Patrick Bade
Paris to Berlin: Refugee Songwriters

Patrick Bade | Paris to Berlin Refugee Songwriters | 06.02.21

- I want to just say, over to you, Patrick, Paris to Berlin: Refugees As Songwriters. We’re looking forward to your presentation. Welcome back, everyone. Thanks for joining us. And once again, thanks to Judy, and always thanks to Patrick. So looking forward.

Visual and music are displayed throughout the presentation.

• Thank you, thank you, Wendy. Now I’m starting, a few years ago, I had dinner at Trudy’s place with Robert Wistrich. And I know he’s somebody whose name you’re familiar with because Judy has very often quoted him, and he’s considered one of the greatest authorities, if not the great authority, on the history of the Holocaust. And on this occasion, the conversation turned to antisemitism in France, and in particular, to the antisemitic songs that became popular in the period of the Dreyfus affair. Robert insisted adamantly that there had never been such a thing as a popular song in France that was sympathetic to Jews. Now, I was quite nervous about contradicting him. He was not a man who took kindly to being contradicted, as I’d found out to my cost on a previous occasion, so I rather tentatively pointed him to the song that I’m going to play to you now, “Israel, va-t-en,” which dates from 1934.

And this song was written in direct response to the Nazi persecution of German Jews and the number of of German Jews who fled to France as refugees. A very passionate song. It’s really quite extraordinary. I can’t think of any equivalent in English language. And it’s a song that recounts the history of persecution suffered by Jews driven from place to place, searching for the Promised Land, and always having to move from one place to another. And this was a popular song. It was actually recorded twice in one year in 1934. And Lys Gauty, the version I’m going to play you, she was one of the most popular singers of the period.

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I’m going to talk today about these five Berlin composers, Kurt Weill, Franz Waxman Werner Richard Heymann, Mischa Spoliansky, and Friedrich Hollaender. They were the big stars of the golden Age of Berlin cabaret in the Weimar period up to 1933. Well, of course, cabaret was an art form that was absolutely not tolerated by the Nazis, partly because it was super pervasively a Jewish art form, but also because a cabaret is inherently political and it’s inherently subversive. So all five of these composers decamped more or less straightaway in 1933 to Paris, which I suppose there are only two possibilities really. There was Amsterdam and there were certain musicians, all of you heard about Kurt Gerron, for instance, he went to Amsterdam. But really Paris, Paris was the city where Cabaret was born as an art form and where they could be sure of finding an audience that would appreciate what they had to offer.

Now, somebody a couple of weeks ago in the chat made the comment that there are two sides to France. There almost two countries in France. There is the France of the Enlightenment of liberty, equality, fraternity. There is the France that has been really a light unto the nations. It’s led the way in liberal and enlightened values since the 18th century. But there’s another France. There’s a darker France, a reactionary conservative France, that’s the France of the Dreyfus affair, the France a Vichy, and it’s still there today, of course, with the Le Pen family and their supporters. But on the whole, I think the story I’m going to tell you today, by contrast with the one I told last time, this is a very positive one, and I think it reflects pretty well on France, that all these composers were so warmly received.

None of them stayed that long, just as well considering what happened in 1940. All four of them went to Hollywood and continued their careers in Hollywood by the end of the 1930s. And Mischa Spoliansky came to Britain and spent the rest of his life in United Kingdom. Now, nearly all the tracks I’m going to play you today come from a CD that I put together for the French Record Company of Malibran. And I’ve been associated with this company for nearly 20 years, and it’s been a very happy association. I’ve loved working with them. I either translate their notes from French into English, or sometimes I write the notes in English and they translate them into French. And they’ve also given me great freedom to put together CDs of material that interested me. And so, in fact, the list that I’ve compiled for you today, it’s got a list of all the music I’m going to play to you and on that list, you’ll see various CDs that I have put together for Malibran that are relevant to the course that we’ve been teaching for the past couple of months.

Now how I came to do this CD is also a rather strange story, here we’ve got Werner Richard Heymann on the left, Mischa Spolianski on the right. And in the early years of this century, I suppose the first 10 years of this century, I had a very close friendship with Spoli Spolianski the daughter of Mischa Spolianski, wonderful, wonderful, delightful, charming woman. Her flat was near to my office, and once a week I would go to her flat, she’d poured me a tumbler of vodka and tonic, and then she’d regale me with wonderful stories of Berlin in the 1920s. Well, she was just 11 years old when she left in, in 1933. But in a way, she’d taken Berlin at that period with her, her father maintained his contact with all his colleagues from that time in close friendship, people like Marlene Dietrich, cause he helped to launch her career, Richard Tauber and many others. He remained friends with them for the rest of his life.

And she had wonderful stories to tell and to just before she died unexpectedly and rather shockingly, she sponsored a CD of her father’s songs. And she asked me to write the notes for the CD, which I did. And on this CD I compared Spoliansky’s songs with those of the other composers. So Kurt Weill being more political, harsher in a way, Spoliansky’s songs being wonderfully ambiguous and naughty, often having very ambiguous sexual undertones and Werner Richard Heymann’s best known songs having a kind of sweetness and innocence really. They’ve got a sort of folkloric quality. And I said this in the notes, and unfortunately, the daughter of Werner Richard Heymann took this amiss. She thought I was talking her father down compared to the other composers, which is certainly not my intention, because I’ll come to his songs in a minute. And I admired them greatly. And it’s not that easy to write songs that have an apparently folkloric quality.

But anyway, there was a big rumpus and it looked like there was going to be a feud between the two families of the composers and the grandsons of Mischa Spoliansky pleaded in this. You’ve got to do something to heal this rift. So I thought, well, I went to Malibran, my friends at Malibran and I said, can I do this CD? I want to do a CD of all these German Jewish composers in their time in Paris and the work they did in Paris. And I want to put a particular emphasis on Werner Richard Heymann because he was actually probably the most popular of all these composers in France. And that’s how that came about. So the way I did it was quite simple again, and I seem to refer to the flea market in every single lecture I do for you.

But over the years in the Paris Flea Market, I’ve been collecting these record catalogues from the 1930s, like the one you see on the right hand side. And so I went through all these record catalogues and I found songs by these German composers. And so there’s a genre in France, which they call the these are songs, which usually, they tell a story, and it’s often a very dark story. And there are lots of songs to do with broken love affairs, tragic situations, lots of songs about brothels and prostitution. Lots and lots of songs about all kinds of substance abuse, alcohol and drugs. And these four singers Lys Gauty, Yvonne Georges, they specialised in these songs.

You just look at some of the titles at . She’s another wonderful singer that’s of course a brothel plural. You can imagine what that one is. it’s too late. Where have all my lovers gone? And you can see “Israel, va-t-en” amongst the songs of Lys Gauty and wonderful titles must get hold of you made me suffer so much and you have poisoned my life. There’s a title for you. So anyway, I’m going to start with Werner Richard Heymann. And he had his greatest success in 1931 with a movie, in English It’s called the Congress Dances. It was actually made in in three languages. it was one of those early silent films. It was made in German, in French, and in English. Massive success. I remember my mother talking about it the rest of her life. How she loved it when she went to see it as a child, it made a huge star out of Lillian Harvey. Lillian Harvey, who was Anglo German, she was completely fluent in both languages. She, for two years, from 1931 to 33, she was the top film star in Europe.

Then she went to Hollywood where she flopped. They didn’t like her there. And she came by the time she came back to Europe, of course it was too late for her because for the English she was too German. And for the German she was too English. But she’s a delightful stage presence. But I’m going to play you a song from the movie, not sung by her. It’s actually recorded by a North African singer and a very delightful Algerian singer, Leila Ben Sadir. And this, this is very jaunty tune. And as I said, the film is set in Vienna during the Vienna Conference of 1814. And it has a sort of cosy quality to it. And the songs have as well.

This song I’m going to play you was used by the Russians at the end of the second World War. You probably know the first wave of Russian troops reeked most horrible vengeance on Berlin, raping everybody. every female, murdering people, brutalising people, people hid in their cellars, terrified. And then when that was over the initial wave of terror, the Russians actually wanted to lure people out of their cellars. So they actually rigged up a loud speaker van and it drove around Berlin playing this song to try and lure people out of their cellars.

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And another song by Werner Richard Heymann, which had an entirely another life in a way beyond its original setting, was it was originally written in German, as you can see the love of Sailors, and it’s the Boys of the Navy. And this was just a massive success in France, biggest success in France than it was in Germany. And it was adopted as the unofficial anthem of the French Navy. Now I’m going to play you this in aver in French sung by the Comedian Harmonists. I’ve had quite a few emails about them. I have actually mentioned them very early on. It must be about a year ago now, when I was talking about Berlin and obviously they’re very popular and people are interested in them, of course their story is a very interesting one. And I hope I’ll have an opportunity to talk more about them at in some later lecture. But here they are singing “Le Gars De La Marine”

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Now we come to Spoliansky and he realised very quickly what was happening in Germany. He left almost immediately. And I remember Spoli telling me that he always used to say that the song I’m going to play you now was his passport to Freedom and Life. The film came out in 19 I think it may be 33 or 34 with Jan Kiepura, very famous, handsome Polish, Jewish tenor, big, big star all all over Europe. And in English it was again a film made in different languages in English. It’s called “Tell Me Tonight”. And the title song became the major hit of 1934. Of course, it was recorded by various different people including Jan Kiepura. But I want to play you a version by a wonderful French tenor Chose Luccone. A really thrilling, sort of Franco Corelli type of voice. Lots of squillo, lots of brightness at the top. But he also sings, I think with considerable sensitivity. And you can see that the song gives him wonderful opportunities to show off his voice.

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Now that song earned Spoliansky a contract with Alexander Corder, who needed songs for various films, including I think first one was “Saunders of the River” and then “King Solomon’s Mines” So that brought Spoliansky to Britain and he spent the rest of his life in Britain and wrote the music for lots of movies that the Brits among you will be very, very familiar with, like “The Best Days of Our Lives” and “The Ghost Goes West” and so on. So he wasn’t in France very long, but he had another very big hit for the queen of the music hall, Mistinguett famous for her croaky voice and her beautiful legs. And this is in fact, this is a tune that he had written for a Berlin review called with quite different words. But it’s a very jaunty attractive tune and completely new words were created for Mistinguett. The original title in German is .

My friend Michael in Munich tells me, it’s quite hard to translate that, but he suggests is it could be I long for you or I’m in the mood for you. But in the French version, the title is come, and there are two things I want to say about this. First of all the way through the song you’ll see that all the words rhyme with so we get . So it’s all all in the nose, which reminds me of how difficult it is actually to sing in French because so much of French language is in the nose, at least for classical singers. It’s much more difficult for a French singer to make a beautiful sound singing in French than, than singing in say, Italian and German, which have pure vowel sounds. of course German can be quite throaty, but Italian is really the best language for singing in.

But also I’d like you to notice how utterly delightful Mistinguett is in this song and how the different I mean the word comes many, many times in the song. And each time she gives it a different emphasis, a different double meaning and quite naughty, risque double meanings. And this is actually completely in the spirit of Spoliansky who really liked to write rather naughty, sexy songs.

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Now moving on to Franz Waxman and I have talked about him already in two lectures. He began his career in Berlin very young I the ‘30s orchestrated the score for “The Blue Angel” wrote that gorgeous song from Marlene Dietrich that I’d played to you. But he was attacked in street by Nazis. He left immediately, he came to Paris and he found two very interesting to write songs for. First of these is Suzy Solidor, and I mentioned her, I think in the context of Paris under the occupation, she was a famous artist model. It’s reckoned that there are over 600 paintings of her, this little museum in the south of France near Cannes where they actually have a couple of hundred portraits of her and I think there are about 40 of them on show by a whole variety of different artists. She was tall, blonde, beautiful, and very out lesbian. She has this very deep voice. And this song was, I think written especially for her called (speaks French).

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Now this was a discovery for me this particular song and interestingly, even a discovery for the composer’s son, John Waxman, who when the CD came out, he contacted me and he said he hadn’t come across this song before. I found it in the catalogue, which you can see here, sung by Marianna Oswald called “Tout Seul” “All Alone”. At the same time I was contacted by an American academic who, who’s a specialist in Cabaret and so on. And he said, oh, you’ve got it wrong. This song is not by Franz Waxman it’s by Val Begg. Well Vel Begg is actually the conductor on the record. And so we had this email correspondence and I said, well, where does your information come from? And he said he got it from Wikipedia, which I didn’t find very impressive for an academic.

So I was able to show him this Columbia catalogue of 1938. It’s very, very clear that the, the song is, you can see it’s misspelt Wagman, but it is definitely Waxman. The S missing there. And also the song is just unmistakably his, has, quite a strong resemblance to the Now Marianna Oswald is a very interesting character as well. She was of Polish Jewish origin, but born in Alsace. She began her career in Berlin. She had an operation for (indistinct) that damaged her vocal chords. And that became, in a funny kind of way, her trademark, was this kind of completely destroyed voice. And she also became like the two women on this page, Nita Jual, Mariana Oswald. They were great specialists in these I mean if you look again at the titles of “J'ai Soif” I’m thirsty, that’s a song of course about alcoholism, cocaine, that’s a prostitute asking a light from a customer. So pretty dark stuff in all these songs. And you can hear that Mariana Oswald really gets her teeth into “Tout Seul”.

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I think she sings even more out of tune than Marlene Dietrich but that’s part of her style, I suppose. And she was a great cult singer with French intellectuals. People like and she escaped to New York at the outbreak of war and continued her career as a cabaret singer to minority audience in New York during the second World War. And now Friedrich Hollaender his fame, of course his international fame, was created by the songs that he wrote for Marlene Dietrich which is very coily translated into English as falling in love again. It’s not really, it’s a little translation is I’m made for sax from head to foot. And so that was a huge international success.

And I’m going to play you a version in French with with a singer called Berthe Sylva. I think she was the best selling popular singer in France in the 1930s. And she was a particularly known, there’s a surprisingly sentimental side to the French. And she was famous for songs with terrible, terrible, tragic sob stories. And the most famous of all is about a little boy who adores his mommy. And he spends his pocket money to buy white roses for her every week. And then she falls ill and she’s taken to the hospital and he steals the flowers 'cause he hasn’t got any money, he hasn’t got any pocket money. And he goes to the hospital and he’s met on the steps of the hospital by a nurse who says immortal words, you haven’t got a mother anymore 'cause she’s just died in the hospital. But anyway, here is Berthe Sylva singing a rather different kind of song, which you will of course recognise.

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Now, most of these composers, when they got to Hollywood, they weren’t really required to write songs anymore. They were re required to write film music. That’s the case with Waxman, case with Werner Richard Heymann. But Hollander, I suppose he was so famous, so associated with the songs for “The Blue Angel” And he continued to write songs for Marlene Dietrich in films like “Destry RIdes Again” and “A Foreign Affair” And this is a film he actually wrote in 1932. So before he was a refugee, but it is a song that he wrote for a French movie sung by the popular Star Florelle.

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Now, I suppose the composer, all these composers who came to the France with the greatest reclaim and reputation was Kurt Weill, and that was down to the huge success of “3 Groschen-Oper” “The Three Penny Opera” in 1928 in Berlin. And that transferred to Paris where it was an absolutely huge success as well. And again, it was filmed in two language versions, a German version and a French version, both directed by the famous German director Pabst. And song from “The Three Penny Opera” in French immediately became standards and were recorded by many French singers, including (indistinct) who is dubbed (speaking French) for her love of very dark and tragic songs.

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And now that of course was the collaboration of the great playwright Bert Albrecht and Kurt Weill, and they had produced several works together in Berlin, and their final collaboration was in Paris in 1935, which in what I think is Kurt Weill’s masterpiece among his stage works, which is “Seven Deadly Sins” And this was premiered in 1935 in the beautiful which you see here. And it was a what you call a . It appealed to French intellectuals and artists, but it wasn’t a tremendous hit with the public. But it’s a marvellous work. It was commissioned and paid for by an English millionaire called Edward James. And he had married a very beautiful young Austrian Jewish dancer called Tilly Losch, marriage started off well enough, he was completely besotted with her, so besotted with her that in his house at, is it Easten or Westine, anyway, near Brighton, he had her footprints woven into the carpet of the spiral staircase leaving to the bedroom.

Unfortunately the marriage ended very nastily, very badly with an extremely messy, unpleasant divorce, soon afterwards. But at least as a result of his love of Tilly Lush, we have this masterpiece “Seven Deadly Sins” And the she Cause Tilly Losch was a dancer, and so they needed a singer to sing the songs. So it was Kurt Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya who sang the songs. so character called Anna, and she’s kind of a split personality who longs to commit all the deadly sins, the wild, instinctive side of her wants to commit all the deadly sins. And the wise sort of calculating side of her prevents her. And in each case, we we’re led to feel that actually to commit the sin would actually have been the right thing to do. And not to commit the sin was really the sin.

So anyway, I’m going to play you my two favourite deadly sins, which are “Gluttony” and “Lust” these days in Paris, I must say gluttony is more of a temptation to me than lust. But here is “Gluttony” and in this case, it’s not Anna who sings the song, it’s her family who are worried about her putting on weight if she eats too much and the effect it will have on her career as an exotic dancer.

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See that every deadly sin takes place in a different American city. And lust takes place in the rather prim city of Boston, where she takes a rich lover. But she falls in love with the young gigolo, and the wise Anna persuades the reckless Anna to give up her gigolo and not risk her income from the rich lover. So in this song we hear the original Anna, Lotte Lenya.

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Right well, I’m going to come out and finish now and see what questions we have.

No women composers. Now I don’t think there were actually very important cabaret, there are plenty of women performers of course in cabaret.

Q: Were there women composers? A: Not that I know of that there probably were, but not that have a big reputation.

What is the, Wistrich, Robert Wistrich. I know Trudy’s mentioned him many, many times.

None of these composers were deported. They left because they had to, but also because they could, that’s a very important point to make. And I want to make that point about France, received them and gave them opportunities. So the story of France is not all black by any means.

The name of the CD it’s Berlin, Paris Cabaret. It’s on the list that you’ve been sent.

The lovely singer Leila Ben Sadir. Is that the one you mean? Anyway, all the names are and the spellings are on the list that you’ve been sent.

Russians playing French songs. Well, they didn’t play it in French. It’s actually not a French song. It’s a German song. I played you a French version. And of course the Russians played it in the original, with the original German words to lure them out of the cellars.

With the Oswald. Again, all these names are on the list.

Q: What is her accent in French? A: She was certainly brought up in Alsace so it’s probably an Alsatian accent I would say.

Somebody’s saying they couldn’t understand most of the words of the song “Israel, va-t-en,” Tell me where I can Go, is a very beautiful song speaks to the same of Jewish people to their homeland. That’s very interesting. I must look that one up. I wonder where was that song written and who wrote it would be interesting to know.

The song “Over the Rainbow” Yes, I suppose it does, but it’s not specific. “Over the Rainbow” doesn’t have specifically Jewish references. Well, the song “Tout Seul” is all about being betrayed in love and just a very unhappy love song, I suppose. “Over the Rainbow” composed by Harold Arlen whose parents were Jewish. Yes, I suppose you could make that connection, but I would like to see some evidence that that was his original intention.

The name of the company, again, it’s on the list, it’s Malibran, M, A, L, I, B, R, A, N Yeah.

Well, French singers use the amazing diction French, that’s French singers were so famous for that. They kind of lost it since. But in those days, French singers did have fabulous diction.

Cinematographer Ronald Neame photographed Lillian Harvey in Stranger Left No Card,“ directed by Paul Mertzbach. Yeah, it’s funny. Lillian Harvey so famous and then very quickly forgotten. It’s quite an interesting story really.

Kurt Weill was the son of a cantor in Dessau. I recommend his biography "The days Grow Short The Life Music of Kurt Weill” by Ronald Sanders.

Somebody saying their father, this is Linda Goldseft saying father born in London, raised in Egypt, lived in Rhodesia, born in the British Army in World War two used to sing all these songs in the bathroom each morning. He spoke seven languages. French being his mother tongue and played us many records of this music during my childhood. And of course as a kid I used to roll my eyes. What a trip down memory lane.

After arriving in New York, Eric Maria Remark was asked whether he’d missed the German culture and language and replied, not really, but then I’m not Jewish. Yeah, very clever quip. What you’d think, well, that’s a very clever quip for somebody who’s not Jewish too.

Q: Was Jacques Brel around then? A: No, he wasn’t, or at least he must have been a baby or a child.

Somebody again saying they’re astonished by the fantastic diction of these singers and their amazing projection of the words, of course.

“Where can I go?” popular Yiddish song, “Where Can I Go?”. Yes. Was written by Hershaw Glick.

Somebody else I really need to follow this up. This is really interesting, this idea that “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” was written. But the point I wanted to make about that song, I don’t know about the composer or who wrote the words, I don’t think they were Jewish and certainly Lys Gauty was not Jewish. So I think it’s interesting that this is something that comes from France, the sympathy that’s expressed in that song.

Right? I think my time is up now. So thank you all very much.

• Thank you, Patrick. Thank you to everybody. Just I know that a lot of people are asking about these documents. If you all look, scroll down the email that you receive in the morning with the reminders. There are two links in green that are the PowerPoint copy of Patrick’s PowerPoint as well as the information sheet. So if you’re looking for it, you’ll find it on the email I sent you in the morning.

So thank you once again Patrick, and thank you to everybody who joined us today, and we’ll see you all tomorrow.

• [Call Member] Thank you, Jude. Thanks everyone.

• Bye

• [Patrick] Bye bye.