Martha Schlamme

Martha Schlamme (born Martha Haftel, September 25, 1923, Vienna, Austria; died October 6, 1985, Jamestown, New York) was an Austrian-born American singer and actress known for performing international folk songs and the works of composer Kurt Weill. Her Broadway career spanned from 1964 to 1979 and included roles in Fiddler on the Roof and Adam Solitaire, as well as her work in A Kurt Weill Cabaret.

Schlamme was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Vienna to parents Meier Haftel and Gisa Braten. Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, the family was forced to flee to France, and she subsequently joined them in England, where they were interned as enemy aliens on the Isle of Man. It was during her internment that she made her acting debut in a German-language production of As You Like It. A concert by Danish-Icelandic folk singer Engel Lund at the camp, which featured traditional Yiddish songs, prompted her to pursue a musical career. After the war she settled in London, where she worked in an office while studying voice and piano and performing on stage and radio.

Shortly before emigrating to the United States in 1948, she married Hans Schlamme. In America, she performed folk songs in multiple languages at concert venues, Jewish community centers, and summer resorts in the Catskills. Her first two albums, released in 1951 on the Reena Record label, consisted of songs in Hebrew and were recorded with Israeli composer Nahum Nardi and his wife Bracha Zefira. In 1954, she recorded German Folk-Songs for Folkways Records alongside the then-blacklisted singer Pete Seeger, and that same year released Songs of Many Lands on Vanguard Records, a title she also adopted for her touring concert program. She recorded Martha Schlamme – Folk Songs of Many Lands for Vanguard in 1958 and continued releasing albums on that label as well as for MGM Records.

Schlamme's engagement with the music of Kurt Weill began in 1959, when she performed his songs at a small Edinburgh nightclub called the Howff on the eve of the Edinburgh Festival. MGM Records released her album The World of Kurt Weill in Song in 1962, followed by A Kurt Weill Cabaret in 1963, the same year the label issued (Martha Schlamme says:) Kissin's No Sin. Her stage work with Weill's material included a production of Mahagonny at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in 1965 and A Kurt Weill Cabaret at the Ravinia Festival in 1967, in addition to her Broadway appearance in A Kurt Weill Cabaret. She played the role of Golde in the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof in 1968 and also appeared on Broadway in Adam Solitaire.

Her television credits included appearances on Hootenanny in 1963, Camera Three in 1963, and Rainbow Quest in 1965. She had a small role in the 1980 television movie Playing for Time and made a final guest appearance on the America's Musical Theater episode "Happy End" in 1985. On August 7, 1985, Schlamme suffered a stroke while performing at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in Chautauqua, New York. She never regained consciousness and died two months later in Jamestown, New York, at the age of 62.