Century of Song - Jan Josef Liefers, Miroslav Nemec, Uwe Ochsenknecht Actors and their songwriters

During the 2006 season the Century of Song project will for the first time be focussing on actors. For it was stage and film actors like Claire Waldorff, Curt Bois, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron and Lotte Lenya who inspired the legendary German songwriters of the 1920s and 30s to their popular melodies, verses and chansons.
Composers such as Friedrich Hollaender, Kurt Weill, Mischa Spoliansky and Rudolf Nelson and lyricists like Bert Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky, Frank Wedekind, Walter Mehring and others wrote songs for the theatre, revues, cabaret and cinema. Professional pop singers only found their limelight in the Thirties.
We wanted to explore the process in reverse and have invited great actors who have been inspired by songwriters in their work, whether in order to create their own material or to sing the songs which have influenced them so much that interpreting songs has long become a central part of their work. For our guests, music has long ceased to be a mere hobby. Our stars are completely themselves when they sing these songs.
They tell the stories of their lives through their own songs or through evergreens by Bob Dylan or Manfred Krug, by Led Zeppelin or Hildegard Knef, by Frank Sinatra or Rio Reiser – the range of their intimate soundtracks is boundlessly honest. After all, singing is always all about the truth.