CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Max Raabe
Palast Orchester

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Palast Orchester
Max Raabe, Vocalist

Evoking a nostalgic romance that has captured the imaginations of generations from all over the world, singer and bandleader Max Raabe and his 12-piece Palast Orchester perform dance and film music from the golden age of songwriting in Germany, the United States, and beyond.

The Berlin in Lights festival is made possible by a leadership gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Martha and Bob Lipp, Fundación Mercantil (Venezuela), and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding provided by Axel Springer AG, GWFF USA Inc., and the Jerome Robbins Foundation.

Program Notes:

Richard Traubner on
Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester

The über-elegant Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester return to New York, this time to the ur-Carnegie Hall (that is, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage) following their great success downstairs in Zankel Hall in 2005. Dispensing their faultless big-band recreations of 1920s and ’30s German and American favorites, they are the antidote to today’s noisiest and most soulless of popular fare.

In evening dress, hair brilliantined back, with their creamy lead baritone and gowned violinist, they bring us back to the Weimar (and later) Berlin of gigolos (Eintänzers, in German) and hotel tea dances along the Kurfürstendamm. It was an era of Rundfunk (radio) and Schellack (the 78-rpm record), punctuated by the latest American hits (usually written by Jewish songwriters) and their German equivalents (also often by Jews); foxtrots and waltzes; hits from the latest stage or screen operettas; and a large number of silly songs with novelty lyrics that caught on like wildfire.

This era reached an apex in the early 1930s with the male singing group The Comedian Harmonists (recreated by the band) and such saucy numbers as “Veronika, der Lenz ist da” and “My Little Green Cactus.”; the group and certain songs were purged by the Nazis, and popular composers like Walter Jurmann and Robert Stolz emigrated to Hollywood. But even in the era of “Aryan” Blood and Soil, the rage for catchy swing numbers, Latin rhythms, and charm persisted during the Third Reich, and certain composers and lyricists managed to turn out enduring songs, especially Theo Mackeben, the original conductor of Weill’s Threepenny Opera in 1928. The Palast Orchester artfully recalls them all.

Richard Traubner is the author of the standard Operetta: A Theatrical History (Routledge). He recently translated (and designed) White Horse Inn and Bluebeard for Ohio Light Opera, as well as another German operetta hit of the 1920s, Der Vetter aus Dingsda. He writes frequently for Opera News, Opera, American Record Guide, and The Economist.

Palast Orchester
Max Raabe, Vocalist
Faultlessly fitting tuxedo, hair slicked back, a cheeky look, and Max Raabe sings the best of the 1920s and early ’30s with amusing nostalgia. Songs, hits, and couplets. Cuban rumbas, cheerful foxtrots, and elegant tangos. Songs of amazingly serious, amusing yet melancholy simplicity. The ironic lyrics suit the times today as they did 80 years ago. In the concert halls of New York, Shanghai, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Rome, audiences celebrate Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester with incredible enthusiasm.

When Max Raabe, with an incredibly straight face, ironically raised eyebrow, and slightly bent elbow enters the stage almost carelessly, sends a sardonic look to the audience and, with the greatest nonchalance and melodramatically rolling “r,” admits, “I break the hearts of the most aloof women. I have such incredible luck with the ladies. My blood is lava and that is the trick,” the man doesn’t only seem to be a strange otherworldly phenomenon to the delicate natures of the 21st century.

Even 20 years after the founding of the Palast Orchester, after countless performances at home and abroad, from Luebeck to Los Angeles, from Munich to Montreaux, the singer who is always perfectly attired astounds his contemporaries with an amazing old-fashionedness. Very anachronistically, as if from a far-away time, he sings “My Heart Is Only Yours,” “My Brother Makes the Sound Effects in the Talkies,” “Bel Ami,” or “My Little Green Cactus”—historic jewels, almost archaic-seeming songs, hits, and cabaret of the 1920s and early ’30s. The amazing thing is that he performs them with such precise, dry, and down-to-earth perfection that the 80-year-old songs sound as fresh and vivid as they did at their very first performance. They are therefore not simply re-makes, well-performed old hits, or bittersweet memories for the generation that grew up with old shellac records, rumbas, and foxtrots, but rather, wonderful new interpretations that reveal the timeless qualities of this brilliant music. Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester want to keep the unique music of this epoch alive and let it shine night after night—not as museum pieces, but rather as timeless entertainment whose skewed humor and mocking irony have no peer in Germany.

One doesn’t need to say much about the music of the Palast Orchester. The pieces speak for themselves. For the most part they were written towards the end of the Weimar Republic. In this open, contradictory time period, new paths were forged in all of the arts. Culturally unglamourous times they were not when Josephine Baker danced across the stages of Berlin in a banana skirt. Jazz infected those hungry for entertainment during the roaring ’20s.


The Pieces Speak for Themselves

Revues, variety shows, cabaret and dancing halls sprouted up everywhere. The Charleston became the hip-swinger of the season. An indispensible part of the great revues and the glittering Friedrich-strasse was the 100-meter-long chorus line of the Tiller Girls, which seductively and precisely swung to the beat. Yet theater and political cabaret were also an expression of this incredible epoch. Dadaism, Surrealism, new functionalism, and other avant-garde experiments to asthetically capture new realities alternated with the need for popular entertainment. Jazz, swing, slowfox, foxtrot—music in tune with all the rhythms of the times. And of course the hits, the modern medium back then, a fantastic combination of music, lyrics, and dance. Composers such as Walter Jurmann, Friedrich Hollaender, Willy Rosen, Theo Mackeben, and Werner Richard Heymann wrote their melodies for operettas and musicals just as finely as those for revues, cabaret, dance houses, and theaters. Just a few measures in their songs and hits transport the feeling of the times. Some of their compositions were composed overnight and were sung all over Berlin the following day. Many became evergreens, transcending the failures of the Weimar Republic. After 1933, Germany robbed itself of its culture, and its talents were exiled or killed. The lyricists and composers, whose names were to be forgotten, celebrate a quiet triumph today. They have found a young audience that has discovered and learned to love the skewed humor, mocking irony, and melancholy of these superficially harmless songs and their amusing nostalgia. In their three- or four-minute durations, they reflect the comedy and tragedy of human nature.

Raabe is their most superb singer. This flexible baritone, which he can lead to the highest tenor heights and drop into a bottomless bass, unites it all: the cunning rasp of the cabaret singer, the confident bel canto hero, the oily melodiousness of the revue beau, the carefree timbre of early jazz, the falsetto of ragtime. Very lightly, softly, and yet vividly his voice carries across the theater with Walter Jurmann’s “Ninon.” Whistled refrains alternate with frivolous-cryptic ambiguity; elegant pianissimo notes with the brilliant nonsense of his accompanying presentation. Flawlessly, the musicians of the Palast Orchester sing—when they step up to the microphone and enter the spotlight around Max Raabe—Werner Richard Heymann’s “Darling, My Heart Says Hello to You.” Max Raabe’s art lies in revealing the enigmatic, intelligent ambiguity in addition to the musical power and complexity of these “German chansons” from the turbulent Weimar Republic: Between melancholy and irony, rebellion and resignation, elegy and slapstick, there is often only half a measure, sometimes just a single note, a mere word, a syllable.


Melancholy and Irony

As well as listening to the pleasure of these streetwise songs of love and loss, of looking for happiness, of falling prickly balcony vegetation, and the fear of other disasters, for those who desire to, a pithy analysis of social situations and a merciless diagnosis of human relationships can be seen, which have changed much less than one would expect over the course of the years. Disappointment follows hope, disillusionment follows dreams, and age follows youth—this not-so-uplifting philosophy on the transitory nature of life on earth sounds like pure entertainment when performed by Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester. Simply indestructible is the belief, which never sounds as lovely as when Max Raabe quietly promises: “Somewhere in the world, there is a little bit of happiness. And I’m dreaming of it right now . . .”

After all, he looked for it himself—and found it. Already in the children’s church choir of the Westphalian small-town of Lünen, where he was born in 1962, he learned about the wonders of music. In the third grade he was impressed by the operas of Wagner. And Beethoven’s Ninth symphony floored him. “From this moment onwards I knew that I wanted to become a singer,” he says. Later on, in the church choir of his boarding school, he further developed this early love and listened, in addition to Wagner and Beethoven, to the peculiar sounds of the roaring ’20s, which were suddenly played on the radio, including old recordings of the “Comedian Harmonists.” “I’m Crazy about Hilde” was his first shellac record, which he found in his parents’ cupboard. A jovial, fast foxtrot, the recording at the same time exudes sadness. His first performance was at a boy scout social at the church where small sketches were supposed to be performed and jokes to be told. Berlin was one of the names that ran around in his head.

This made him leave tranquil Westphalia and the Catholic diocese of Paderborn for Berlin, where he began taking voice lessons privately and where he has lived since he was 20. In order to finance his studies of opera at the renowned Berlin University of the Arts, the young Raabe trimmed large green hedges, mowed lawns, cleaned dark house foyers, and sang here and there for small amounts of money and for the enjoyment of the neighbors. In fact, he wanted to become an opera singer with his flexible baritone voice. Yet in 1986, first a seemingly distant yet also obvious possiblity opened up to finance his studies: to found a “palace orchestra,” to perform the hits from the 1920s and ’30s. But first the sheet music had to be found. With fellow students of the conservatory, who also enjoyed the old hits, Raabe dug through archives, flea markets, and antiquarian bookshops and collected old records and films with whose help it finally became possible to create authentic polyphone sounding orchestral arrangements.


The First Shellac Record

Music as rigid, archaic, and simple as the sound of the 1920s should sound the way one knows it from old records and films. “I love clichés, the intact world of the early talkies,” says Raabe, “even if it never really existed in reality. And it’s like that with our music. We tell the people something and that’s not nostalgia, but rather, sweet frolic.” Rehearsals went on for a year, and inn 1987, at Berlin’s Theaterball, they had their premiere, the first live performance of the 12-member Palast Orchester and their charismatic singer, who looks like an incredibly well-dressed bean pole. The performance was so successful that they had to perform their program twice in a row. The crowd wanted it that way—and they still didn’t go home.


Sweet Frolic

Max Raabe was still just a local legend, renowned in Berlin. Sophisticated, urban, certainly cosmopolitan, but the world didn’t know of him yet. The now-certified baritone decided to take up his own pen. Drawing on his own experience, he wrote and composed the timelessly true lament “No One Ever Calls, No One Has a Care for Me” in 1992 and captured the mood and feelings of thousands of people in the age of telecommunication. Back then Max Raabe wrote the gag for a variety evening in Berlin where the audience expected the usual homage to the music of the roaring ’20s. “It’s supposed to be elegant, tasteful nonsense,” the baritone says about his musical offerings. “I liked the idea of standing on stage in elegant tails with the orchestra and celebrating such strong language as “Schwein” (pig) and “Sau” (swine). It was an elegant way of snubbing. It was supposed to be a one-time gag.” Raabe landed a smash hit. What came then is generally called a “breakthrough.”Concerts were overbooked; more and more engagements and bigger concert halls. Raabe was offered theater and film roles, appearing in a new Berlin production of the cult operetta Im weißen Rössl, Peter Zadek’s The Blue Engel, and Sönke Wortmann’s hit film Der bewegte Mann, as well as in the TV movie Charley’s Aunt and in Werner Herzog’s Invincible. In 1994 he recorded, with Hildegard Knef, the single “That Irritated Oyster,” and three years later Palast Orchester was celebrated with an audience of 20,000 at Berlin’s Wald-bühne. In 2000 the album Charming Weill was released, a homage to the great composer Kurt Weill (Three Penny Opera) which was awarded the Classic Echo. In Latvia the Palast Orchester’s Super Hits became the No.1 album, and in 2002 the Palast Orchester had the honor of opening the Viennese Festival Weeks for an audience of 40,000.

The group’s repertoire, which now includes more than 400 songs, classics such as “I’ll Kiss Your Hand, Dear Lady” can be found as well as many new songs, such as “Carmen, Have Mercy,” the story of a very lively lady who tires out every man between the sheets. In “Cloning Could Be Worth It” Raabe threatens his lover: “Should you leave me, then I’ll clone ye, I have your double, you’re no longer trouble.” In August 2003 the lavish production Palast Revue, with changing scenery, Palast ballet troupe, and video backdrop premiered in Hamburg’s Thalia Theater. More than 300,000 people have seen the show since its opening. What began with 20 performances in 1986 has blossomed with ten times as many concerts per year into a Berlin institution of international acclaim. In spring 2004 the singer from Germany with the bewitching soft voice elicited standing ovations from New Yorkers, with two sold-out solo concerts in the Neue Galerie and a concert in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

But now back to the original question of his success. Is it the music, or is it the lyrics and the melodies? Could it be the pomp and circumstance of the 1920s? Is it the musical seriousness? The ability to break up the poses with self-irony? Is it because of his charming manner, the elegance and smartness of his appearance? Perhaps it is because he understands in life as on stage to stylize himself to an art form? How? This, too, remains his secret. Yet what a lovely one.