Date: January 12, 2026
What music do you remember hearing as a small child?
In the 60s in Germany, we had a pretty bad cultural vacuum. My family listened to classical music, nothing much contemporary, and my father had a very good Jazz collection that had an impact on my musical ear and became a big inspiration.
They both played several instruments, piano, violin, guitar, my mother sang opera.. music was very alive in our house.
Did you always want to sing and act as a career? Did you try any other jobs?
I started learning ballet at the age of 6, continued with modern dance, tap dance and piano. At the age of 15 I started to discover my voice and sang in a variety of Jazz bands. After high school I went to the Rheinhardt Seminar Art University in Vienna and then my path was set. I possibly could have imagined being an French and German literature teacher, but my journey continued in the Arts until today
Can you tell us why the cabaret songs of Weimar Germany appeal so much to you?
In the eighties I was on a mission to revive the music of Weimar, especially the music of Kurt Weill. I was a young German actress, living in West-Berlin, a divided city, surrounded by the Wall in the middle of the DDR. It was a time when Europe was still in the midst of cold war trauma and Weimar seemed simply a forgotten era that eventually facilitated through its political failures the pathway to Nazi Germany.
I had moved to Berlin in 1984 after studying and performing in Vienna, Austria and I felt that art was a lot more political in West-Berlin than in the rest of the world. The devastating face of history was written all over the walls, and my mind and heartbeat grew angrier and more rebellious. I studied the music of Weill and conceived my first concert dedicated uniquely to the composer. I wanted to tell his story to the people of my generation, and so I did, in jeans and a T-shirt, in little experimental theatres in the dark but feverish West-Berlin.
Kurt Weill’s story was exemplary as a revolutionary German Jewish composer during Weimar, then persecuted by the Nazis, thrown out of the country but able to pursue and create more fascinating compositions and collaborations in exile in a new world, of course with enormous sacrifice and pain.
When I started to rerecord with UNIVERSAL/DECCA the complex songbook of Kurt Weill and the Berlin Cabaret Songs, it initiated a wave of revival and the “Dance on the Volcano” of the 20s in Berlin was back in fashion and fascinated a wave of young performers and audiences in its progressivity and exotism. Being the protagonist of all these recordings was a great privilege that came with enormous responsibility. To be a German with an international career was still a complicated affair in those years. I was confronted with stereotypes and a strangely fascinated hostility based on the stigma of the German character and language. I felt sometimes that I had to carry the horrible Nazi history on my shoulders simply by carrying the German passport. The Holocaust inflicted unbearable pain on my soul, and I wished nothing more than to run away from Germany to bring the story of the Jewish composer Kurt Weill with me to fuel a dialogue about the past.
This is when the mission became heartfelt and I dedicated many years to travel the world to celebrate his music in recitals or with symphony orchestras, string quartets, or my band to sing the magical creations from Weimar, mostly with Berthold Brecht, as much as the unknown and known song books of the French and American periods. For more than 40 years, the journey of this simple and brilliant composer who died in America of a broken heart has inspired my life.
What do you think these songs can tell us about the word we live in today?
Now, the world is once again in the chaos of more cold and hot wars. The compositions, especially the ones with Berthold Brecht as the lyricist are written almost 100 years ago now, yet still breath-taking and completely unique. There is nothing like it. Rock, Pop, Cabaret and Classical artists have been inspired by his works since the nineties. The biting words meet the melancholic melody and the harmonic context evokes in a quirky way colours of Jazz, Ragtime, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. There is theatre in all the stories and political, satirical commentary about morality and a corrupt society. Exotic characters tell us about their survival, risen from the ashes of racism, disadvantage, and neglect. It all sounds oh so contemporary.
I love to sing these ballads of the truth even more 40 years later, after living through the mills of life and witnessing that history wanted to be a good teacher but it could not find any students.
When you sing these songs in English, many of which were written in German originally, what
changes for you (and how is it different for the audience?)?
At this point It feels equally strong to me in German or English. At first many years ago it felt that the English translations had lost the bite, but I am long over this impression. Of course, the sound and attack of the German language seem more expressionistic.
What do you enjoy most about performing with an 8-piece band, as you will on 5 March?
I am looking very much forward to join Robert Ziegler again, after we first recorded together almost
30 years ago. He always brings together a fantastic musical ensemble, and it will be an adventurous
and powerful experience.
See Ute on stage at Cambridge Corn Exchange on 5 March