Interpretations

The first commercial recording, with Richard Woitach at the piano. Stratas had been Lotte Lenya's 'dream Jenny' the year before, and her reading carries Lenya's blessing — restrained, unadorned, with the ache of the line trusted to its own gravity.

A Greek mezzo-soprano whose career was shaped by Mikis Theodorakis and the songs of political resistance brings Youkali into dialogue with Mediterranean songbook traditions. The exile lyric reads naturally inside her repertoire of displaced and lamenting voices.

The cabaret-theatrical lineage made explicit. Lemper brings the song closer to the German Weimar tradition — diction forward, the tango a stage gesture rather than a salon ornament.

The title track of a solo-jazz-guitar record. With no voice, the melody stands exposed; you hear how much of the song's pathos lives in the interval and how little depends on the words.

A cinematic re-reading more than a decade after the studio recording: the same singer, looser, more public, the song carried by image as much as by tone.

A jazz singer's account: the habanera bass loosens, the line breathes around the beat, and the song becomes a slow, voiced confession. The clearest argument for the song as a jazz standard rather than a recital piece.

Raabe and the Palast Orchester restore the song to its inter-war salon: a tenor voice held in perfect courtesy, a small orchestra in late-Weimar period costume. The reading is wry without being ironic — the dream is taken seriously even as it is named a dream.

Cabaret voice in dialogue with a string quartet — the most recent of the notable readings. Strings give the tango a chamber-music intimacy, while the voice keeps it bare and theatrical.