5 Brettllieder (1901)

Gigerlette (Bierbaum)

Der genügsame Liebhaber (Salus)

Galathea (Wedekind)

Mahnung (Hochstetter)

Arie aus dem “Spiegel von Arcadien” (Schikaneder)

If it is difficult to imagine Arnold Schoenberg and Oscar Straus working as colleagues in a cabaret, it is even more difficult to imagine the ambitious young composer of the monumental Gurrelieder writing naughty ballads and voluptuous waltzes. In fact, both Schoenberg and Straus were engaged as conductors at the Überbrettl by Ernst von Wolzogen, who had brought artistic cabaret to Berlin and opened his Buntes Theater there in 1901. Schoenberg had first met Wolzogen when the Überbrettl was on tour in Vienna and had impressed him not only by deputising for Straus as conductor at the Karl-Theater but also by playing him some of his own cabaret songs. One of them was immediately adopted for the Überbrettl.

Schoenberg was familiar with the popular idiom partly through his industry as copyist and arranger - the only way he could make a living at the time - and partly, it seems, because of his sympathy with the artistic cabaret movement which had spread from Paris to Germany in the late 1890s. Certainly, he owned a copy of Deutsche Chansons - Otto Julius Bierbaum’s turn-of-the-century collection of cabaret songs by Dehmel, Lilienkron and Wedekind among other distinguished poets - and he had set pieces from it (by Falke, Wedekind and Bierbaum) before he met Wolzogen. Five similar songs, to words by poets not represented in the collection, were written at much the same time.

Some of the Brettllieder, like the cheerful Gigerlette, are as unassuming as most of their kind. Others are more ambitious, with piano parts varying in interest between discreetly witty musical comments, like the purring introduction to the scarcely decent Genügsame Liebhaber, and an accompaniment as elaborate as that of Galathea, which is much the most original song in the set. Not that originality was a virtue to be prized in this context. Familiarity was more important, whether the chosen idiom derived from the Parisian café concert, as in the seductive slow-waltz tune of Mahnung, or Viennese operetta, as in the stylish, if anachronistic, setting of an aria by Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder.