Cabaret

William Grange, Simon Shepherd

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350140271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica teatrales

Where did cabaret come from? What has it got to do with pre-war Berlin, decadent society and Nazis? How does it turn into media cabaret and the sisterhood of sleaze? Is cabaret a primary vehicle for exploring the range of sexual practices and alternative sexual identities? In this new book William Grange brings into one place for the first time the range of practices now associated with the form of cabaret. Beginning with its origins in speciality German theatres and the development both of the sheet music industry and disc recordings, Grange tracks the form through into its golden age in the 1920s and beyond. The book's three sections deal first with the emergence of Berlin as the 'German Chicago', where cabaret flourished in the midst of post-war political turmoil. The abolition of censorship allowed nude dancing and sexually explicit songs and routines. It also saw the introduction of kick-line dancing and black performers.
In the book's second and third sections Grange takes the story forward into the post second-world-war world, describing how the form moved outwards from central Europe to move across the whole world, reaching Singapore and Australia, and as it did so settling into the range of forms in which we know it today. Some of these forms became 'media cabaret' looking towards the new media age, the postmodernism that followed on from modernism. To this age, even in its new forms, cabaret brought its old habits of making challenges to assumptions around gender identities and sexual practices. As throughout its whole history, cabaret was a form that provided particular vehicles for female performers. And whereas it once served up whore songs and nude dancing it now offers a sisterhood of sleaze.

1

Beginnings in France

Montmartre

Among the most notable of seventeenth-century Parisian cabarets during the reign of Louis XIII were The Fox, The Three Golden Bridges, and The Cross of Lorraine. The most “literary” (i.e., where Parisians met to argue about literature) of them all was thought to be a place called The Pine Cone. During the reign of Louis XIV, the favorite hangout of Moliére and Racine (when they were still on speaking terms) was a cabaret called the White Sheep. The cabaret favored by courtiers at the court of Louis XIV was La Boisselière, near the Tuileries Palace. This cabaret had no name, but mistress of the house was Mme. Boisselière. Dinner at her place cost five times that of an ordinary cabaret in Paris (Household Words 1857: 115). Food was important at cabarets, almost as important as arguing about poetry, gossiping about sex and politics at court, or drinking affordable wine.

By the mid-nineteenth century in Paris the term “cabaret” had fallen out of everyday use, though there certainly remained several venues where customers met to discuss literature, politics, or art. Such informal gatherings in public houses with alcoholic beverages on offer were abundant in Parisian neighborhoods. In some of those public houses one could hear poets, essayists, scribes, translators, copyists, and others with literary ambitions read their efforts aloud to what they hoped would be a sympathetic audience. The audiences were an elite company, many being members of literary clubs that had emerged in the 1850s. All of the presenters were desirous of finding a market for their endeavors. By the end of the 1870s, proprietors of public houses, wine bars, taverns, hostelries, and similar establishments discovered the unexpected profitability of readings open to the public. What made the arrangement doubly promising for the proprietor was the readiness of writers and balladmongers to present their work free of charge even while audience members were willing to pay an admission fee.

There were of course other forces at work in the process of conceiving the child that grew up to become the modern cabaret. One of the forces was legislative, which resulted in the so-called embourgoisement of public performance in 1864. A decree of the Emperor’s Household in that year liberalized ownership of theaters in Paris (a similar law went into effect in Berlin five years later), and in 1867 the French government’s head of theater administration ruled that “café-concerts” were henceforth permitted to use costumes and other articles of scenic investiture. Such use was previously restricted to opera and spoken drama, and the measure broadened the popularity of the “café-concerts.” By 1872 there were more than 150 such venues in Paris. Café-concerts were what one might best describe as a middlebrow musical extravaganza, though many were extremely modest; most had a mini-stage, with no special dramaturgy. Singers alternated and mostly performed their own songs and lyrics. Some café-concerts, however, were elaborate and attracted substantial audience numbers. All featured singers and musical accompaniment, and after the legislative relaxation of 1867 they began to resemble what some observers have called music halls.

The Bohemians

The second major influence on the emergence of modern cabaret was the socio-cultural structure of Paris. In the years following the collapse of the Second Empire during the brief Franco-Prussian War (1870–1), the separated hill-top suburb of Montmartre retained its reputation as a refuge not only for certain criminal elements, but also for certain kinds of non-conformists known as “bohemians.” The etymology of bohême or bohêmien to signify immigrant beggars in the fifteenth century from Eastern Europe (sometimes called gitane, or “gypsies”) is fairly well acknowledged. The term first gained circulation in Paris during 1840, when Honore de Balzac published a novel titled Un prince de la bohème (A Prince of Bohemia). Its use as a signifier of non-conformity or even to equate it with the repudiation of bourgeois behavioral norms is inexact. That usage probably emerged during the early stages of European industrialization, when middle-class viewpoints came to dominate much of European print media. In those years the French police used the term to identify individuals living in low-rent, crime-ridden Parisian neighborhoods. The provenance of the term’s use to describe avant-garde artists, literary pretenders, entertainers of various stripes, anarchists, and other semi-disreputable characters is more easily determined, especially as the term became international.

In 1845, a French writer named Henri Murger (1822–61) began publishing stories he called Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes from Bohemian Life) in a literary journal called Le Corsaire Satan (The Satanic Corsair). Mergur belonged to a loosely organized group of companions who called themselves the Buveurs d’eau (“the water drinkers,” presumably because they could not afford wine, beer, or anything else alcoholic). They met in spaces found throughout the Nouvelle-Athènes neighborhood of the ninth arrondissement. A playwright named Théodore Barrière (1823–77) convinced Murger to help him adapt the stories for an 1849 theatrical production titled Bohemian Life at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. The production was an enormous success, which led Murger to write additional “bohemian” stories and publish them in 1851. In his preface to the volume, Murger described his subjects as

a race of people who have existed in all climes and ages, and can claim an illustrious descent. They are the race of obstinate dreamers for whom art has remained a faith and not a profession …. The real Bohemians are really amongst those called by art, and have the chance of being also amongst its elect. [In] this Bohemia, two abysses flank it on either side—poverty and doubt.

(Murger 1888: ii)

Murger had based the characters in his stories (and in the play with Barrière) on his own experiences not only of poverty and doubt, but also of deep friendships, young love, disease, near-starvation, and death.

Bohemians thus became character types, not just characters (most familiar later to audiences in two operas, one by Giacomo Puccini in 1895 and another by Ruggero Leoncavallo in 1896, but both titled La Bohème; the 1994 Broadway musical Rent by Jonathan Larson also uses the Murger precedents for the character types depicted). Such character types became popular with their bourgeois opposites, who included lawyers, physicians, real estate speculators, insurance brokers, bankers, and even some clerks, tellers, cashiers, accountants, and other “white collar” employees. The so-called “bohemians” mocked the bourgeoisie, considering their values and habits equally objectionable. Bohemians in the 1870s and 1880s derided the bourgeois ideals of frugality, sobriety, celibacy, and domesticity. Bourgeois Frenchmen, paradoxically, found such accusations, along with the voluntary idiosyncrasies that embraced destitution, insecurity poverty, and love affairs that ended in death as objects of fascination. They avidly read novels and stories like Murger’s, and attended productions like Bohemian Life. When certain bars, restaurants, and similar venues became identified as bohemian gathering places, bourgeois curiosity prompted visits to such locales, where reputed bohemian exoticism, behaviors, affectations of dress, and peculiar manners of speech were on full display.

That bourgeois audiences flocked to bohemian displays has been a topic of fascination for decades, especially among students of both anthropology and the performing arts. For some observers, “bohemia” is a community within a community, a self-identifying aggregation of individuals who share sentiments of social marginality. They also share attitudes of metaphysical anxiety. The bourgeois, on the other hand, were mostly well-bred, well-fed, and well-bathed when they came to observe bohemians and to consume the entertainment packages they offered. Such consumers perhaps sought a release of feelings they most often sought to repress, or at least to experience something that was restricted in their everyday middle-class lives. But did the middle class really live in circumstances so restricted and confined that they needed some kind of eccentric behavior to reinvigorate themselves? Attempts to answer such questions can enkindle heated discussions in several directions, so for the purposes of these inquiries, the idea of a venue where “the increasingly organized and regulated life of the modern city could be left behind for an evening” must suffice. In such venues, non-Bohemians might seek release from ordinary social boundaries, experience the thrill of violating conventions, or acquaint themselves with assorted taboos (Seigel 1987: 240).

Among the first of such venues was the Café de la Rive Gauche in the “Latin Quarter” of the fifth and sixth arrondissements of Paris. This area got its name from the colleges located there, in which Latin remained the traditional language of instruction until the Revolution of 1789. There were numerous literary clubs that sprang up during the 1870s, but a group that called themselves Les Hydropathes (“the avoiders of water”) became the precedent for subsequent cabaret efforts in Montmartre. Among the original members of the “Club des Hydropathes” were its President Èmile Goudeau (1849–1906), along with Paul Arena (1843–96), Charles Cros (1824–88), Ernest Grenet-Dancourt (1854–1913), Jules Laforgue (1860–87), Maurice Mac-Nab (1856–89), Georges Rodenbach (1855–98), and Laurent Tailhade (1854–1919). This group was generally more prosperous than Mergur and his companions had been: not only did they drink wine, they had regular day jobs and lived in modest but comfortable dwellings. Not all of them were poets; some were musicians, performers, or artists. Their presentations became popular minor successes, with their work published in small-circulation journals and in Parisian newspapers.

The above-noted Goudeau (he was a clerk at the French Ministry of Finance) arranged for the lease of a large space in a nearby hotel in the Rue Cujas in the fifth arronidissement. His fellow Hydropathes possessed the resources to lease the space, which could accommodate about 300 people. At the Hydropathes Café, “cabaret” was on the menu. It was a round food platter encircled by wine bowls; it had been on the menus of taverns and boîtes for years in France. Food and bread were served on the round platter and wine drunk from bowls. The term came into more prominence as the group staged entertainments in the form of poetry or prose readings and songs. Their work became increasingly popular among audiences, and some of it was openly satirical, set to popular songs of the day. The increasing size of audiences at the biweekly gatherings indicated to Goudeau that some cultural changes were underway by the late 1870s.

The exercise became so popular that in January of 1879, Goudeau launched a bimonthly journal called L’Hydropathe, which published the work of several poets, essayists, and artists who had presented their work at the Hydropathes Café. By 1880, however, most of the adventurous energy that had animated both the club and the journal had dissipated. Groups within the original club formed breakaway organizations, calling themselves Hirsutes (“the hairy ones”), Zutistes (“the slackers”), and Incohérents (“the Incoherent Ones”).

Rodolphe Salis

Louis Rodolphe Salis (1852–97) had been a frequent habitué of the Club Hydropathes, and his experiences there coincided with his desire to open a “cabaret artistique” in which poets presented their work for free to an audience willing to pay high prices for wine, cognac, and liqueur. To him, it seemed like a money-making proposition After a false start at a career as a painter, and with funds from his father and the dowry of his new (second) wife, Salis leased a small space in Montmartre that had been a post office. He thought it suitable for a boîte in the Boulevard Rochechouart. The place had only one advantage: it was near the Grande Pinte, one of the neighborhood’s most popular taverns. Salis thought he might profit from any surplus in their customers. The neighborhood abounded in cats. After finding one that wanted to live in his home, Salis memorialized it in the name of his establishment, Le Chat Noir.

The interior of the place was eclectic in taste, to say the least. It looked like the kind of shop where pawnbrokers unloaded articles nobody would buy, and indeed some sources insist that Salis had filled the venue with cast-off tables and chairs he found discarded on the streets or in flea markets. Salis had little concern for the material milieu of his establishment, but rather for the literary and artistic atmosphere he hoped to create within it. Accounts vary about the first encounter between Salis and Goudeau, but the most credible include a chance meeting at the aforementioned Grande Pinte tavern in Montmartre. There a former member of the Hydropathes introduced Salis to Goudeau, and the former began to elaborate on his plans for a cabaret artistique in Montmartre. His most salient point was getting Goudeau to encourage former members of the Hydopathes to make the journey up to Montmartre and present their work to a live audience, just as they had done in the Latin Quarter. Goudeau immediately agreed, and in November 1881 Salis opened the Black Cat. Directly in front of the establishment was a street light, and Salis asked some former Hydropathes to stand under the light for a while, giving the impression that the locale was popular. A new bill-posting law permitted posters advertising the venue to be pasted on vacant walls, tram waiting stations, and public urinals. He also obtained permission from Parisian police to have a piano on the premises. This, together with the printing of a song book, encouraged customers to sing boisterously, which created a need for much liquid refreshment. He then began raising the prices of the beverages, which were mostly spirits, aperitifs, and fortified wine. One of the Chat Noir’s first musical performers was the former Hydropath member Jules Jouy (1855–97), whose songs were often rousing critiques of contemporary politicians or public figures.

Salis lit the interior of his venue with candles and oil lamps, and their illumination provided ambience, enhancing the special kind of atmosphere he wanted to create. There was also a fairly large fireplace in one corner, supplementing warmth in the cold winter months of 1882. As his income increased Salis installed oak tables. Sketches of various Hydropaths hung on the walls. Salis soon began publishing a small journal featuring caricatures, sketches, song lyrics, poems, and essays by former Hydropaths, along with others who were starting to appear with greater frequency on the small platform stage Salis had installed. The journal proved to be popular in Paris, further stimulating attendance.

The establishment also benefited from a new trend that found acceptance among certain numbers of the Parisian bourgeoisie, who began to indulge themselves in an aperitif before dinner even if one was not dining.¹ Crowds gathered at the Chat Noir, which (as noted earlier) had ample supplies of distillates and fortified wines. Salis dressed himself in a frock coat, wearing a high stiff collar and spats on his shoes. He furnished a small room at the back of the premises and set it aside for his regular clientele and called it “the Institute.” Salis then developed another of his heretofore unknown talents, that of a conférencier, or master of ceremonies. He interspersed remarks and jokes of his own devising between the readings of poetry, the presentation of sketches, or musical offerings. He grandiloquently welcomed patrons as they came through the front door with mock salutations like “Ah! Your Honor—so glad to see you!” or “Somebody help His Excellency to his seat,” or “Your Esteemed Electoral Highness, how nice of you to join us tonight!” Most of the performers at the Chat Noir resembled former Hydropaths or imitators of Hydropaths, telling stories about the poor and downtrodden in Paris, reciting verse in odd rhythmic structures, belting out songs called chansons réalistes, or sometimes staging dialogues in the nearly unintelligible gibberish of the street. Salis then launched a peculiarly eccentric political campaign to popularize visits to Montmartre and the Chat Noir. His electoral platform demanded the separation of Montmartre from France. “What is Montmartre?” he rhetorically asked. “Nothing. What should it be? Everything” (Appignanesi 2004: 15). Salis’ campaign was nothing but a publicity stunt, but as such it attracted the attention of artists wanting to perform for free, while likewise enticing the paying public he sought as patrons.

One of the songs which premiered at the Chat Noir and later became popular was “An Old Workman,” which celebrated the life of a broken-down vagrant with no place to spend the night. He notes that even dogs and pigs have places to sleep—but no matter. At least he doesn’t have to pay rent. Songs with lyrics such as these became drawing cards to the Chat Noir, which in turn attracted talented songwriters like Jouy and Maurice Mac-Nab (1856–89) who had performed with the Hydropaths. Erik Satie (1866–1925) also worked for Salis when he took a forced leave of absence from the Paris Conservatory, the French national school of music. He ultimately led a small group of musicians for Salis, calling themselves the “Black Cat Orchestra.” Salis and Satie, however, had several arguments over money and theirs was an unamicable p...