Pathos, Bathos, Love, and Subversion
VICTORIA KINGHAM reflects on Cabaret Vibe of 20th Century at Kino-Theatre St Leonards
A handful of people were privileged, on a recent wet Sunday afternoon, to watch a cabaret performance of significance put together by three versatile, internationally-known musicians. Neither trivial imitation nor Hollywood schmalz, this careful rendering of twelve pieces reflected wider political and cultural strife, past and current.
Cultural Angst
The poetry of W. H. Auden has always filled me with simultaneous joy and unease, and whether or not he is the ‘I’ of his own poetry, it seems to speak for him as a human being who only existed uncomfortably in his own time. Benjamin Britten’s setting of three of his best poems reflects their blues-based rhythms and lyrics and slightly cynical expression, but also one cannot fail to associate with them Auden’s own unrequited love for Britten (‘O tell me the truth about love’) and the possibility of his having been infatuated by a Johnny (the third poem) in his own sexual explorations, giving that eponymous work the same nuance as, say, Noel Coward’s Mad About the Boy.
Brechtian Angst
Immediately after Auden’s Johnny the cabaret turned to Brecht and Weill’s Surabaya Johnny from the 1929 musical Happy End. Brecht’s and Weill’s own political exile from Berlin followed in 1933, Brecht’s Marxism and Weill’s Judaism being unacceptable to the Nazi party. Additionally, there was in this selection of four songs a double irony: first Mack The Knife, Brecht and Weill’s most well-known song, is a cheerful ditty in C Major about a serial killer, and references both John Gay’s 18th century arch criminal in The Beggars Opera and the sinister London Victorian East-Ender Jack the Ripper. It is consistently bizarre that lyrics such as these become world-famous singalong hits, along with others about drug addiction and prostitution. The second oddly ironical fact is that Brecht admired and copied both the imperialist-born Rudyard Kipling and the Harvard-educated intellectual Ogden Nash, descendant of Republican state governors and Confederate generals.
The Silent Angst of Argentinian Militarism
From Brecht and Weill we were led to the music of Astor Piazzolla, who did more than anyone else to incorporate Argentinian Tango into the twentieth-century musical melting pot. We heard Oblivion, used as a theme tune to an Italian film in 1984, then the heart-stopping Balada para mi muerte, written soon after the Argentinian military coup at the start of the desaparecidos period: ‘I will die in Buenos Aires, it will be at daybreak … my darling, let’s move on, don’t weep’. Yo soy Maria from Piazzolla’s opera Maria De Buenos Aires is sung by a woman reviled and debased by men, but defiant: ‘I am Maria … I am tango’ and Maria’s first life is essentially that of the Tango, beginning in the low streets as a protest against a repressive and repressed ruling class, and ending up as a jewel in the classical music crown. After her murder, she is condemned to hell. Put the two together, and you have in microcosm the story of the rise and fall of 20th-century Argentina.
Intellect and authenticity
All these multi-layered ideas were musically delivered, beautifully and intelligently. The songs were presented and sung by the extraordinary Belarussian soprano and actor Alexia Mankovskaya, who imbued them with exactly the right amount of humorous desperation and weary cynicism, changing languages with ease and displaying the black-and-silver glitz and exaggerated gestures of authentic cabaret performance. ‘The cabaret stage’, wrote Cath Pound in 2019, ‘was used as a satirical weapon to condemn the barbarism of war, nationalism, and the hypocrisy of politicians’. This performance by exceptional musicians (the notable violinist José Gandia and fine pianist Andrea Kmecova made up the trio) said it all.
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