NEW YORK, NY.- Caterina Valente, a polyglot performer who sang in more than a dozen languages and was a television mainstay on two continents in the 1950s and ’60s, died Sept. 9 at her home in Lugano, Switzerland. She was 93.
Her death was announced on her website.
Valente achieved stardom in mid-1950s Germany in a popular music genre known as schlager: novelty songs, with titles like “Ganz Paris Träumt von der Liebe” (“All Paris Dreams of Love”) and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Honolulu Strandbikini.” By 1955, her hits had put her on the cover of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
She had her own television show in Germany in 1957, and she appeared regularly at the Olympia in Paris throughout her career. Her fluid, confident delivery and sure pitch, as well as her skill as both a guitar player and a tap dancer, also carried her across the Atlantic, and by the early 1960s she was a regular on American television.
Valente capitalized on her cosmopolitan origins. She was born in Paris to Italian parents who themselves were entertainers, was brought up in wartime Germany, and was fluent in a half-dozen languages. She would regularly make records for the French, Italian and German markets, which led to hits all across the continent. She won France’s Grand Prix du Disque for her 1959 recording of the song “Bim-Bom-Bey.”
In the United States she appeared nine times on “The Dean Martin Show” and was also seen on the variety shows of Ed Sullivan, Perry Como and others. She performed memorably with Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye on a 1966 episode of “The Danny Kaye Show.” A jokey 1966 bossa nova duet with Dean Martin has more than 20 million hits on YouTube. In the 1964-65 TV season, she was a regular on “The Entertainers,” an hourlong variety show that also starred Carol Burnett and Bob Newhart.
Her reviews in the United States were mixed. Writing about a Bing Crosby special on which she appeared in 1963, Paul Gardner of The New York Times wrote: “The program emerged as a harmless hodgepodge of folk, popular and semiclassical music. Miss Valente, for example, stylized beyond recognition Cole Porter’s haunting ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’” which was “a silly thing to do.”
When she appeared the next year at the Persian Room in the Plaza Hotel, John S. Wilson reviewed her performance in the Times. “Miss Valente,” he wrote, “keeps changing languages frequently enough to give the listener who hesitates in trying to distinguish a Portuguese song from a Spanish song the impression that he is engaged in a pretty rugged game of musical chairs.”
Wilson praised her “lingual versatility and her ability to take off on flights of wordless vocalizing.” But, he added, “She is not a particularly imaginative performer and is more apt to grind a song down than to light it with life.”
In Germany, though, her popularity never flagged. Into the 1970s, even after she had expressed a wish to retire, she had Top 10 hits with “Wo die Musikanten Sind” and “Manuel” in 1978. Her last live performance was in Leipzig in 1996, when she was 65.
The German press, in appraising Valente’s career, attributed her early success to West Germany’s yearning in the 1950s to forget the war. Valente’s sunny ballads of love in southern lands, and her unreserved celebration of the German economic miracle, hit the right note for Germans eager to put the past behind them.
“It’s getting better, better, better,” she sang with Austrian schlager star Peter Alexander, who had been an anti-aircraft gunner for the Nazis. “We are creating true miracles and everyone can see it.”
With ordinary people beginning to flex their economic muscle and once again venture out into a continent their armies had devastated, Valente “strongly stimulated the proto-tourist fantasies of the Germans,” the newspaper Die Presse wrote in its obituary.
In 2021, Manuel Brug of Die Welt wrote that she “stoked the southern longing of the postwar generation and always took them a bit to Italy.”
Caterina Germaine Maria Valente was born on Jan. 14, 1931, in Paris, the fourth child of Giuseppe and Maria Valente. Her father was an accordion player, and her mother was a dancer and vaudeville performer.
Caterina first performed with the family when she was 5, singing the French children’s song “Papa N’a Pas Voulu” in Stuttgart. The family spent the war in Germany and, according to her official website, endured the bombing of Breslau and imprisonment by the Russians.
At war’s end, they returned to Paris and, according to her website, her mother received a booking at the Olympia, helping the family get back on its feet.
Valente performed with her parents at first. But, encouraged by her first husband, a circus juggler named Gerd Scholz, whom she married in 1951, she began recording on her own. Success soon followed: “Ganz Paris Träumt von der Liebe,” according to her website, sold more than 500,000 copies.
Valente divorced Scholz in 1971. She is survived by their son, Eric van Aro, and another son, Alexander Budd, from her marriage to pianist Roy Budd, which ended in divorce in 1980.
She made light of her multinational allegiances. “I’m sure some of you are asking, ‘What kind of a nationality is she?’ Well, that’s quite complicated,” she once joked to an audience. “I was born in France, I’m married to a German and I live in Switzerland. That makes me a kind of a musical goulash.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
