The songs explored homosexuality, free love, abortion, fascism, racism and anti-Semitism.
The performers appeared in drag or in skimpy outfits or covered with enough plumage to make their gender seem ambiguous at best.
This decadent scene flourished for more than a decade, but it did not take place, at one might have guessed, in New York’s Greenwich Village or Chicago’s Old Town in the ’60s but, rather, in Berlin in the ’20s.
It’s a place and an era that have been mythologized ever since, most notably in musicals such as Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” and in the romanticized Hollywood films of Marlene Dietrich.
The real Berlin of the ’20s, however, has been harder to find–until now, that is, with the release of a stunning new recording by Ute Lemper. With “Berlin Cabaret Songs” (London), Lemper unearths repertoire well beyond the usual Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and sings it with a ferocity that makes Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” sound more like “Mary Poppins.”
“When you listen to these wonderful old recordings of this music, even with the cracks in the old records, you can hear how wicked the performances were,” says Lemper, who brings this repertoire to Chicago March 13-15 at the Athenaeum Theatre (presented by Performing Arts Chicago).
“Most of the women’s voices were squeaky and high and very sarcastic sounding, and quite crazy, with plenty of humor inside,” adds Lemper, speaking English with just a hint of her native Germany.
“They didn’t care whether they hit the pitch all the time. Most of all they sang really for the fun of provocation.”
Anyone who doubts that a 34-year-old diva truly can capture the color and texture of a music that flowered more than 70 years ago in pre-Nazi Germany surely hasn’t heard “Berlin Cabaret Songs.” Listen to Lemper’s bitter tone in “It’s All a Swindle,” her unabashed sensuality in “Sex Appeal” and “Take It Off Petronella,” her coy dual female roles in “When the Special Girlfriend,” and you are hearing one of the world’s most erudite cabaret performers dispatching repertoire that is in her blood.
It’s a music that was immensely popular in Weimar Germany (from the end of World War I to the ascent of Hitler in ’33) and all but forgotten thereafter. The freewheeling spirit of Berlin between the wars may have captured the world’s imagination, but the actual music of songwriters such as Rudolf Nelson, Friedrich Hollaender, Mischa Spoliansky and Kurt Tucholsky all but faded from view.
In part, that may owe to the particular history of German musical culture in this century. The cabaret repertoire that blossomed in the ’20s, when Germany experimented with uncensored artistic expression, withered all at once with the rise of the Nazis. Hitler and cohorts declared this repertoire “Entartete Musik” (or “degenerate music”), and the horrors of the period that ensued made Germans reluctant to look back on their recent past–even one of its most creative chapters.
“Generally, Germans have a problem thinking about this past, and facing what the Hitler period brought them to,” says Lemper, who now lives in Paris.
“They want to forget about responsibility or any kind of shame or guilt about this time–they don’t want to hear about it. For them it’s past, it’s like Napoleon. It’s long ago, and that’s how I was raised in the ’60s and ’70s, and that’s definitely how young people are raised today.
“I don’t even think the Germans even like the term `entartete musik,’ because, first of all, it’s a derogatory term, it’s a term the Nazis created.”
But considering the economic and democratic triumph of Germany after World War II, why wouldn’t the brilliant old songs flourish immediately after the Nazi era?
“Because the music market had changed so much by the ’50s and ’60s,” says Lemper. “With the influence of American pop music, the music became lightweight and designed more for entertainment than anything else.
“The cabaret music of Berlin in the ’20s would not sell millions of albums, which is what the commercial laws of the music market today demands.
“Radio stations won’t play this music, because everything nowadays is designed just for selling, selling and selling.
“So this theatrical music, where you really have to listen and follow the story, became a kind of lost genre.”
What a pity, considering the sophisticated nature of the music and lyrics involved. Take the sardonic, richly literate text to “I Am a Vamp,” from the “Berlin Cabaret Songs” album:
My bed belonged to Pompadour
like Lulu I have bright red hair
I dance as well as Salome
and treat my Baptists just as fair.
Soon after, the song pushes into bitter political commentary:
It’s true that some of my collections
I have found in other’s trash
like the Weimar constitution
also Hitler’s first moustache.
The singers and songwriters of Weimar Germany were fearless in addressing the times, and therein lies their tragedy. For while Germany’s most daring musical artists were pointing to the dark clouds ahead, they systematically were being silenced, exiled, imprisoned or worse.
In Hollaender’s “Munchhausen,” for instance, written in 1931, the protagonist dreams of a nobler, better Germany:
You could be rich you could be poor
you could be Christian or a Jew
Your politics did not have sway
on how a judge would rule on you.
As history shows, the dream was shattered.
By performing this music in concert and on record, Lemper not only helps us better understand a vital chapter in world culture but revives an ingenious repertoire that deserves to be heard again. That she sings this music with a vocal equipment that few of her contemporaries could match gives these songs a fighting chance of entering the cabaret repertory again.
Her vocal equipment may be too substantial to duplicate the somewhat dated, wobbly pitched singing of old, but she surely captures the spirit and fire of 1920s Berlin.
Now the question is whether the folks at London Records will videotape Lemper’s English-language performances in America, just as the European presenters taped her German-language shows last year in Berlin for TV.
“I really don’t know whether anyone is going to tape these American shows, I haven’t heard yet,” says Lemper, who also will bring the concert to New York and Washington, D.C.
“But it would be wonderful to make a video of the concert, because the visual aspect of the performance is very important. It’s part of being at the cabaret, isn’t it?”
Indeed it is. What’s more, if Lemper’s visuals are half as strong as her recording, her “Berlin” could be revelatory.
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THE FACTS
Ute Lemper:`Berlin Cabaret Songs’
When: 7:30 p.m. March 13; 8 p.m. March 14, 15
Where: Athenaeum Theatre. 2935 N. Southport Ave.
Tickets: $10-$36
Call: 773-722-5463 or 312-902-1500
