This Valley Stream composer to host hometown tribute concert for Viennese ‘force of nature’

On a recent Friday in his house on Court Street, opera composer Leonard Lehrman sat combing through albums recorded by Martha Schlamme, speaking fondly of his late “dear friend” who was a “force of nature” in the performance world.

To celebrate the centennial of the birth of the husky-voiced Viennese soprano, who rose to become an international singing sensation, known for her interpretations of the works of the German-American composer Kurt Weill, Lehrman has been touring the country with a remembrance concert series.

Titled “Songs of Love and Social Consciousness,” the series strings together selected songs from Schlamme’s repertoire and features the works of composers including Leonard Bernstein and Joel Mandelbaum, as well as Lehrman’s own compositions. The concert will be hosted by the Pagan-Fletcher Restoration, on Hendrickson Avenue, on July 30. The songs will be performed by Lehrman and his wife and longtime collaborator, Helene Williams, accompanied by violist Daniel Hyman.

Life took a dramatic turn for Schlamme, an Orthodox Jew raised in Vienna, when she was young, and her family fled to Great Britain, after Austria came under Nazi occupation. Schlamme’s parents found themselves in murky legal status, as both refugees and, as Austrian nationals, “enemy aliens,” and the family spent World War II in an internment camp on the Isle of Man.

It was there, however, that she began performing and was introduced to the music of Icelandic singer Engel Lund,  sparking her musical career. Schlamme’s discography is even more fascinating given the larger context of her life — the antisemitism she encountered and the German culture she sought to passionately reclaim in her songs, Lehrman noted.

“Martha wanted to sing German songs and the Jews didn’t want her to,” he said, “and she was fighting that with the help of people like Pete Seeger, because she wanted to reclaim the German cultural heritage that had been stolen from Hitler and the Nazis.”

“Martha taught people how to perform and feel the vulnerability of the underserved and the ostracized, and that’s what love and social consciousness have to do with one another,” Williams said. She personified what it meant to be a socially conscious artist. Schlamme understood the history and social implications of each song she interpreted and made audiences pay attention, imbuing it with the operatic intensity of a voice that felt “at once cynical and fervently life-loving,” as one New York Times critic describes it.

The selections in “Songs of Love and Social Consciousness” take the audience through stirring and nuanced meditations of love’s many emotional twists and turns, and include “Labyrinth of Love,” eight love poems written by the American poet Louis Untermeyer and set to music by Lehrman.

“The variety of styles and the emotional directness of the music have to appeal to different people in different moods,” Hyman said. “And it greatly increases the chances that people will relate to it and feel heard, seen, and felt.”

Watch the free live stream of the concert here. A recorded version of the concert will also be made available in a few days following the performance here.

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