Words and Music

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A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Remembering Weimar 1919-1933

Remembering Weimar 1919-1933

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Poems, prose, song and music inspired in and by the brilliant but doomed German republic.

The brilliant but doomed German republic evoked in readings of Kästner, Brecht and Alfred Doblin read by Sheila Atim and Philip Franks. Music by Dietrich, Eisler and Schoenberg.

The Weimar Republic may barely have spanned fifteen years from the adoption of a new German constitution in August 1919 (following the abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918) to  the beginning of 1933 but there can rarely have been a more disturbing and yet thrilling period in Germany’s history. Political turbulence and violence were matched by radical developments in the arts and a new kind of sexual candour. Germany’s military was still smarting after defeat in the First World War but that conflict’s violence seemed to have found a fresh outlet in social and political upheaval. As the demand for war reparations began to bite the economy collapsed; housewives found that they needed barrow loads of cash to buy their groceries and by 1933 there were six million people out of work. At the same time, and maybe in part,  because of the hardship and social turmoil,  cabaret culture flourished; ragtime took over from the waltz; Berg and Schoenberg forged a new musical language;  Brecht began to create a revolutionary theatre;  Dada was born;  the satire of Otto Dix and George Grosz sharpened its claws;  Alfred Doblin and Robert Musil wrote books that would become landmarks of modernist fiction; and the Bauhaus, through its teaching as well as its practice, began to transform our understanding of architecture and design. 
                      This edition of Words and Music with Sheila Atim and Philip Franks is about the historical Weimar, of course, but it’s also about how we continue to think about Weimar. 

You'll be introduced to the quintessential Weimar woman – Vicki Baum’s ash blonde, Ypsi Lona, as well as to the emblematic figure of  Moosbrugger, the murderer who haunts Musil’s novel, The Man without Qualities. The artist George Grosz gives a first-hand account of what it was like to live in Weimar’s capital, Berlin and we hear one of the pieces dedicated to him by the Dadaist composer, Erwin Schulhoff. There’s also an encounter with one of the very first examples of  Schoenberg’s twelve tone composition and a chance to hear  soprano Barbara Hannigan’s Berg- like account of Gershwin’s But Not for Me , recorded just a couple of years ago. Berg and Gershwin admired each other’s work and actually met in Vienna in 1928 so the affiliation is historical as well as aesthetic. Berg figures in his own right too, of course, with extracts from his two great prophetic operas, Lulu and Wozzeck. You’ll find more links between Weimar and the myth of Weimar in two famous film performances – Marlene Dietrich’s cabaret number,  Falling in Love Again, from Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and Joel Grey from the sound track of Bob Fosse’s Seventies classic, Cabaret. 
       As with the music so with the words..... take Marc Behm’s thriller, Queen of the Night  from which I’ve chosen an extract. Its set in the Twenties at the height of the Weimar period but was published in America in 1977 – testament to the period’s way of jumping out of time.  Chronology is also deliberately jumbled in the programme’s ending where the great star of the Weimar stage, Lotte Lenya, gives a twentieth century tone to the words of the  nineteenth century philosopher, Nietzsche. It may be a hundred years since the establishment of the Weimar Republic but it seems somehow perfectly natural that many of the ideas and impulses of that time find echoes in the present as well as in the past.

Readings: 
Ypsi Lona by Vicki Baum translated by Don Reneau
Moosbrugger by Robert Musil translated by Sophie Wilkins
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz translated by A.J. Pomerans 
Queen of the Night by Marc Behm 
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kastner translated by Cyrus Brooks
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood 
Erinnerung an die Marie A by Bertolt Brecht translated by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn
First Dada Manifesto by Hugo Ball translated by Ralph Mannheim
What I saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 by Joseph Roth translated by Michael Hofmann
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin translated by Michael Hofmann
What I saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 by Joseph Roth translated by Michael Hofmann
Vereinsamt Nietzsche freely translated by M Z Warley

Producer: Zahid Warley

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