Effigies of Wickedness: Degenerate music, then and now
Guest post: Peter Brathwaite, Ellen McDougall & Christopher Green
Le Gateau Chocolat in Effigies of Wickedness, The Gate Theatre, 2018. Design by E. M. Parry. Lighting by Azusa Ono. Photo: Hellen Murray.
In the summer of 2018, the walls of Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre reverberated with voices echoing those from one of history’s darkest moments, when the Third Reich was in its ascendency. ‘Welcome to the cabaret of degenerate music!’, its audiences were told, ‘Where you can be just who you want to be!’.[1] The cabaret in question was called Effigies of Wickedness.
In 1938, the Nazi propagandist Hans Severus Ziegler staged an exhibition in Düsseldorf called ‘Entartete Musik’ (Degenerate Music); it was a musical companion to the notorious Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition that the Nazis first held in 1937, and that was still touring Germany at the time. Both Entartete Musik and Entartete Kunst were intended to ridicule experimental modernist trends in music and art that were at odds with the Nazis’ more conservative taste, while providing an opportunity to advance racist propaganda that ridiculed not just art, but ostracised artists persecuted under the Nazi regime: especially Jews, and people of colour.[2] Effigies of Wickedness - a co-production with the English National Opera - was a response to the ridiculing of such art and the persecution of such artists, and included inventive renditions of songs by Friedrich Hollander, Kurt Weill, Hans Eisler, Misha Spoliansky, Siegwart Ehrlich, and Arnold Schoenberg. However, it was also an attempt to consider the continued relevance of the work of many of the artists that the Nazi regime sought to consign to the dustbin of history, and to do so by reimagining their relevance from an explicitly twenty-first-century perspective. Hence the impressive list of contributors, which included performances by Peter Brathwaite, Katie Bray, Le Gateau Chocolat, and Lucy McCormick (you can find an interview with McCormick on this blog); creative contributions from E. M Parry (design), Dan Balfour (sound), Tim Claydon (movement director and choreographer), Seiriol Davies (lyricist), Azusa Ono (lighting), and Malik Nashad Sharpe (movement dramaturg); and musicianship from Geri Allen, Cassie Kinoshi, and Fra Rustumji, with musical direction by Phil Cornwell. Brathwaite is also one of the contributors to this guest post (the performance was also based on his original idea), alongside the dramaturg Christopher Green, and the show’s director Ellen McDougall. They reflect on the context underpinning the show, the cabaret form, and why the re-telling of history is always a political act.
This post has been adapted from the show’s programme notes, which only exists in print form, with the kind permission of the contributors.
Peter Brathwaite in Effigies of Wickedness, The Gate Theatre, 2018. Design by E. M. Parry. Lighting by Azusa Ono. Photo: Hellen Murray.
Peter Brathwaite: Performer
The Nazi campaign against music was manifested in the 1938 ‘Entartete Musik’ (Degenerate Music) exhibition in Düsseldorf. Here, leading propagandist Hans Severus Ziegler designed the show to justify Nazi censorship and prove that there was a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt German decency through its impure, subversive art. In a week celebrating ‘national music’, the exhibition presented the antithesis of so-called ‘healthy’ Germanic repertoire. Ziegler opened his exhibition in a form never seen before, with listening booths where visitors could listen to examples of Jewish music, ‘Negermusik’ (Negro Music), and anything atonal or untraditional, or which the regime classified in any way as ‘un-German’. In addition, the exhibition displayed portraits of banned composers and performers which were accompanied by crudely painted slogans attacking their music. Composers featured in the exhibition included Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, Franz Schreker, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Igor Stravinsky, Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, Leo Fall, Oskar Straus, Mischa Spoliansky, Hugo Hirsch, Leon Jessel, Paul Abraham and Rudolf Nelson and Friedrich Hollaender. In his slanderous accompanying brochure, curator Ziegler announced that ‘Not one of the composers in this exhibition is exceptionally gifted with the great spirit of humanity. This exhibition is a witches’ sabbath. We must now name names and take decisive steps to distance ourselves from this development. Hitler has ordered us to do this’.
The exhibition’s didactic tone was meant to convey to visitors an impression of chaos and disorder in German musical life. Comments such as ‘mentally ill’, ‘alienation from ourselves’, ‘sarcastic cultural bolshevism’, ‘race dishonour’, and ‘Jazz is Negro music seen through the eyes of the Jews’ were presented as the ‘voice of reason’, and were used to justify the inconsistent themes of degeneration. Press at the time reported on the concurrent touring ‘Entartete Kunst’ (Degenerate Art) exhibition with headlines such as ‘From Chaos to Art: Overcoming a Jewish Liberal Plague by means of a New German Art’. This did much to heighten the lust for sensation, the lure of the abnormal and risqué. The adult-only show produced well-calculated outrage and sold out immediately, with Germans queuing around the block to hear much more of the music they had been denied. ‘Entartete Musik’ ran until 1939 when the outbreak of war prevented any further touring.
The poster image for ‘Entartete Musik’ was a caricature of an African-American musician playing a saxophone, suggestively earringed and wearing a Star of David on his jacket lapel. It was seeing this shocking image that prompted me to devise a musical project: I wanted to be ‘the Negro’ musician to interpret these forgotten songs for a contemporary audience and, in so doing, attempt to challenge the concept of forbidden art and music.
Left to right: Le Gateau Chocolat, Lucy McCormick, Katie Bray and Peter Brathwaite in Effigies of Wickedness, The Gate Theatre, 2018. Design by E. M. Parry. Lighting by Azusa Ono. Photo: Hellen Murray.
Ellen McDougall: Director
The idea of celebrating difference underpinned the gesture of this project. Its historical context is one where the fragile notion of equality survived only a few years before an ideology promoting uniformity was violently imposed on a population with desperate consequences. We were also conscious that drawing parallels between Weimar Germany and our own time, while dangerously easy, ran the risk of being reductive and fatalistic. The way history is framed, in the retelling of it, is a political act in itself.
The composers and lyricists that featured in this show – who saw what was coming, who resisted through their art and their activism – remain thrilling, and dangerous, and joyful to hear today. They have the capacity to galvanise us in fights that we wish we didn’t need to still keep fighting. But there were also songs we chose not to include. There are hundreds we could have chosen, with the directory of banned musicians being about an inch thick and with very small type. The evening was by no means a comprehensive musical overview of that moment, but it was a subjective response to the fact that while the presence of that music in a historical canon is undeniable, we were considering it in the now. It was intended to mark the beginning of a conversation extending back into the past, and also into the future, prompting reflection on the world we might want to live in.
Christopher Green: Dramaturg
‘Stop showing off!’ was my mother’s harshest rebuke when I was a small child. She meant, ‘stop drawing attention to yourself, stop being dramatic, stop being emotional, stop being angry and shouting about it’. I haven’t stopped.
There are many ways to respond to oppression: some get laws changed, some turn the hate they experience on themselves, some are kind to others, and some of us respond by SHOWING OFF. Contemporary queer cabaret should be hard to pin down. Argued over. It shouldn’t be a list of venues and performers that can be ticked off; it should be messy, hard to grab hold of, restless and shifting. Collectives and performers might go on to have an established artistic practice, but the true sense of cabaret should be something less formal than that, not funded by any recognised body (or anybody). If it’s being devised in a rehearsal room and not thrown together in someone’s bedroom, I reckon it’s Work Employing the Cabaret Form and not really Cabaret.
Lucy McCormick in Effigies of Wickedness, The Gate Theatre, 2018. Design by E. M. Parry. Lighting by Azusa Ono. Photo: Hellen Murray.
‘But, hang on! I want to consumer this and I’ve googled some interesting sounding events. Can you help me recognise its authentic provenance?’
Sure – you need to look for the absence of even a slender notion that there was ever a thing called a fourth wall, an immediacy of experience, a humour and wit that is virtually indistinguishable from a howl of pain and a sheer giddiness that comes from those with very little left to lose.
‘OK, great! Got it, thanks!’
Hang on. I need to tell you that you need to keep your nostrils open for the whiff of toxic shame. Because queer cabaret should be the attempt to rid us all of that rancid odour; the societal shame that comes from being too gender non-conforming, too female, too sexual, too queer, too too whatever. Airing it in the sweet, gentle fresh air of dark basements, fetid cupboards made into dressing rooms; the delightful bouquet of sheer rage and the desire for change.
Queer cabaret can be totally rubbish. And it can be so rubbish it’s genius. I once saw a naked woman in Kyoto play the Theremin with her hair for over an hour. I think that was genius probably. But it was also boring. Then there’s always an ongoing tension when making work about your pain, that you inevitably make into a product to be observed by voyeurs. There is a tension between being confrontational and consumed, but that’s part of the fabulous mess.
I’m torn. I’d love to live in a world where this kind of work isn’t necessary – where the sharp stab of the subculture isn’t necessary to wake up the body politic. Then that fact makes me sad; to think what we will be missing. Then I remember that oppression and bullying isn’t going anywhere, so each generation will have to make this kind of work anew in their own image. Hurray! Right?
Notes
[1] ‘Effigies of Wickedness’, The Gate Theatre website, 2018, https://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/effigies-of-wickedness/, accessed 17 December 2021.
[2] For an authoritative account of ‘the closing of the German mind’ in Nazi Germany, see Arthur Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 221-55.