There is a sticker diagonally across the real estate agent sign in the front yard. The East Brabant country house of singer/singer-songwriter Lenny Kuhr (76), located on a quiet road, has been sold. It’s hard for her, she says. Because the sale of the house is related to her decision to leave the Netherlands. “I don’t want to live in a country where I see anti-Semitism increasing so much.” She will soon live in Israel with her husband Rob, close to her two daughters and four grandchildren. But her migration also marks the end of her singing career. She will give a few more shows, her last concert in Utrecht will be on May 31.
Which song suits her musical farewell? She doesn’t have to think about it for long. That’s ‘The Troubadour’, the poetic chanson with which she won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1969.
He was so full of music
He sang for large and small audiences
He made me happy and melancholy
The troubadour (…)
That’s how he sang all his life
His own song, his own singing
Yet death simply takes its course
The troubadour, the troubadour
Then it became quiet, the song was over
Just some mud to finish
But who was comforted by his song
Don’t forget him
“Every time I sing it, I hear my own story in it,” she says under the colorful mosaic lamp above the large square dining table. “In any case, I now see very clearly the relativity of all the interest I receive. It is a lot, and you might like it, but I also realize that it will all come to a standstill soon.”
Kuhr becomes emotional several times during the conversation when she talks about her farewell and departure. That farewell is well-considered, she says. And it feels inevitable. “But now that I am in the middle of the move and doing the last shows with my band, I also feel the pain of leaving. When I announce my musicians, I really have to do everything I can not to close down.”
The set list of singer Lenny Kuhr.
Photo Andreas Terlaak
Judaism
Lenny Kuhr converted to Judaism at the age of twenty-five. She lived in Israel with her family in the 1980s. Her first husband was an Israeli otolaryngologist. Her current husband and manager Rob Frank is also Jewish. Two of her grandchildren are serving in the IDF. When one of them was injured in the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, she immediately traveled there. She later spoke out in a controversial interview Dutch Dagblad (2023) about the war in Gaza. She said: “I support the military operation that Israel is conducting. It is about the survival of the state of Israel, which is always under threat. But in my view of life, violence should be as short and minimal as possible.”
Now, two and a half years later, Lenny Kuhr still supports Israel. When asked about the war in Gaza and the civilian casualties: “I would hope that there will be no more fire from all sides and I regret any human suffering, especially in Gaza.”
She has experienced the aggression that has come her way since October 7, 2023, as an alarm signal, she says. The real turning point came two years ago, when activists in the hall disrupted her concert in Waalwijk. “Zionist, they shouted. And: terrorist. They came forward, wanted to take my microphone, shouted that I was ‘a murderer’.” Kuhr was given police protection for a year. Protests and tensions also arose at performances by other Jewish or Israeli artists. Members of the House of Representatives spoke out about the question of where the line lies between demonstrating and intimidating.
I was never a political artist. I have to constantly speak out to the media. As if I have a monopoly on wisdom
Kuhr says she receives threatening emails every day and often reports them. Recently, during her performance in Huizen, some pro-Palestinian activists demonstrated peacefully with flags. The police stopped them. According to Kuhr, her audience feels intimidated by it. On Monday, her performance on May 24 at the Rosa Spierhuis in Laren was canceled by the healthcare institution – “for the sake of the peace and safety of our residents”. Kuhr: “And this is exactly why I am leaving. I find what is happening now serious. Jewish and Israeli artists are being banned and canceled.”
Since the war in Gaza, Israel’s participation in cultural events has sparked controversy and protest everywhere: this week alone, at the Venice Biennale and the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. Supporters of a cultural boycott point to the high number of Palestinian civilian casualties, the death toll in Gaza is over 72,000, due to Israeli genocidal violence. Kuhr was never a political artist, she counters. “But I have to constantly speak out to the media. As if I have a monopoly on wisdom.”
She sees herself as someone who mainly wants to “reach out.” “Of course dialogue would be the best thing, that has also been tried. But there comes a time when you have to be able to defend yourself. Without defense, Israel no longer exists.” She is not afraid, she says, but of course she is aware of the safety risks. “Violence has been a reality in Israel for a long time. I have been going there for so many years, I have often witnessed buses exploding or a kindergarten being attacked while I was there.” But the presence of family is harder, she says. They are still looking for a house. “My daughter lives in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. It is relatively quiet there, but we have had to flee into bomb shelters before.”
First prize Eurovision Song Contest
The Netherlands will not participate in the Eurovision Song Contest this year. Broadcaster AVROTROS withdrew because Israel is still participating despite protests. Kuhr thinks that is a shame and unjustified. The Eurovision Song Contest, she says, should be about music and connections between countries, as she experienced it herself in 1969 in Madrid. She won the festival at the age of nineteen together with Lulu (United Kingdom), Frida Boccara (France) and Salomé (Spain). It was the only time in the festival’s history that four countries shared the first prize.
Kuhr looks back with palpable pleasure on the event, now 57 years ago. The win earned her an international recording contract with Phonogram in France. At home in Eindhoven, her parents could not experience it live, but a television store lent them a color television for that evening. The Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast in color for the first time. When the tension during the scoring became too much for her mother, she fled upstairs. Until the boy next door shouted in the stairwell: “Come down, neighbor, you’re fine!”
She thinks that the Netherlands will participate again next year. “That is not just a wish, I really think so. After all, a media team will go there and reports will be made. It was hoped that Israel would not participate due to the boycott, but that did not happen. Then the Netherlands will ultimately have to reconsider its view.” She refers to Duncan Laurence’s Dutch win at the 2019 edition in Tel Aviv. “That was one big party. People from all kinds of countries were singing, dancing, celebrating together.” She is convinced that the friendships forged by the festival are greater than politics. She remained friends with fellow winner Frida Boccara, who played for France in 1969, until Boccara’s death in 1996.
Lenny Kuhr.
Photo Andreas Terlaak
From chanson to classical
The artistic essence of Lenny Kuhr: a lifetime of making music on your own terms. Far outside the American pop tradition, she sang in Dutch, French, English and Portuguese, from chanson to classical (Schubert songs) and fado, from small halls to large stages. Next to ‘The Troubadour’ was ‘Visite’ in 1980 her big hit with the French boy group Les Poppys. Somewhere in the house, she points out, there are still Edisons, a Silver Harp and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Buma Awards that she received in 2017. Kuhr has also been a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau since 2007.
Looking back, she says she never thought in advance about the qualities that could make a song a hit, or about the musical fashions of the moment. “I didn’t let that guide me. Musically, I preferred to step outside the pattern.” The Dutch language is dear to her, because she can express all her nuances in it. She also worked in France for a long time and speaks French well, but later noticed “that something that sounds poetic sometimes turns out to be kitschy.”
“I have always remained autonomous and want to fully support what I sing. A song lives and changes. I have sometimes formulated it this way: I am actually a living song that is constantly renewing itself.”
Because popularity was not a goal in itself, Kuhr did not always have the same success over the past fifty years. She self-published some records because there was no interest from the record companies. A large-scale artistic comeback formed the surprisingly vital record Lenny Kuhr in 2020. She was then artistically challenged by musicians such as Stef Bos, Spinvis and Elke Vierveijzer. In ‘Still a troubadour’, a song by Stef Bos that nods to ‘The Troubadour’, she sings how she is still that troubadour and searches for the words for what she feels and sees. And how she wants to be a light in the dark, among all the hatred and envy.
What will I miss? That magical moment when everything comes together. The rising, the concentration that focuses entirely on that one song
What will she miss? She doesn’t have to think about it for long. “That magical moment when everything comes together. The emergence, the concentration that is completely focused on that one song. Then I feel supported. My children used to say that they did not recognize me on stage. A very compact energy is then released, which makes me completely present in what I sing and do. My hands are more of a kind of extension of the sounds I produce. Like a conductor.”
And then there are the fans. Who already said goodbye once and yet come again. Whose faces she recognizes. “They write me their personal stories and tell me how my texts help them. I know what they have gone through and try to answer it as much as possible. That sometimes takes a lot of time, but I have always felt that it is part of it.”
Sudden loss of voice
The fact that her farewell feels like a grieving process also has to do with an earlier fault line in her life. In 1993, she suddenly lost her voice during a performance. She was 43. The cause was later discovered to be a neurological disorder. For a year she could barely sing and even speaking was difficult. The silence forced her to turn inward, she says. Kuhr studied spirituality intensively. It wasn’t until seven years later that her old voice fully returned.
“By continuing to listen to my intuition and inspiration, I have been able to lift the most difficult moments in my life into something beyond them, even the loss of my voice,” she says. Yet that period was anything but exalted. “I slowly felt all the shells falling off. Suddenly I was no longer a singer.”
That is precisely why she recognizes something of that disruption in the farewell that is now approaching. With one essential difference: “I can still sing. In fact, I feel so in good shape. Then I couldn’t say a word anymore.”
She is on tour with her most personal work, the EP Light from 2025. “The most beautiful thing I have ever done,” she says without hesitation. “A whole life has gone into that.” That makes the decision to stop even more painful. There is a moment of silence. Then it sounds determined: “But I see it as a necessity.”
