Ute Lemper's “Rendezvous with Marlene” can be experienced free of charge in the stream on WELT;

You can find the film here on New Year's Eve from 6 p.m.

“If I could wish for something, I would like visibility.” This is how you could paraphrase Ute Lemper's intention with a classic by Marlene Dietrich.

That would also characterize her latest project well.

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It brings the two German stars together.

Because Lemper turned Dietrich's repertoire into a stage program and now a dense concert film.

Ute Lemper was of course slowed down by Corona.

Otherwise she, who has lived in New York for more than two decades, jets to Europe two or three times a month, as she confesses in an interview.

"I don't want to do that as often in the future."

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She, too, is currently being held in the States after performing in Brussels in March but then canceling everything to hurry back home.

“Going home, that still sounds strange,” she says.

“I'm more like Marlene Dietrich.” So far, she has traveled from Münster to Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London and New York.

She definitely wants to go back to Germany, "when the two youngest of my four children are out of school, but until then I have to bring some things home as a breadwinner".

Your love affair with Marlene will continue, says Ute Lemper

Source: Getty Images

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No problem so far, the 57-year-old singer, actress and entertainer is busy.

2021 is the 100th birthday of the tango legend Astor Piazzolla, so she is in demand as an accomplished singer of his works.

"But my love affair with Marlene should also continue."

In 1921, Dietrich appeared for the first time, third from the left, on the Berlin vaudeville stages and then trundled through Germany.

Lemper absolutely wants to continue her Dietrich program at the big summer festivals, from the Rheingau to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which had to postpone their concerts.

But even before that, this idiosyncratic mixture of chansons and scenes from Ute and Marlene, Berlin, Hollywood, Paris can be seen as a concert film.

Because Ute Lemper did not rest in the Covid summer either.

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She recorded her “Rendezvous with Marlene” in New York, where all theaters and clubs have been closed since March, with four musicians in the East Village at “Club Cumming”.

This is the bar-like, thoroughly wicked gay bar of actor and singer Alan Cumming, who himself shone in the former Studio 54 as a demonic emcee in the musical "Cabaret".

The entire film can now be experienced exclusively via stream on welt.de.

“We didn't have to change anything, it looks and fits perfectly,” says Ute Lemper of the filming.

"It was just tight and stuffy, but that also fits in wonderfully with this story."

Lemper also became a star in “Cabaret”, 1987 in Paris.

At that time she wrote a card to Marlene Dietrich, who lived there in her mattress tomb at number 12 Rue Montaigne, but who spoke worldwide by telephone, with whom Lemper was constantly compared by the French press at the time.

Dietrich called back interested.

The conversation between the two of them lasted three hours, which left a deep impression on Ute Lemper.

The musical actress Ute Lemper became a globally sought-after entertainer, who built her repertoire on the very music of the Weimar Republic and songs of the emigrants, who sang as "degenerate" ostracized and partly murdered in the Holocaust - with her sometimes flattering, sometimes cutting voice.

She never spoke again with Marlene Dietrich, who died in Paris in 1992.

But her songs continued to accompany her.

This "rendezvous" has grown slowly.

Now she has transformed this long-distance musical relationship into a whole evening that shows Dietrich as a moody wonder animal.

Hanging on the line, with a Berlin snout, poisonous, tender, bitter, generously reminding herself of her life and loved ones, of men and women.

“An unadapted diva of the future, that's how I see her,” says Ute Lemper.

"And with a sentimental feeling of homesickness for Berlin, which she only entered again with a suitcase or coffin - that is, a coffin after she was reviled as a traitor to the fatherland on her concert tour in the sixties."

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An ambivalent woman.

Like Ute Lemper.

"A name that begins like a caress and ends like a lash," said Jean Cocteau once about his girlfriend Marlene.

This is how she is interpreted by Lemper, but at the same time as a lonely woman, lost like the protagonist in Cocteau's “The Beloved Voice”, who clings to the telephone earpiece and then sings all the more freely.

You have to hear and see that.