes on stage, he’s on stage in Acts 1 and 3 in an American Navy uniform. This on the left, you’ve got Zenatello, who was in the first production of La Scala, and on the right you have the great German, or Latvian tenor, actually, Hermann Jadlowker. And this is an old postcard, and you can see Hermann Jadlowker as Linkerton. Now, this is a really obscure little piece of information for you, that in Germany, Pinkerton had to be changed to Linkerton because the word pinkeln, the verb pinkeln, in German, means to piss, and they didn’t think that that was very appropriate for the name of a hero of an opera. And I’m going to play you the moment which caused the opera to be banned. It speaks for itself. This is a recording of the end of the '30s with Beniamino Gigli

Audio plays.

♪ America ♪ ♪ Forever ♪ ♪ America ♪ ♪ Forever ♪

• Now, with the American troops newly arrived on the other side of the Mediterranean, the Germans were very nervous about what a French audience might do if they heard that in the theatre. Now, “Madame Butterfly” was very frequently performed in both Germany and Britain throughout the Second World War. The leading Madame Butterfly in Germany was a Romanian soprano, Maria Cebotari, a very beautiful woman, and as you can see from, you know, she had these wonderful high cheekbones. She really looked quite convincing as an oriental woman. I’m afraid the Australian Joan Hammond, whatever her vocal qualities, can never have been very dramatically convincing. One critic described her in Dvorak’s “Rusalka” where she sings a nymph, as looking more like a beached whale. And she was a very tall woman and she was of course athletic. She was a champion golfer. And there’s a wonderful story about her singing “Madame Butterfly” in Edinburgh and she had to get the last train back to London for a concert the next day, so she didn’t have time to get out of her costume and her makeup, and so the people of Edinburgh were treated to the wonderful spectacle of a six-foot geisha with enormous shoulders in a kimono, sprinting across central Edinburgh to get to the railway station on time. And Maria Cebotari, this is something I’ve only discovered very recently, literally only about a month ago, a friend showed me a copy of a film that came out in 1939 called “Il Sogno di Butterfly,” and it was one of those that was an Italo-German production, so it was filmed in German and it was filmed in Italian with the very beautiful Maria Cebotari. It’s actually loosely based on the story of Toscanini’s affair with the soprano Rosina Storchio who sang the first Madame Butterfly and who had an illegitimate child by Toscanini. And in the film, actually pretty well all of Butterfly’s role is shown in the film, big, big chunks of the opera. And this solved a mystery for me that I’ll come to in a minute. But, so first of all, let’s hear Maria Cebotari singing part of the love duet with Walther Ludwig, in German, of course.

• This, on the right-hand side, we have a photograph of my mother who was in the Navy during the Second World War and she was stationed in Palestine from 1943 to '44, which is where she met my father. But on the ship, on the way home from Palestine in 1944, she met a young soldier who fell in love with her. And when they got back to England, he presented her with this record, which you can see on the left-hand side, inscribed, “With love, from Bill,” and it’s on the B-side of the “Love Duet” from “Madame Butterfly,” and as you can see, it says, very touchingly, “Ah, Love Me a Little.” So I’m going to play you that record and this is Joan Hammond singing with Webster Booth.

• Now I’m going to tell you a harrowing story. I think it’s actually one of the most harrowing stories I know from the Second World War and the Shoah. The women you can see on the screen, on the right-hand side, it’s Maria Mandl, who was in charge of the women’s section of Auschwitz, and I think one can confidently say she is the most terrible female criminal in the history of the world. She is responsible, directly responsible, for the deaths of more than half a million women and children. On the left-hand side is Fania Fenelon, author of “Playing for Time,” and she was a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, so she was very well-rounded musically. She’d been very well trained musically, and she owned her survival to the fact that when she arrived at Auschwitz, somehow or other it transpired that she was able from memory to write out parts of “Madame Butterfly” and Maria Mandl had a thing about “Madame Butterfly.” She was completely obsessed with it. Now, it puzzled me for a long time. I thought, “How does a woman like Maria Mandl from a very, very humble working-class background, completely ill-educated, uneducated, how did she come across 'Madame Butterfly?’”

And when I saw that film, I realised that was the probable answer, that she must have seen the 1930 movie, 1939 movie, “Il Sogno di Butterfly.” So the really terrible story that Fania Fenelon tells, and, you know, I can hardly bear to repeat it to you, it’s so terrible, on one occasion when a whole lot of new arrivals were being swept towards the gas chambers, there was a little child, three years old, with blonde, curly hair and crying. And Maria Mandl saw this child, and of course it reminded her of the child in “Madame Butterfly.” You know, it’s a big thing in “Madame Butterfly,” of course, that Butterfly points out that her child has blonde, curly hair. And for a few days, Maria Mandl adopted the child and it was her fantasy. Her fantasy was that she was Madame Butterfly and she took the child with her, but then after a couple of days, she was bored with this and she just packed off the child to a gas chamber. Now, moving on to the song of the Second World War. Now, when I was writing my book a few years ago, I was still at Christie’s, and I was in the office one day and there were two colleagues there. One was American and one was German. And so I said to them, “For you, what’s the song of the…” Oh, no, it was a British person there, of course, my friend Brenda. I don’t know, she might be listening in. And Brenda said, “Well, of course it’s ‘We’ll Meet Again,’ Vera Lynn, it would be for any British person, that’s the song they associate with the Second World War. And the young German man said, "Well, you know, for us it would be Zarah Leander in ‘Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen.’” I’m going to talk about that song later in the series when I do a talk on musical films in the Second World War. It’s a kind of mirror image in a way of “We’ll Meet Again.” It’s the same theme about one day we’ll meet again.

And for the American, of course, it was Glenn Miller and “In the Mood.” But then if you want… So those are local songs of the Second World War. If you want a song that’s for everybody in the Second World War, it has to be “Lili Marleen.” Almost every, I think the only nation I know that really didn’t adopt it was France, and I will explain that in a minute, but, you know, somehow the Americans, the British, the Italians, they all thought of it as their song. And it’s a very extraordinary story, ‘cause it could so easily have disappeared without trace. It was by a composer called Norbert Schultze. If anybody, I know there are lots of German speakers, actually, and I would recommend his autobiography. It’s very fascinating. It raises a lot of issues, because, you know, he was definitely a tool of the Nazis and he knew it, but I would defy anybody to read that book and get to the end and hate him. Somehow he’s very likeable. He was a kind of a lovable rogue who wanted to survive and he said very clearly, “You know, I had a choice. I could fight on the Eastern front and be killed by the Russians, or I could write tunes and songs for Goebbels,” and who’s to blame him, in a way?

Now, this song was written in 1939, and it was a setting of a poem that had been written by a soldier in the First World War called Hans Leip, and it’s a song with a story, and it tells a story of a young prostitute who’s waiting underneath a lamp outside of a barracks for her soldier lover. So the famous version with Lale Andersen, this is it, that was a recorded, actually, before the outbreak of war. It was recorded at the beginning of August in 1939. Nobody was interested. It hardly sold any copies at all. As I said, it could so easily have disappeared without trace. But it’s really fate takes over. The Germans invaded Yugoslavia. The Italians had been absolutely hopeless, of course, and had, you know, lost every battle, so the Italians invaded Yugoslavia and Greece and got thoroughly beaten, so the Germans had to move in to help the Italians out and they conquered Belgrade and they set up a radio station, which you can see on the right-hand side, that was aimed all over Europe, but actually particularly at the North African war zone. And so they went through the archive of the radio station. By the time they cleared out all the music that was unacceptable to them, either by Jewish composers or by Yugoslav composers, there was almost nothing left. They had very few records.

So they sent a desperate plea to the nearest big radio station, Nazi-controlled, which was Vienna, and they said, “Can you please send us any spare records so that we can play popular music over the airways?” And Vienna sent the records they didn’t want and one of the records that they didn’t want was “Lili Marleen” and apparently, well, according to Norbert Schultze, the reason for that was that it begins with a Prussian bugle call and they had a different bugle call in Vienna and they didn’t want to use the Prussian one. So, as I said, they had a small number of records, so in the first few days, “Lili Marleen” was played many times over and it immediately caught the attention of soldiers on both sides in the North African campaigns. So here is the original version of “Lili Marleen” with Lale Andersen. This is what the soldiers heard in 1943, '42.

• So this is actually, these are stills from a propaganda movie that was made by the British, actually during the war, by Humphrey Jennings, called “The True Story of Lili Marlene.” Well, it’s not very true, actually. It distorts the truth in quite a number of ways. But so it spread amazingly. Today you’d say it was viral. And of course Marlene Dietrich was interested. There was the coincidence of her name and an awful lot of people think it was written for Marlene Dietrich or premiered by her. No, it wasn’t at all. Here she’s entertaining troops in North Africa and she undoubtedly would’ve sung this to them. I’m going to play, she recorded it many times, but I’m going to play her version. She made her own translation, which is much closer to the original than the one that was usually sung in English at the time, and she gives it a totally different feeling.

I mean, the girl in the song is a prostitute, but she’s very young and she’s very innocent, really, whereas Marlene’s woman standing outside the barracks, you know, she’s been there and done that and she’s rather blase and a woman of a lot of experience. When I hear her sing, it always reminds me of that hilarious scene in “Blazing Saddles” where Madeline Kahn spoofs Marlene Dietrich and, you know, she’s sitting in her chair with her legs open and saying, “I’ve had thousands and thousands of men coming again and again, and I’m tired.”

Audio plays.

♪ Outside the barracks, by the corner light ♪ ♪ I’ll always stand and wait for you at night ♪ ♪ We will create a world for two ♪ ♪ I’ll wait for you the whole night through ♪ ♪ For you, Lili Marlene ♪ ♪ For you, Lili Marlene ♪

• During the Second World War itself, there were more than 70 versions of “Lili Marleen” recorded in every possible language, and if you are really interested in this, there is a German publication of the Bear Family. I mean, you know, we know how thorough the Germans are, and this is a 10-set of CDs with 200 versions of “Lili Marleen,” and I listened through all of them when I was writing my book, and this is one I particularly like. This is sung in Italian by Meme Bianchi and it just has a gorgeous Italian warmth about it, quite different from the two I’ve already played you.

• Now, the popular version in England was not by, oh, having a senior moment, not by Vera. She was too nice. Nobody was ever going to believe that she was hanging around barracks at night. Mind you, the version I’m going to play you by Anne Shelton is also not very believable. She sounds like she’s standing under the lamppost wearing a ball gown.

Audio plays.

♪ Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate ♪ ♪ Darling, I remember the way you used to wait ♪ ♪ 'Twas there that you whispered tenderly ♪ ♪ That you loved me ♪ ♪ You’d always be ♪ ♪ My Lili of the lamplight ♪ ♪ My own Lili Marlene ♪

• France was the only country which really didn’t adopt “Lili Marleen” as their own, and there were several recordings of it made in French and probably the most best-known was the version of Suzy Solidor, and her version is another one that gives it a very different flavour and connotation. For one thing, she was a very out and known lesbian. So, you know, the whole ambience of the song of, you know, a woman talking about another woman has rather different connotations when she sings it. She has a very deep, almost a kind of a baritonal voice. It was unfortunate that having been the most visible and fashionable lesbian in Paris, when she finally decided to have an affair with a man, it was with a German officer and she was in big trouble at the end of the war for what they called “collaboration horizontale.” And one of the things that they held against her was that she was associated with this song and recorded it. In fact, the still you see on the left-hand side is actually from an early experimental television broadcast in occupied France showing Suzy Solidor singing the song.

• Now, Lale Andersen literally found herself world-famous overnight and she describes… That’s another book I’d recommend you if you can read German, her memoirs. They’re very, very interesting indeed. And she describes, you know, being on tour and not particularly well-known and coming back to Berlin. Suddenly everybody spotted her in the street. When she tried to open the door to her flat, she couldn’t open it 'cause there was so much fan mail that the door was stuck. But she was in a terrible position. Her lover was Rolf Liebermann, who later very famous as the director of the Hamburg Opera and the Paris Opera, but he was Swiss and he was Jewish and she was desperate to get to him. So she went on tour to Italy and she did a bunk and she attempted to cross the border from Italy into Switzerland, but of course the Nazis were not going to let that happen. That would’ve been a terrible propaganda blow. So they caught her and she was imprisoned and probably would’ve been heading for Ravensbruck or some other concentration camp if it were not for the BBC.

Underground spies in Germany got the information to the BBC that Lale Andersen had been arrested and was imprisoned, and on the 3rd of April, 1943, the BBC broadcast the song, the original record with Lale Andersen, to the Germans. Of course it would only have been a certain number of people who’d been listening in. It was a criminal offence for Germans to listen to the BBC. There would’ve been some people listening. And it starts off with the song, I’m going to play it to you, and then we have an announcer saying in German, “Have you noticed that you haven’t heard this song on the radio recently, and is the reason that Lale Andersen is in a concentration camp?” And so of course she had to be released. That actually saved her life. And so this, after this announcement, the guy says, “Well, you know, of course, today the world the war had changed,” by 1943 you’ve had Stalingrad, you’ve had El-Alamein, Germany is now losing the war, and he said, “But I want to tell you that the words of 'Lili Marleen ,” they’re not up to date, “and this is what Lili Marleen would sing if she were singing the song today.” And it’s a really hard-hitting, harsh propaganda version of the song, sung here by the emigrate actress Lucie Mannheim.

• So she’s just sung there, “One of these days you’re going to die. You’re going to die in Russia or you’re going to die in North Africa and that is what your Fuhrer wants.” And she ends the song by saying she hopes to see the Fuhrer hanging from the lamppost that she’s standing underneath. So that is it, and I’m coming… Let me see if there are any questions for me to…

Q&A and Comments:

Right, “My grandparents were at the first performance of 'Butterfly’ in London and because my grandmother was a singer, she was in the circle and got the autographs of the whole cast for her daughter’s autograph book, which I inherited from my mother.” I’d have to think who that was. That would’ve been 19- Probably

Emmy Destinn, I would think, would’ve sung in London in 1907. I’m not sure. I’ll check who sung the premiere.

Q: “Where do you draw the fine line between opera, operetta, and musical?”

A: Woo, that’s a very complicated question. Actually, that deserves a whole lecture in itself. I don’t really think I can go into that. Operetta of course is a much lighter form of musical entertainment, but very often, in fact, the borders between the three things are quite blurred.

Q: No, “Is the librettist the same as Leo Stein, Gertrude’s brothers?”

A: No, it’s a different Stein. That was another thing, well, I touched on briefly, but the two librettists of “Merry Widow” of course were both Jewish and, you know, think even Mozart’s librettist, Da Ponte, of course he was a problem to the Nazis because he was Jewish.

“One of the best performances of ‘Merry Widow’ was from the Met with Frederica von Stade and Placido Domingo. I’ve searched in vain for a recording but never found one.” I bet you could find it somewhere though. You know, everything from the Met exists. Right.

“I wish you had subtitles for the German and the French. Beautiful music.” Well, the words are more or less the same, actually. I’m sure you know the words of “Lili Marlene” in English.

“Most singers have high cheekbones. Is that true? Developed to keep the voice high?” I don’t know about that. That’s interesting, an interesting theory.

“Webster Booth and Anne Ziegler came to Namibia.” That’s true, ‘cause they settled for a long time in South Africa, and somebody says that it’s through hearing them, they got to love opera and operetta.

Let me see, do I look like my mother? It’s a bit alarming.

“I was directed by Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth in Port Elizabeth in 1972, 'Lady Audley’s Secret.’” That’s a memory.

“Although there were many young Jewish pianists, violinists, et cetera making musical headlines, today there seem to be very few singers in comparison with pre-war times.” I wonder, is that, again, I don’t know if, I’d have to really think about that. I’m not sure that is true. I think there are quite a few good Jewish singers around.

“‘Merry Widow was featured prominently in Hitchcock’s 1943 film, 'Shadow of Doubt.’” I know, it’s so brilliant, isn’t it, to use something as charming as that in such a sinister way, but that’s the genius of Hitchcock.

Q: “Don’t the original main type of ‘Lili Marleen’ as well as the text actually suggest that it should be sung by a man?”

A: Yes, actually, yes, but it’s nearly always sung by women. There were versions recorded in the Second World War by men. I don’t know why. That’s a very interesting point to make.

Let me see, “I associate Madeline Kahn’s ‘Blazing Saddles’ Dietrich spoof with ‘The Laziest Gal in Town.’” It’s a whole lot of things, ‘cause it’s partly a spoof on, I mean, her pose and so on, on the chair with the legs apart, comes from the performance of “Falling in Love Again” in “The Blue Angel.”

Somebody else saying, “Doesn’t it make a bit more sense for a man…” Yeah, absolutely, but it made total sense for the wonderful Suzy Solidor to sing it.

“Being from Holland, our family love Richard Tauber.” Look, everybody loves Richard Tauber.

“Marlene Dietrich worked with the underground to help Jewish people.” Yes, I mean, Marlene Dietrich was really on the side of the angels, I have to say.

“It’s interesting that presently Placido Domingo sings 'Vienna, Vienna,’ singing Wien, in German being the most beautiful rendition.” Right. I think that is it on the questions.

Q: “Were there any rights or royalties?”

A: Yes. I mean, that’s very interesting. It was very difficult, because in this country, all the royalties were frozen from anybody who was on the other side, and that was really tricky. Even, for instance, a composer like Mischa Spoliansky, who was here as a refugee, found that all his royalties were frozen, ‘cause technically he was still a German.

Somebody love the… Yeah, I love that Italian version. Meme Bianchi, I’m dying to get a CD of her. She’s such a fabulous singer and she does, you know, so many popular songs of the period in such a charming way, but she seems to be completely forgotten.

So I think that’s probably all the questions I need to answer. Thank you very much, everybody, for your very, very kind comments, which I greatly appreciate. Right.

• Thank you very much, Patrick. Thanks so much. That was brilliant, really fantastic.

• Thank you.

• Thank you. I’d just like to say to everybody who’s on, we’re starting a new series called Thrive in an Hour. And it’s going to be, it’s going to be looking at psychological challenges and issues that we’ve faced throughout the pandemic, and we have a clinical psychologist by the name of Dorianne Weil who’ll be speaking to us. She’ll be in conversation with another psychologist by the name of John Edmondson, and they’re going to be talking about, the topic is Forgiveness to Freedom. So I think it’s going to be very interesting, so I just want to give you a heads-up for that. And yeah, our faculty is growing, so we’ll be able to look at the psychological implications on the musicians as well, Patrick.

• Good. Great. Thank you, Wendy. Thank you very much.

• Thank you, everybody. Thanks a million. See you later. Bye.