Barbara Sukowa finds a new rhythm

By JERRY TALLMER

It’s like a scene out of a Fassbinder movie.

A beautiful young woman — an actress at the Stadtstheater in Frankfurt, Germany — is sitting alone at a table in what she will one day call “sort of an actors’ dive” near that theater.

A man she has never met walks into the restaurant and casts an eye on her.

“He came to the table and provoked me in a really rude way,” she says, quite dispassionately, these thirtysomething years later. “I was not impressed. I acted unimpressed. I guess I was shocked, but I was able to hide my shock.

“He sat beside my chair and talked very long. He told me many things. He was then running a small theater in Frankfurt, the Theater am Turm [Theater in the Tower]. Some years later he cast me for ‘Women of New York’ — a film that nobody has ever seen — but he never mentioned that incident again.”

The man of course was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the beautiful young woman — still golden–beautiful to this very day — was the Barbara Sukowa who would go on to subsequent blazing stardom in Fassbinder’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Fassbinder’s “Lola,” Margarethe von Trotta’s “Rosa Luxemburg,” Lars von Trier’s “Zentropa,” Tim Robbins’s “The Cradle Will Rock,” and dozens of other motion pictures, not to mention as many or more stage plays, not to mention an entire parallel career as a singer.

It is Sukowa the singer who will be
glorifying Schumann and Schubert this Friday evening, December 7, at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. We’ll get to that. But first:

“Women of New York” was a play, in German, made from Clare Booth Luce’s ‘The Women.’ Fassbinder staged it in Hamburg — “and then in four days, four mornings,” Sukowa says, “made it into a movie.”

He was a fast worker and a prodigiously, inconceivably, productive one. He was also a monster who terrorized and variously abused the actors who clustered around him in a sort of commune, and he died at 37, in 1982, on an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. He was also, like Italy’s Pasolini, a forcefully, flamboyantly homosexual artist whose creations could be just as powerfully heterosexual when that’s what the story called for.

And Sukowa’s frenzied supersexual night-club singing in Fassbinder’s “Lola” (1981) is about as far a cry from the wistful “Month of May” love lieder of Robert Schumann (1810-56) and Franz Schubert (1797-1828) as you could get.

“I went a little crazy,” Sukowa says of herself as Lola.

Is it fair to say that Barbara Sukowa is an actress who sings, a singer who acts? And sometimes just talks, narrates — in what the Germans call Sprechgesang, a blend of song and the spoken word.

“Yeah. Oh yeah,” says the lead singer of the X-Patsys. “I still don’t know what my voice is, and with every song I’m trying to find it. It’s a bit scary sometimes. If you don’t have a trained voice, you have to work in another way. I didn’t want to go in the opera direction, or the Broadway direction. I just wanted to convey the emotional content ”

Actually she’s been singing since she was a kid in the Bremen where she was born February 2, 1950, the daughter of Ilsa and businessman Kurt Titze. “I sang in a choir — two choirs, actually — and on the radio. Then I was in the Bremen Dome Choir — the only reason I got in was my girlfriend’s father was head of the choir. And I was acting in school plays. I think the real kick was when I came to America at 16, as an exchange student to La Habra High School in Orange County, California. Very conservative locale, yes? They had a class called Drama, and I got an acting award. I never considered it a profession, just a fun thing to do.”

These days she’s been feeling her way into rock music and blues — “I mix things, Schumann and Schubert and Muddy Waters and a swarm of heavy-metal guitars” — though it’s unlikely that rock or blues or Muddy Waters or those guitars will work their way into Friday’s concert. It will be led — her portion of it — by her longtime associate Reinbert de Leeuw.

“You’re up there beside the Steinway piano in this big concert hall. There’s always a certain distance that people feel. But I feel I can do some things an opera singer cannot do. My speaking and my singing are almost the same.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, were he still around, would surely once again walk up to her and say some provocative things if he saw sitting alone in a restaurant. Or some provocative things of a very different nature if he saw Brooklyn resident Barbara Sukowa — Mrs. Robert Longo — sitting there amid her three sons.

Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert? They’d clap their hands over their ears.

IN THE LOVELY MONTH OF MAY. Barbara Sukowa singing lieder of Schumann and Schubert with the ACJW Ensemble conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw. Also on the bill: Toru Takemitsu’s “Tree Line,” Arnold Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie, Op. 9, No. 1. Friday, December 7, 7 p.m. at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, 154 West 57th Street, (212) 247—7800. Tickets start at $15.

“The constant haggling for repairs, having a hostile relationship with your landlord — as a rent-regulated tenant, this becomes your lifestyle,” she said.