Notes from a Composer

Last Thursday I had the privilege and pleasure to perform in “Dance on the Volcano“, a revue covering the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, the short time of democracy in Germany between the end of World War One and the rise of the Third Reich. Presented by Elysium – Between Two Continents and the Leo Baeck Institute – New York / Berlin at the Center for Jewish History, the revue featured soprano Jeannie Im, tenor Michael Protacio, pianist Samuel Kardos and myself as the Narrator.

Almost all the songs sung by Jeannie and Michael were from the Weimar era and sung in German (with English translations projected on a large screen). In between musical numbers, I as Narrator recited (in English translations) diverse texts – poems, journal entries, newspaper columns, satirical and polemical commentary – by a wide collection of luminaries of the time. I also joined in the singing in the opening and closing numbers as well as a campy duet “Wenn die Beste Freundin” (once made famous by Marlene Dietrich) in which Jeannie and I play Besties who both sleep with Jeannie’s “cute little husband”, Michael, who makes it a trio for the final chorus.

That number followed hard upon a (deceptively) high-minded appraisal of the industrial railway system. But emotional whiplash from harsh to humorous was part of the esthetic of the revue, befitting the era it described.

I’ll quote some lines from a few of the texts, to give you a sense:

Klaus Mann on the hyperinflation that bedeviled Germany after WW1:

Had lonely thinkers once dreamed of of a “reevaluation of all values”? Instead we now experienced the total devaluation of the one value that a godless epoch had truly believed in: money.

and Mann again, evoking the title metaphor of the revue:

The dollar is rising: let’s let ourselves fall! Why should we be more stable than our currency?

Among many others, I also took on the persona of avant-garde dancer Valeska Gert:

Because I did not love the bourgeois, I danced those he despised … Until now, prostitutes had never been depicted on the dance stage … I danced the coitus.

More examples: Erich Mühsam reconceives Goethe’s poem about Italy “Do you know the land where the lemon tree blooms” as “Do you know the land where the fascists bloom?” In Bertolt Brecht’s satirical poetic sermon “700 Intellectuals Worship an Oil Tank” and Erwin Piscator evokes George Grosz’s “Christ with a Gas Mask”:

A new Christ. All the more shattering because it corresponded to the facts. For had he not been condemned to silence for four years?