On March 5 & 6 German cabaret revivalist Max Raabe will make his Boston debut with the Palast Orchester at the Paramount Theater. Born in Westphalia in 1962, Max Raabe was influenced from an early age by a wide range of German music that included Wagner’s operas, Beethoven’s 9 th Symphony, and music of the 1920s and 30s. Raabe studied opera at Berlin University of the Arts, and in 1986, while still a student, founded the Palast Orchester. In preparation for the formation of his ensemble, Raabe combed antiquarian bookstores, archives, and flea markets collecting sheet music, recordings, and films and eventually collaborated with nonagenarian arranger Günther Gürsch.

Raabe and his group have put together “A Night in Berlin” a show that recaptures the sly thrill of cabaret as it was produced in Berlin between the world wars. Despite political instability and enormous economic hardship, the Weimar Republic was one of the most culturally exciting and fertile periods in German history. The population of Berlin exploded through immigration both from within Germany and Eastern Europe. The publishing industry expanded along with the performing arts, generating over 100 publications and nearly three dozen theaters with nightly entertainment. The Expressionist and Dada movements flourished, bringing experimental, often politically charged works to popular notice.

Technological developments gave birth to a mass entertainment industry. By 1925 grammaphone and record sales were a mass market phenomenon, with recordings of all styles, from classical music to proletariat choirs, flooding the market. With the commercialization of dance and popular music came the concept of the “hit” song. Germany began producing sound films in the late 1920s, with Berlin as the center, and musicals rapidly became one of the leading genres.

This active arts scene brought about several of the 20 th century’s first masterworks, including the paintings of Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, and the collages of Hannah Hoch. The Expressionist movement gave birth to some of the first art films, including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Nosferatu. Playwright Berthold Brecht and composer Kurt Weill collaborated on the Threepenny Opera, Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann published their first novels, and Arnold Schoenberg and his students were constructing a new atonal sound world.

Cabaret occupied a middle ground between high art and popular entertainment. It developed from Victorian vaudeville, variety shows, and various forms of pub entertainment. The patchwork of songs and skits inherited from these Victorian forms of entertainment fit well with emergence of cosmopolitan urbanity, consumerism’s appetite for novelty, and the popularity of collage techniques in visual art and film. After World War I, cabaret acquired a biting satirical edge, often aimed at politics, that blossomed with the lifting of wartime censorship. Although the leftist and libertine songs and skits loom large in cultural memory, the Berlin stage had just as many nationalistic, right-wing acts.

Cabaret songs generally followed a three-part format, in which the first stanza presents the characters and situation, the second stanza makes a sexual innuendo of it, and the third stanza turns it to satire, often of a political nature. Novelty and nonsense songs were also popular.

The Palast Orchester’s repertoire encompasses a cross-section of music written at the end of the Weimar Republic when a wealth of composers and songwriters wrote for operetta, musicals, revues, and the cutting edge cabaret that thrived in Berlin. Among their more than 400-song repertoire are classics such as "I'll Kiss Your  Hand, Dear Lady", "Cheek to Cheek", "You're the Cream in My Coffee" as well as German standards from that era such as "Ninon", "Salomé", and "Irgendwo Auf Der Welt.” The Palast Orchestra has also incorporated new stylistic adaptations of contemporary songs such as “We Will Rock You” and original tunes including his breakthrough hit "No one Ever Calls, No one Has a Care for Me."

“[Max Raabe and Palast Orchester] is at once one of the most meticulously rehearsed and researched musical history projects in the world right now. (Not to mention, one of the craziest, most out-of-control bands of any kind playing concerts.) The huge dynamics, quicksilver tempo and mood shifts, and delicate, perfectly articulated ensemble work add up to a potent cocktail—the musical equivalent of an Absinthe Cosmopolitan."
Santa Barbara Independent, October 2008

Stefanie Lubkowski
Publicity and Communications Manager
MM, New England Conservatory, 2007

Sources:

Appignanesi, Lisa. Cabaret. 2004. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. 1996. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Schrader, Barbel and Jurgen Scebera. The Golden Twenties: Art and Literature in the Weimar Republic. Yale Univeristy Press: New Haven. 1988