Cabaret.

A term loosely applied to places of entertainment like night clubs that offer a wide variety of showmanship, food and drink, and often dancing both on stage and on the floor; naturally there is a great demand for music. In this context, cabaret has also become a descriptive term for a show designed to promote the talents of a single well-known performer, usually a singer. Renowned for this style of show are such diverse performers as Frank Sinatra and Noël Coward, while Las Vegas – in which both regularly appeared – is identified in particular with the form. Indeed, a solo cabaret act is considered an essential part of the personal repertory of many performers, particularly those from musical theatre. American singer-pianists such as Bobby Short and Blossom Dearie are primarily noted for their solo work in this format.

In the strictest sense, cabaret is a form of artistic and social activity of a kind that flourished for about half a century between the opening on 18 November 1881 of the famous ‘Chat Noir’ in Paris, and the political crises in Europe in the 1930s that put an end to the freedom of thought, experiment and expression that characterizes cabaret in its most vigorous form. The extensive account of the history of cabaret in La grande encyclopédie (1889) emphasizes, in unambiguous terms, the traditional association of the cabaret with vice and illegal activities of all kinds throughout the centuries. By the end of the 18th century there were several establishments, frequented by men of letters, that have a place in literary history. The cabaret of the 18th century was a musical affair in the sense that street musicians made the rounds of the establishments, with a repertory made up of songs in praise of wine and debauchery. There are parallels with the coffee-house and catch-club traditions in England, particularly as regards the café-chantant and Café-concert. Of the café, La grande encyclopédie says: ‘it had something of a salon originally, in those days when one did not smoke in a café’; it reports that the beer-hall made its appearance during the Empire and that one of them, ‘La Brasserie de Martyrs’, merited mention in literary history side by side with the ‘Chat Noir’. The modern cabaret of 1881 inherited the literary clientèle of its predecessors.

The founders of the ‘Chat Noir’ intended cabaret to be a place where painters, poets, composers and performing musicians could not only meet each other but confront the public, the bourgeoisie; an element of provocative artistic statement was the essence of cabaret during its heyday. In the 1880s the opportunity of meeting famous artists of the day in the relaxed, intimate atmosphere of cabaret was irresistible to contemporary society, and the artists themselves understood cabaret in those terms. The ‘Chat Noir’ was imitated by hundreds of other enterprises of a similar kind, catering for variations on the same theme: they toured the provinces and went beyond the borders of France, especially to French-speaking regions, including north Africa, but also visited other countries, and the German cabaret movement probably owed its birth to such visits.

When the famous diseuse Yvette Guilbert (1865–1944) undertook a concert tour through Germany in 1902 it was not so much French wit and humour that moved her German colleagues in the world of amusement but the realization that there was a desperate need for an entertainment form that pandered neither to the philistine taste in concert song nor to the inanities of tingel-tangel airs and music. German artists wanted to ennoble both. Julius Bierbaum, in his preface to Deutsche Chansons (‘Brettllieder’; 1900), explained the serious purpose that inspired German cabaret. But he was also in earnest when he said: ‘We want to write poetry that is not merely read between the four walls of a lonely room but can be sung by a public ready for lusty entertainment’. There always was an aspiration towards high standards as understood by the artists who supported the cabaret idea. There was also the element of laughter. The cabaret relied on the intimacy of the locale, the economy of a small, often ad hoc, musical ensemble, and the directness and warmth of contact between floor and platform. Artists read their own poetry and composers performed their own music; at least, that was the idea.

The leading German cabaret, the ‘Überbrettl’ (founded in Berlin by Ernst von Wolzogen in 1901), sparked off many other smaller ventures, in Berlin especially, that preserved the intimate atmosphere. Furthermore, cabaret in Germany developed satire of other literature. In Munich ‘the coincidence of creative talent with the native experience of carnival produced one of the most fertile and interesting European cabarets’ (Appignanesi). The style that evolved from such conditions was that of the diseuse. It relied equally on the word and the simple ballad-like tune, and on the significant movement of limb or body and facial expression. Yvette Guilbert developed this to a fine art. It involved Sprechgesang, but not in the sense that Schoenberg conceived of it in Pierrot lunaire; there the singer was never to derive the character of his rendering of the music from the mood of the words, but for Guilbert the exact opposite was true.

Guilbert was by common consent the greatest of diseuses; her consummate art, which combined oral and visual presentation, had a lasting influence over her many successors, including Marie Dubas, Marianne Oswald and Agnes Capri. Musically a genre emerged that was sentimental and at the same time satirical. It found perhaps its most successful and typical representative in Kurt Weill. Although he never composed any music specifically for cabaret, singers took the arias from his operas (especially Die Dreigroschenoper and Happy End) for their repertories. In Berlin in the 1920s, at such cabarets as ‘Schall und Rauch’ and the ‘Wilderbühne’, the composers Friedrich Hollaender, Mischa Spoliansky and Rudolf Nelson mixed political, sentimental and comic themes. The literature on cabaret names many other active composers and performing musicians: Hannes Rauch (originally Hans Richard Weinhöppel); Elsa Laura Seemann, who accompanied herself on the lute (this was more characteristic of France than of Germany – Ewers, who was in the centre of the German cabaret movement, complained that at the ‘Überbrettl’ cabaret not a single composer could sing his own songs, unlike their French counterparts, Legay, Delmet, Fragerolles etc.); Adolphe Stanislas; Clement Georges, famous for his so-called Parisian Bluettes; Lehner; and Bogumil Zepler. The ideal remained the componiste-chansonnier, but the cabaret also produced famous conductors. There was Frau Käte Hyan, who accompanied her husband, composed the songs that he sang, and was herself known for her beautiful voice which she used in her own compositions, accompanying them on the lute. The repertory was not only sentimental and satirical at the same time; it also included folksy elements – there were Spanish items performed with castanets, Italian music, the characteristic songs of Berlin and parodies of black American song.

Cabaret provided an atmosphere in which innovation could flourish and the opportunity for it to do so; it is not surprising that avant-garde experimentation often dominated the performances. Much that went on was improvised. The role of the conférencier, or master of ceremonies, especially demanded presence of mind. Many composers of considerable fame joined in. Debussy once conducted a chorus, and Milhaud, Satie, Jean Wiener and Schoenberg played active roles. Satie is credited with having composed more than 50 pieces when he was pianist at the ‘Chat Noir’ and at the ‘Auberge du Clou’. Schoenberg conducted the orchestra at the ‘Überbrettl’ and composed seven Brettllieder (not published until 1975).

After World War I the Parisian cabaret reached a new peak, with many American jazz musicians arriving and influencing the local style as well as taking on a more European texture to their music. Clubs that featured the dance-orientated songs included ‘Le grand duc’, ‘L’oasis’, ‘Chez Joséphine’ (where Josephine Baker was the commère) and ‘Le boeuf sur le toit’, with resident pianists Jean Wiener and Clément Doucet, while such venues as ‘Les deux anes’, ‘La lune rousse’ and ‘La pie qui chante’ had a more literary repertory. The most influential French songwriter of the 1930s and 40s, Charles Trenet, began his career in partnership with the Swiss composer and pianist Johnny Hess at the Montparnasse cabaret, ‘College Inn’. During the occupation, the most celebrated cabaret was ‘La vie parisienne’, run by the singer Suzy Solidor; the clientèle was dominated by German officers and high-ranking officials, but Solidor later claimed that the club had been a cover for the Résistance. In the late 1940s there was an explosion of activity in tiny clubs in Paris, the songs of Joseph Kosma, Leo Ferré, Jacques Brel, Barbara and many others giving France a new and distinctive popular song, with the chanteuse Juliette Greco as its leading interpreter.

There is no distinctive musical form that can be called ‘cabaret’: all the composers who have worked in cabaret have drawn on existing folksong, popular song or operatic parodies for their inspiration. Traditions have evolved, so that in particular the slow waltz as used by Satie (Je te veux, Tendrement) is recognized as a cabaret style, so is a dramatic tango such as the one composed by Lehár for the cabaret scene in his last stage work, Giuditta (1933). (Several operas of the mid-20th century have cabaret scenes in them, for instance in Korngold’s Die Kathrin, 1937.)

Besides Paris and Berlin, always the two most important centres of cabaret, and Munich, Vienna had an active cabaret life during the 1920s and 30s. Cabaret found its way to English-speaking countries in a somewhat diluted form, not only in restaurants and night clubs but also in the theatrical ‘intimate revue’. After World War II the influence of pre-war cabaret on American singers such as Tom Lehrer and composers such as Bart Howard and Alec Wilder is unmistakable. The British wave of satire of the 1960s (at the Establishment Club and on television) led to the foundation of the strongest cabaret tradition in England – the wave of ‘alternative’ comedy. Although most of this was without music, groups such as Fascinating Aida, Kit and the Widow and the composer Richard Vranch, who was the regular accompanist for the Comedy Store Players, forged a new style, drawing on pop music and calypso. The composer Martyn Jacques and his trio the Tiger Lillies pursued a more anarchic style, using themes from central European folksong in the ‘junk opera’ Shockheaded Peter.

Appignanesi’s masterly book pursues the story of the cabaret up to its final dissolution; her bibliography shows the dearth of information on this fascinating and crucial European institution, but for anyone in search of an eye-witness story from a person who was himself an actor in the cabaret in the early days, Ewers’s book (1904) conveys the very feel of this exciting venture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Larousse: Grand dictionnaire universel, iii (Paris, 1867), 9ff

D.B.: ‘Cabaret’, La grande encyclopédie (Paris, 1889)

H. Ewers: Das Cabaret (Berlin, 1904)

M. Herbert: La chanson à Montmartre (Paris, 1967)

L. Appignanesi: The Cabaret (London, 1975, 2/1984)

W. Rösler: Das Chanson im deutschen Kabarett 1901–1933 (Berlin, 1980)

H. Segel: Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich (New York, 1987)

J. Gavin: Intimate Nights: the Golden Age of New York Cabaret (New York, 1991) [incl. discography, 361–87]

J.-C. Klein: La chanson à l’affiche: histoire de la chanson française du café-concert à nos jours (Paris, 1991)

L. Richard: Cabaret, cabarets: origines et décadence (Paris, 1991)

P. Jelavich: Berlin Cabaret (Harvard, 1993)

M.E. Poole: Chansonnier and Chanson in Parisian Cabarets Artistiques (diss., U. of Illinois, 1994)

G. Latour: Le ‘cabaret théâtre’, 1945–1965 (Paris, 1996)

D.G. Winer: The Night and the Music: Rosemary Clooney, Barbara Cook, and Julie Wilson, Inside the World of Cabaret (New York, 1996)

KLAUS WACHSMANN/PATRICK O’CONNOR