Martha
Haftel
Martha
Haftel was born in Vienna, 25 September 1922. Died, October 6, 1985, Jamestown,
NY. Singer, pianist and actress. Martha was the only daughter of Meier and Gisa
Braten Haftel, who were Orthodox Jews. Her father owned a kosher restaurant in
Vienna, where Martha spent her formative years before escaping Nazis in 1938.
She escaped through France to England, where her father became a butler and her
mother a cook. She attended a Jewish school in England.
Despite
being refugees, her parents were considered "enemy aliens" and so
were interned by the English government on the Isle of Man . Martha chose to
join her parents there. At the camp she met Engel Lund, a singer from Iceland,
who inspired her to become an international singer. He recommended her to good
music teachers, and after WWII, she studied with Ferdinand Rauter (piano) and
Emmy Heim (voice) in London. Schlamme came to the US in 1948, shortly after
marrying Hans Schlamme, which marriage ended in annulment in the 1960s.
She
began her concert career in the Catskills singing in Hebrew and Yiddish. She
continued vocal studies with Marinka Gurewich and Hans Heinz and later at Aspen
where she studied with Jennie Tourel, who introduced her to Olga Ryss who
became her coach. She began singing at good venues including college campuses,
concert halls and nightclubs, such as Town Hall and the Village Gate in NY and
Wilshire-Ebell Theater in LA.
She was able to perform on tv and radio. She was
so popular that by 1960, she had performed at over a thousand concerts in the
US. Shlamme was known as a supreme interpreter of folk song and concertized and
recorded in twelve languages, saying to The Christian Science Monitor in 1959
"The real test of a multilinguist is whether he can make his audience feel
a part of the country about which he is singing" and commenting again in
Musical America in 1963, "The meaning-yes, that's the most important
thing!"
Schlamme
enthusiastically sang Jewish songs throughout her career. On the Vanguard,
Folkways, Columbia and MGM labels she produced fifteen albums including
"Martha Schlamme Sings Israeli Folk Songs"(1953); "Martha
Schlamme Sings Folk Songs of Many Lands" (1958); "Martha Schlamme
Sings Jewish Folks Songs"(1957, and vol. 2 1959). She recorded "German
Folk Songs" on the Folkways label with Pete Seeger.
As an
early performer of Kurt Weill songs, her roles brought her considerable
attention and fame. She performed Weill's songs in Edinburgh at a venue called
the Howff. This show grew and eventually came to New York, playing for months.
For over twenty years she included Weill's music in her programs and produced
the recordings "The World of Kurt Weill in Song" (1962) and "A
Kurt Weill Cabaret" (1963). In 1965, she starred in a production of
Weill's "Mahoganny" at the Strafford Festival in Ontario and two
years later sang at Ravinia Music Festival in "A Kurt Weill Cabaret"
with Alvin Epstein. In 1985, she appeared with Epstein at the Israel Festival
in Jerusalem.
Schlamme
sang on Broadway, playing the role of Golde in "Fiddler on the Roof"
in 1968, and that same year appearing in "A Month of Sundays", and
"Solitaire, Double Solitaire." Later she had a one-woman show,
"A Woman Without a Man is..." Schlamme became a teacher of song and
acting at the the Circle in the Square Theater School in New York and H.B.
Studio. Schlamme was close to activists in leftist politics and later married
Mark Lane, a Democratic politician.
Despite
her early personal experiences, Ms. Schlamme wrote in a Music Journal article
in May, 1963, "I have always felt that people are very much alike all over
the world; by that I mean the human experience is very similar.... Languages
differ, customs differ, and the variations are fascinating but not
incomprehensible. And the same holds true for the music of different
peoples." Martha Schlamme suffered a stroke onstage at the Chautaugqua in
front of an audience of three thousand. She died at age sixty in nearby
Jamestown, NY. Today, her Yiddish and Weill recordings still circulate as
reformatted CDs.
