Brettllieder

Galathea (Wedekind)

Enfältiges Lied (Salus)

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. Although, as the seductive slow-waltz element in Mahnung suggests, Schoenberg was not unacquainted with the music of the Parisian café-concert, his main source of inspiration was French and Viennese operetta: his setting of an aria by Emanuel Schikaneder - librettist of Die Zauberflöte - is a particularly stylish, if anachronistic, example.

Gerald Larner©

A writer and critic associated mainly with The Times, Gerald Larner has recently completed a biography of Maurice Ravel to be published by Phaidon Press in September