Patrick Bade
Mischa Spoliansky

Patrick Bade | Mischa Spoliansky | 06.19.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- Some of you know, I’ve just spent the past week in Vienna, that was really wonderful. Had such a good time, and in fact, half the group were Lockdown alumni. So that made a very nice atmosphere. We all had a lot in common. So anyway, today it’s Mischa Spoliansky, and there there may be some people saying, Mischa Spoliansky, Mischa Spoliansky. Who’s that? Maybe the name is not so familiar, but I think I can guarantee that most of the people listening today will have heard some music by Mischa Spoliansky at some point in their lives. In the inter war period, he wrote two or three massive international hits that everybody was humming. Your parents would’ve been humming these songs. Then in the period of the late twenties, early thirties in Weimar, Berlin, he was a key figure in the golden age of Berlin Cabaret. So if you like that kind of music, if you go to concerts of Ute Lemper, for instance, you’ll certainly have heard songs by Mischa Spoliansky. Then there was this interruption of his career, as with so many artists in 1933 with the takeover of Germany by the Nazis, he was one of the first to realise that he had to go. Went very quickly, initially to Switzerland, Italy, Paris, and then he came to Britain and he spent the rest of his life in the United Kingdom as a film composer.

So I think pretty well everybody will have seen many films for which he wrote the soundtrack. He performed the service for the British film industry that Conal and Voxman did for Hollywood. He really raised the standard of film music, and he wrote the scores for a lot of the best British movies between the 1930s and the 1960s. And I’m going to start off with one of his great hits of the 1930s, A song everybody was humming in the early 1930s. In English, it’s called “Tell Me Tonight”. And this was written for a movie called, The German version of the movie, it was called , But at the time, in the nearly thirties, these kind of movies were often filmed in two or three versions. So it was filmed in French and it was filmed in English, and it was a star vehicle for the great Polish tenor, very handsome Polish tenor Ian Kempura But as I said, it was a massive hit throughout Europe song. So, this is the theme song from the movie, which in English is called “Tell Me Tonight”, but I’m going to play it to you in a French version with the corrigan tenor Wonderful, wonderful, heroic operatic, tenor voice, beautiful, open, luminous sound. And you can see he absolutely revels in the opportunities that Spoliansky has given him in this song.

[Playing “Tell Me Tonight By Spoliansky”]

Spoliansky’s success with that song was very timely, 1932. And he described that song as his passport to freedom. And it attracted the attention of the great Hungarian filmmaker, Alexander Corder. I know that Trudy’s talked about him, and he invited Spoliansky to come to Britain, and that’s where he stayed really for the rest of his life. Now, he was born in 1898 in Bial Stock in Belarus. His father was quite a successful opera singer, and the family were extremely musical. All his siblings became musicians. And he seems to have had a very happy early childhood, I think that established his character, which was basically, a sunny, optimistic character. And that optimism, that that character served him well. ‘Cause he must have had a terrible later childhood. At the age of nine, he was orphaned and he was apprenticed to a fashion house in Berlin in his early teens. But he obviously very, very precociously musically gifted. And he supplemented his income by playing piano in Berlin coffee houses. And that’s how he started his musical career. His first big success was with, as you can see, a Volse Boston called “Morphium”. And, I suppose this is 1920. So we’re into first post war Berlin. There’s an awful lot of substance abuse going on in Berlin in the 1920s. And the swirling grammatic harmonies of this piece, I suppose give you some sense of inebriation, a drug-induced inebriation. So here is “Morphium”, the first great success of Mischa Spoliansky.

[Playing “Morphium.”]

And one reason for the great success of that piece was that it was taken up by an exotic dancer called Anita Beber, who was really, I suppose, one of the characteristic figures of Weimar, Germany. Short-lived, she died as a result of own excesses in alcohol and cocaine, and morphine addiction. And she is of course the subject of one of the most famous of all portraits of the Weimar period. The Auto portrait you see on the left at the moment, it’s actually on show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in an exhibition about Weimar, Germany. So really, if you can get to Paris to see that exhibition, I urge you to do so. But Otto Dix’s wife, Martha left a vivid description of Anita Beber. This is what she said. “She used to spend an hour doing her makeup, consuming a bottle of brandy in the process. And as for the prostitution, that was obvious, we went for a walk in Villa Bardon. And every time someone approached her, she said "200 marks’. I didn’t think that was so awful. After all, she had to pay for her own stage costumes and dancers didn’t get paid much in those days. She was so charming, so sweet, totally natural, lovely.”

So this is Berlin 1920s of notorious, famous, celebrated for its very lush atmosphere. These are two of the most characteristic images of Berlin in the 1920s. Marlena in the Blue Angel in 1931, singing, , not at all, translated by the English title, “Falling in Love Again”. No, she’s switched onto love from head to foot. And then another very famous portrait, of course by Otto Dix of the lesbian journalist Sylvia von Harden. So Spoliansky’s absolutely in the centre of all of this and a great many of his songs are celebrations of sexual freedom, sexual ambiguity. We’ve even got two of images of him here in the 1920s, obviously having a very good time. I love the image on the right hand side, which shows him playing the piano with Richard Tauber. great tenor looking rather inebriated in the background, and Marlena sitting on top of the piano, displaying her wonderful legs. He seems to have been obviously a very tolerant man, very open man, but remarkably untouched by all this inverted commerce depravity around him in Berlin 1920s. He fell in love at first sight with his life, They at first sight with his wife. They had a very, very, very happy marriage that lasted all his life, was a devoted father to his daughters. So I said he was remarkably untouched by all this, the sexual and shenanigans going on around him.

This is Berlin in the 1920s would’ve been a very useful book if you’ve been a visitor. Viva, is a guidebook to lustre after Berlin to Wicked Berlin. So any vice, any perversity you had could be satisfied in Berlin in the 1920s. There is a very, very famous passage in Stefan Zweig’s book, “The World of Yesterday”, which I urge if you haven’t read it, you must read it. Key, key, key work for everything we’re talking about really on lockdown. And he talks about Berlin in the twenties and he says, all those moral attitudes that have been essential to the German bourgeois they’re all thrown out the window. Everything broke down, and everything was up for grabs in the 1920s in Berlin. This is a caricature from the satirical magazine . And it shows a bourgeois woman of the older generation with her young daughter. And the mother is starting to warn her daughter. She says, “You’ve got to an age where you’ve got to worry about men.” And the daughter says to mother, “Oh, drop it mother, I’m a lesbian.” So, actually it’s surprising how many songs by Spoliansky have to do with same sex relationships. Here he is, you can see an elegant mount. What a beautiful face. I think he has a really beautiful face, an expressive, sensitive face. And he’s a wonderful, sensitive performer. He’s a great pianist and he’s a wonderful singer. So I want to play you this song that he wrote, “Baby, When You’re Naughty”. And he such a super elegant performer, both as a pianist and as a singer. I mean, he makes me think of Fred Astaire. It’s the same kind of suave elegance.

[Playing “Baby, When You’re Naughty”]

There’s something very Gershwin esque about that song and his performance of it. So when Gershwin came to Europe in 1928, he was on the kind of triumphal tour, and he came to Berlin, it was inevitable that they should meet. And Gershwin went to the latest hit show, which was Spoliansky’s , and he loved it. And they met at a party afterwards and Gershwin said, “Please, will you play me your song, Le Bleu?” Which was the hit song of the show, which Spoliansky did. And Gershwin was also very impressed by a record that Spoliansky had made the year before 1927. He was the first European to record as a pianist, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” And that’s another thing I’d like to stress about him, his extraordinary versatility as a musician. There was nothing he couldn’t do. This is somebody, you know, with no kind of formal training or background, just a colossal natural gift. So here is Spoliansky playing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue”, recorded in 1927.

[Playing “Rhapsody In Blue”]

So Gershwin liked that so much that he ordered two dozen copies of that record to be given to friends in America. As I said, he was an extraordinary versatile artist. So one moment he’s in the studio recording “Rhapsody In Blue”, and the next he is accompanying the great tenor Richard Tauber in Schubert’s Winterreise, the very first complete recording of Schubert Song Cycle, “Winterreiser”, that was in 1927. So the electric recording process had only just been invented this. And they went off to the Hotel Adlon and in a hotel room at the Hotel Adlon, they sat down and they recorded “Winterreise”. And what I love about this is the complete spontaneity of this performance. It’s so different from anything you’d be likely to hear today. It’s so different from all those performances, after Fisher Diskelle and people like that. Elizabeth Schoff was so precious, so self-conscious. So in a way immaculate. What’s great about this performance is this is completely natural, spontaneous music making by a singer and a pianist who just sit down and they make music together. And in this song, their post, what I’d really like you to notice, Taubert is so wonderful that he has to repeatedly say the words mine has “my heart”. Every time he says it’s different. This is really coming from his heart. This is such spontaneously emotional singing.

[Playing “Winterreise”]

Now, 1928 was really the peak of the Weimar Berlin glorious cultural renaissance. In the opera houses you had Congos competing with , which I’ve talked about in previous lectures. And in the theatres in August, you had the premiere of the Tri Ocean Opera of Betel, blessed and caught vial, which you see here on the screen. And in the same year Spoliansky had his first major theatrical hit with lic in Deloft". It was the piece that so impressed Gershwin in “It’s in the Wind”. And this was the piece of course that launched the reputation of Marlin in this piece with Margo Leone and Oscar Karvise. It’s about a menage a trois with a rather ambiguous sexual relationship between two women and a man. And I’m going to play a little excerpt where two women discover, of course, they’re having a relationship with one another, and they each discover that have been, betrayed with the man who’s the male corner of the this hemuresis triangle. “You betrayed me with him,” each of them says.

♪ Music plays ♪

The big hit number from Esle Deloft was the song “Le Bleu”. Le Bleu was of course the name of a very expensive perfume by Gal la, and it was sung by Margo Leon, who you see here. And she’s describing how she’s preparing herself to go out for an evening on the town. And powdering my face, . I’m making up my face, she’s making herself gorgeous to go out on the town. And so this perfume is still, actually I must, now I’m in Paris, I finally must go out and get myself a little bottle of Le Bleu, ‘cause you can still get it. And I checked on the internet, and this is what they say about this perfume on the internet. “At the very moment when the sun fades on the horizon, the sky is tinged with the velvet of the night. The blue hour spreads its atmosphere, it is with an arm of sweet and delicate flowers wrapped in a powder breath with oriental notes that Jacque Gal La celebrates this fleeting moment.

[Playing "Le Bleu]

So that became a huge international hit taken up by dance bands all over the world, with the English title of the "Error of Parting”. And here it is in the later 1930s performed by the Benny Goodman Band.

[Playing “Le Bleu” by Benny Goodman Band]

So between 1927 and 1932, Spoliansky had a series of huge successes with musical shows where he was really pushing the boundaries, making something new and something interesting of popular musical theatre. The word Alles Schwindel is the titles of his shows. And I’m going to play you next, the hit song from Alles Schwindel. And the title in German is , which is difficult to translate exactly, but it’s sort of, “I have the hots for you.”

♪ Music plays ♪

But rather like “Le Bleu” that was taken up and it became a very popular vehicle for the French superstar of in France. It’s a jaunty tune, you can see it’s absolutely perfect for her sparky, jaunty personality. And the title in French is Via Come. And she of course, she’s a very different kind of vocal artist, but she’s a great, great communicator with her audience. And rather like Richard Tauber with his varying ways of singing the words , she gets so much out of the word Vienne. Every time Vienne comes in the song she sings it in a different and suggestive way.

♪ Music plays ♪

The career of Spoliansky reached a climax in 1932 with his most ambitious musical theatre show, which was . And this was built as a cabaret opera. It was really a new type of theatrical presentation. And this is, my biggest regret really about the career of Spoliansky is that he wasn’t able to develop this 'cause it was a huge success when it was first presented, but of course months later, the Nazis took over and it was shut down and he was forced to leave and there was nowhere else really, maybe Paris, but nowhere else where you could follow up these, this kind of experimentation with theatrical forms. So is set in a department store. The department store is really a kind of metaphor for modern life department stores where invention of the early modern period, the first department stores were in Paris and then they spent to Berlin. And a theme that has been talked about quite a lot in our series is of course the role that Jews have played in developing modern culture. And so I’m not sure about the very first department stores in Paris, , but mostly throughout Europe department stores were something that were developed by Jewish entrepreneur and certainly in Berlin, the great department stores of their time and so on. They were all Jewish enterprises.

And you know, very early on Zola identified that this was really a new phenomenon of love, modern life, the department store. And he analysed that in his novel , and seen department stores as something exciting, but also something actually possibly negative and dangerous in modern life. And so the , it’s really about commercialisation, about the Americanization of modern culture, and also about the anonymity of big city life, people interacting with one another without really any kind of personal interaction. So this show , it was first put on late 1932, right at the am you know, just before the Nazi takeover. And I said it was a massive success and performance was broadcast on the radio and luckily Spoliansky was able to get 78 RPM recordings of the broadcast. And when he fled from Germany, he took them with him and they belonged to his daughter Spolly. And we now have them, they’ve been published and it’s a fascinating glimpse into really the last moments of this golden cultural age of the Weimar Republic. So I’m going to play you three excerpts from this performance where you’re there, you’re there in the house right at the end of 1932 with an audience that’s obviously absolutely loving it. And this is for me, this is interesting also because you realise that this is an audience’s absolutely in sympathy with the peace. And I think it’s quite important to remember that Berlin was never an Nazi city. Berlin was a left-wing city.

I suppose it’s a bit like today, Paris is not a city for Lapan. New York is not a city for Trump. London is not a city for Boris Johnson. The, you know, big cities tend to be open, liberal and more left wing. So as I said, you can really feel, you hear in the applause, you can hear in the reaction of the audience that they’re absolutely loving all of this. So first of all, we’re going to hear the store manager and he sings in New York, That’s all he’s saying. “I spent my apprenticeship here in New York by Wannamaker and Co and I’ve become completely Americanized, that’s all.” It’s a piece which has been revived with great success in Germany in recent years. And here is a modern production of it. The of the title is someone who has been hired by the department store just to be sacked, to satisfy, obnoxious, complaining customers. So, he’s throughout the piece, constantly sacked and then reinstated, and Helen Plen in the first performance was played by one of the big stars of the musical theatre of Germany in the 1920s.

A man called Palsen. You could almost say he was like the Alfred Drake. He starred in so many of the important pieces, including the Opera. And in this period he was very much a colleague of Betel Brest. Of course he was on the left politically. But sadly when the Nazis took over, he really went with a flow and he became an enthusiastic Nazi and then took part in Nazi propaganda and antisemitic movies. So probably not a very decent or likeable human being, but here he is singing a song for Helen Plen. And the song goes . So it’s really talking about this sort of anonymity of being in a big town that you don’t know people, that you just, you pass them by and how really it’s important that you should try to get to know the people that you meet.

♪ Music plays ♪

Next we’re going to hear ar Elaine Eisinger. She was actually, they borrowed her, they poached her from the starts Opera. She was a big operatic star, very charming singer. Very gifted singer. And you can tell when she first, I’m not going to play you that bit, but when she first appears on the stage, there’s a spontaneous outburst of applause from the audience. They obviously love her. You can see she was a very pretty woman. She’s a very, very charming singer. She was a great favourite with Berlin audiences. But this would’ve been one of the last occasions that she was able to appear before them as she was Jewish. And she was dropped from the Starts opera at the moment that the Nazis took power. And at like Spoliansky, of course her career was completely changed. She also found refuge in Britain and she was able to sing at Gleinborn. But of course her career in Britain never had the brilliance that it had in Berlin in the 1920s. In this piece, she is a very wealthy woman who lives to shop. And in the little area, I’m going to play you the button aria. She’s describing how she buys her clothes in Paris. She buys her shoes in London, she buys her underwear in Vienna, but she comes to Berlin just to buy her buttons. Something that fascinates me is how works of art and how songs can change their meaning according to political circumstances. So I’m going to play you two versions of a Spoliansky song called “Auf Wiedersehen”. This was first presented in a show called Alles Schwindel. Auf Wiedersehen, means well “See you again.” and in the original show it’s a charming song, slightly throwaway, I would say. Here it is, as it was when it was first presented.

[Playing “Auf Wiedersehen”]

So the words are, “Auf Wiedersehen, we’ll see each other again somewhere in the world. at some point in the future, we’re going to see each other again. And we’ll never forget how wonderful it was.” Well those words of course really took on new meaning after 1933 when so many people were forced to leave Germany. Now the image on the screen is of the most successful boy band of the 1920s and thirties. These the Comedian Harmonists, they were again a huge international success. They toured Britain, France, everywhere, and their records were absolute bestsellers. Now the problem in 1933 was that of the six members of the group, three were Jews and three were non-Jews. And so they had a tour in 1934 and it ended in Munich, and it was Munich, of course the birthplace of Nazism. But again, a city, it’s probably more the surroundings of Bavaria that were really Nazi sympathisers. Big cities tended not to be fascist or right wing, So this was a sellout performance.

And before the performance began, a brown shirt, a somebody in a brown uniform Nazi came in front of the curtain, he said, “I want to tell you that of your performance tonight, half of them are Jews. And if anybody wishes to leave the theatre now, they can leave the theatre and they can collect their money that they paid for this performance at the box office on the way out.” Apparently only a couple of people left, people stayed in the audience. And the last piece that they, that the comedian Harmonists sang of Spoliansky. And I can imagine that there was probably not a dry eye in the house. It must have been, a very, very emotional moment for the singers and for the audience. And I’m now going to play you that song in a very beautiful version by a wonderful group called . You can get this on cd. And they do a lot of the Comedian Harmonists repertoire and of course they’re singing it with hindsight. So they sing it quite differently from the original singers. They sing it with a lot of pathos and a lot of emotion.

♪ Music plays ♪

Sorry to cut that off really 'cause it’s so beautiful. So Spoliansky lands up in Britain working for Alexander Corder and there is so many amazing movies that he wrote the music for. “The Man Who Could Work Miracles,” Sanders of the River, “King Solomon’s Mind”, “The Ghost Goes West, "Northwest Frontier”, “Happiest Years of our Lives”. Just some of the movies that he wrote the scores for. I’m going to play, I’ve chosen just one excerpt from his movie score, which is from “Sanders of the River”, where he teamed up with the great black American singer Paul Robeson. They got on very well together. They were very uncomfortable actually about this movie, which is, it’s an excruciating movie in some ways. Horrible kind of imperialist racist actually. So they weren’t very happy with that, neither of them. But, you know, they had to earn a living. And Spoliansky wrote this beautiful song for Paul Robeson.

♪ Music plays ♪

I’m going to cut that off 'cause it actually wasn’t Robeson, I put the wrong recording on there. But nevertheless, a beautiful song. So he finds himself in Britain when the war breaks out. He’s an enemy alien. He was in a very weird position of having his music banned on the radio, but at the same time he was working for the BBC producing propaganda songs with proper propaganda words. And I was going to play one of those, but I’m not, I’ve run out of time and it’s really, doesn’t really show his talent at its best. So instead I’m going to finish with a very touching song that he recorded just at this moment at the outbreak of war called “Don’t Be Afraid”. And I had the great, great privilege of friendship with his daughter Spoliansky, one of the most charming, loving, wonderful women I think I’ve ever met. I used to enjoy every moment I spent with her I’d, I’d go over it once a week and she’d pour me a huge vodka and tonic and then she’d tell me about her memories of Berlin in the 1920s and thirties. Wonderful, wonderful woman. And she had two great ambitions.

One was that her father’s symphony should be, it was never performed in his lifetime. She wanted it to be performed and presented to the world. It has been. There is a new recording. If you scroll down to the attachments that you were sent this morning for this lecture, I’ve written a whole essay about Spoliansky’s Symphony you’ve got the details of how you could buy it if you want to do so. And the other thing, she wanted his autobiography, his unfinished autobiography to be published. And it’s quite short and she wanted to fill it out. So she was reading her mother’s diaries to find material to fill out her father’s autobiography. And one time we met and I said, well, your parents, they must have been so afraid. They must have been afraid for themselves. They must have been afraid for you. 1940 when there was a big danger that Britain might do a deal with Germany, there was also an a very big danger that the Germans might invade and they might succeed in their invasion, in which case Spoliansky and his wife and his children, I mean, their fate would’ve been terrible.

And Spolly said to me, “Oh, no, no, no, we never thought like that. We just didn’t think, it never occurred for us for a minute that Hitler might win the war.” And then the next time I went to see her, she said, “Oh, it’s really strange. I’ve just been reading my mother’s diaries and in my mother’s diaries I found this passage where she says that she had discussed,” the two of them, Spoliansky and his wife had a discussion, what to do if the Germans arrived in London, what they should do and whether they should actually shoot their daughters in order to protect them from the Nazis. So I think that knowing that gives an added poignance to this very beautiful song. This is Spoliansky himself singing, “Don’t Be Afraid”.

[“Don’t Be Afraid” By Spoliansky].

♪ What soon does it matter ♪ ♪ I give my heart to you ♪ ♪ What does it really matter ♪ ♪ As long as I love you, don’t be afraid ♪ ♪ Whatever happens to you, don’t be afraid ♪ ♪ There will come happiness too ♪ ♪ Sunshine or rain, no matter what you are thinking of ♪ ♪ So long as we’re in love ♪ ♪ We’re in the sky above ♪ ♪ Don’t be afraid ♪

Well, I think I better finish now. I’ve overrun my time, we’ll see. Thank you.

Q&A and Comments

Q: Who’s playing Morphium? A: It was just a Berlin band of the period.

There’s Patricia who went to that shirt, the Pompidou. Does he have descendants, yes he does. He has two Spolly, I don’t know about with his other daughter, but with Spolly she had two sons, with whom I’m in contact and I think might have been listening to this talk tonight. Yes, he was well rewarded and he did live in comfort. So I think he had a very, I think he had a very happy end to his life. Yes, glittering rendition of Rhapsody in Blue. Menage a trois, yeah. It’s interesting to think about parallels between twenties Germany, late sixties and seventies in America. Hadn’t really thoughts about that. the liberalism and freewill artistic licence of both. There was a period of restriction and conservatism, for lack of a better word, talking about artistic expression. I need to think a bit about that. The name of the book, “The World of Yesterday”, you must read that of it’s Stephan, it’s Essential Reading for for Lockdown University.

Q: Are there any motion picture or clips from any of these five more performances? A: The only thing I know really are is that there’s live recordings of Helen Plen that I played to you. I don’t know of anything else. And I think there is, yes, there is silent film of Anita Beber, creation of Selfridges, yes.

There’s a very good talk that we need to have on Lockdown from somebody about department stores Precursor of American Dinner Theatre. I don’t really know about that.

Q: Are there books, any books in English on the cross influences of Spoliansky and other Weimar popular composers? A: There’s been a number of books about film music in which they’re discussed and actually there’s a cd, if I can blow my own trumpet that I brought out for the firm of Maran Vanessa, I wrote about that brief period in, in the mid thirties when all those Berlin, Jewish cabaret composers, they all came to Paris. That was the most receptive place for them. So Voxman and Richard Van Hyman and so on. So I mean that you might like to get, that’s on the label of Maib brand.

Q: Are there any other songs translating to other languages? A: I cannot imagine there’d same as in German. I don’t know. I mean I think Vienne is so charming with (indistinct), but of course it becomes totally different from the original German text.

Thank you. Yeah, there’s a lot about the Harmonists, there’s a film about them, there’s a documentary and a fictional film about them and various books about them. They’re very interesting what happened to them. Yes, unable to compose experimental music in London. You think his Berlin music music sounds conventional, but I don’t think it was, I think they were really doing interesting things with the musical theatre. And I did, I’m afraid it’s in London. There was never, you couldn’t write the kind of songs in London that you could write in Paris and Berlin. You couldn’t write the kind of songs even in New York, even though you’ve got , who wrote some daring songs, you couldn’t get away with it in the English speaking, the kind of really near the knuckle words that you get in French and German songs of this period.

Q: If the big cities were generally up to experiment, why was Berlin the only city to develop a Weimar type culture at the time? A: Yes, exactly why it’s a fascinating phenomenon that Berlin was so exciting and so much more open and so much more experimental than other places.

His English was good, yes. Well he lived here a long time. Harmony is an excellent show that just appeared off Broadway and we’ll move to Broadway this year about the Harmonists. That’s interesting. Did his descendants, well I don’t think so. I mean Spolly, depends what you mean by remaining Jewish. Spolly, she was certainly conscious of her Jewish background, but she wasn’t observant Jewish in any way. And I don’t think her sons are either.

Herbert Hess, my friend Herbert, , that was very tender and melancholy. Barber, yeah, a little bit like barbershop quartets, I suppose. Thank you. Max Garber, yes, he’s an interesting character. Although I saw, I went to a very odd concert he did at the Wigmore Hall, but he’s somebody who really tries to recapture the spirit of Berlin in the 1920s. He’s something to look out for.

So that’s it. Thank you very much. And I’m back to the visual arts on Wednesday with Soutine and the Ecole de Paris. Thanks, bye-bye.