Udo Jürgens’ Great Encore

I t was anything but an everyday concert when Udo Jürgens performed in Hamburg on October 4, 1967. A year earlier, he had won the Eurovision Song Contest for his home country of Austria, and now the singer, musician and songwriter was embarking on the first headlining tour of his relatively young career. The premiere at the Musikhalle am Dammtor in Hamburg was sold out.

Upcoming Auction

UDO - The Personal Collection of the late Udo Jürgens

23–30 January 2025 | 3:00 PM CET | Cologne

After the finale of the rapturously successful evening, Jürgens was already sitting in his dressing room, having taken off his suit soaked with sweat. But the 2,000 people in the hall went on raving, on and on. What to do? Jürgens simply threw on his white bathrobe – and went back on stage.

The fact that a singer performed the last part of his show in an after-show outfit was something completely out of the ordinary at the time. But people liked the spontaneous (and, to be honest, quite funny) gesture so much that Udo Jürgens repeated it the next night. It became his trademark for almost five decades on tour: he sang the encore songs in his bathrobe. Even on December 7, 2014 in Zurich, at the very last concert before his unexpected, much too early death.

And indeed, the accessory is a brilliant metaphor for the particular contradictions that characterized the great artist, entertainer and heartbreaker Udo Jürgens. On the one hand, the toweling coat looked like a modest version of a royal robe, giving him an aura of excellence and iconic status. A radiance that is reflected in his career record: Jürgens wrote more than 1,000 songs in his 80 years of life and sold more than 105 million records. He gave over 2,000 concerts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, France, Poland, Japan, China, Australia, South America, South Africa, Russia and many other countries. Superstars such as Shirley Bassey, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr. and Sarah Vaughn have sung his songs. There is no other German-language pop and chanson artist who has achieved such massive international success.

At the same time, the bathrobe look radiated something radically intimate. When Udo Jürgens sat at the piano with sweaty hair and sang encores such as “Liebe ohne Leiden” (“Love without suffering”) or his ESC-winning song “Merci Chérie,” he always gave his audience the feeling that they were sharing a particularly intimate, almost private moment with him. This form of closeness was a decisive factor in his art and popularity. For although Jürgens played in the biggest arenas and was at the top of the charts, his music always told of the things that directly determined the lives of his listeners: of love and politics, doubts and hope, dreams, resistance and utopias. He performed in front of tens of thousands, but seemed to sing directly into the ears of each individual.

Therefore, Udo Jürgens was miles away from the stars of notorious German schlager music with whom he occasionally appeared in galas and TV shows. He not only celebrated the joy of life and making music on stage. But also the pain.

“People always read my songs like a book or perceived them like the soundtrack to a movie,” he said in an interview in August 2014. “That’s still the case today, even in my concerts, that the songs with stories touch people the most deeply.”

It therefore makes profound sense that fans and admirers of Udo Jürgens now have the opportunity to literally own a piece of his legacy. In early 2025, Sotheby’s Germany is auctioning off part of his personal estate in close collaboration with his children Jenny and John Jürgens.

UDO – The Personal Collection of the late Udo Jürgens is the title of this unique auction. The items up for sale in January 2025 include private items such as awards, accessories, games, personal pens and a jukebox, as well as works of art by, among others, Hans Arp, Gustav Klimt, Max Pechstein and Manfred Bockelmann, Udo Jürgens’ brother. His beloved Bentley Continental GTC is up for auction, as is the famous glass concert grand piano and various items from his stage and private wardrobe. Including, of course, one of his legendary bathrobes.

The auction is another highlight that keeps alive the memory of the great artist and his music. In 2024, his posthumous 90th birthday was celebrated with the previously unreleased song “Als ich fortging” (“When I left”) and an edition of his work including 70 CDs. The Da Capo tour, in which original recordings by Udo Jürgens are accompanied live by his longstanding stage band Pepe Lienhard Orchester, will continue in 2025.

All this gives an even deeper meaning to one of his greatest songs: “Ich lass euch alles da” (“I’ll leave you with everything”) was first performed in 1999 – then, Udo Jürgens was thinking primarily of the poetry and ideas that are still carried by his music today. Born Jürgen Udo Bockelmann in Klagenfurt in the south of Austria in 1934, he began his musical career in the 1950s with performances in jazz pubs and released his first records, which, however, sold poorly. After Shirley Bassey landed a number one hit in 1961 with the song “Reach for the Stars”, which he had composed, Jürgens briefly considered working solely as a songwriter. But then his success as a singer began.

In the 1970s and 80s in particular, he was not only one of the biggest, best-known and most sought-after pop stars in the German-speaking world – he also used his songs to narrate and comment on the social and cultural history of the time. “Griechischer Wein” (“Greek wine,” also sung by Bing Crosby as “Come Share the Wine”) dealt with foreign guest workers’ struggle for integration, “Ein ehrenwertes Haus” (“An honorable home”) with the change brought about by the social revolution of 1968, “Tausend Jahre sind ein Tag” (“A thousand years are one day”) with the fear of nuclear war and the beginning of the green-ecological movement. The scenery and positionings in Jürgens’ lyrics were as precise and catchy at the same time as neither conservative entertainers nor left-wing political songwriters could manage at the time. When he sharply criticized the Vatican's anti-contraception policy in 1988’s “Gehet hin und vermehret euch” (“Go ye and multiply”), some broadcasters even put the song on their blacklists.

At the same time, Udo Jürgens always had a strong international presence. He celebrated success in Asia with Japanese versions of his songs and performed in front of 40,000 people at the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro in 1974. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers presented him with a Country Music Award for his song “Buenos Dias Argentina.” Shortly afterwards, he produced the English-language album “Leave a Little Love” in Los Angeles, for which he won two prizes at the World Popular Song Festival in Tokyo. It should not be forgotten that Jürgens also composed symphonic orchestral works and musicals and unexpectedly set the dance floors of discotheques ablaze in 1979 with his eight-minute remix of “Ich weiß, was ich will” (“I know what I want”).

When he died three days before Christmas Eve 2014 as a result of heart failure, it was not only a huge shock for his worldwide audience. Almost ten years later, it is still painful to feel how much his voice is missed – especially in a present that could urgently use new, beautiful, intelligent Udo Jürgens songs. Of course, the artist himself always played down his importance. “You walk out of the theater, perhaps through empty backstreets, or someone comes towards you who doesn't know you,” he said shortly before his death, summing up the experience of being a person with extremely earthly problems, despite all his fame. “My profession thrives on memory.”

The auction by Sotheby’s Germany is now helping to preserve this precious memory. The collections will be exhibited successively in Munich, Vienna and Cologne from 9 January. The auction itself will begin – as an online auction – on January 23 and will end on January 30, 2025. “Ich will die Ewigkeit und keinen Abgesang,” he sang back then in “Ich lass euch alles da”: “I want eternity and not a swansong.” It is one of his wishes that will come true, definitely.

^{Portrait of Udo Jergens by Gabo, Dirk Rudolph}