Max Raabe and Palast Orchester
With a faultlessly fitting tuxedo, slicked-back hair, and a cheeky look, Max Raabe sings the best of the 1920s and '30s with amusing nostalgia—songs of amazingly serious, amusing yet melancholy simplicity. The ironic lyrics suit the times today as they did 80 years ago. Audiences in the concert halls of New York, Shanghai, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Rome have celebrated Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester with incredible enthusiasm.
When Max Raabe—with a noticeably straight face, ironically raised eyebrow, and slightly bent elbow—steps on to the stage, he sends a sardonic look to the audience. With the greatest nonchalance and a melodramatically rolling "r" he 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." He appears to be a strange, otherworldly phenomenon to the delicate natures of the 21st century.
Even a good 20 years after the founding of Palast Orchester with countless performances at home and abroad, the perfectly attired singer astounds his contemporaries with an amazingly old-fashioned approach. Raabe performs hits and cabaret of the 1920s and early '30s with such perfection that the 80-year-old songs sound as fresh and as vivid as they did at their very first performance. They're not just re-makes, but rather wonderful new interpretations that reveal the timelessness of this brilliant music. Max Raabe and Palast Orchester keep the unique music of this epoch alive and let it shine night after night—not as museum pieces, but 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, a period during which new paths were forged in all of the arts.
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 Friedrichstraße was the 100-meter-long well-formed chorus line of the Tiller Girls, who swung seductively and precisely 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 aesthetically capture new realities alternated with the need for popular entertainment. 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, cabarets, dance houses, and theaters. After 1933, Germany robbed itself of its culture; its talents were exiled or killed. The lyricists and composers, whose names were to be made forgotten, celebrate a quiet triumph today. They have found a young audience that has discovered and learned to love the skewed humor and mocking irony, the melancholy of these superficially harmless songs, and their amusing nostalgia.
Raabe is their most superb interpreter. This flexible baritone, which he can lead to the highest tenor heights and drop into a bottomless bass, unites it all: the cunning rasping 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 yet vividly, his voice carries across the theater with Walter Jurmann's "Ninon." Whistled refrains alternate with frivolous, cryptic ambiguity; elegant pianissimo notes emerge out of the brilliant nonsense of his accompanying presentation. Raabe's art lies in revealing the enigmatic, intelligent ambiguity in addition to the musical power and complexity of the "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
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 Palast Orchester. Simply indestructible is the belief, which never sounds as lovely as 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 a member of the children's church choir in the small town of Lünen, Raabe 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." Later on in the church choir at his boarding school, he began listening to the peculiar sounds of the roaring '20s– which were suddenly played on the radio. "I'm Crazy about Hilde"—a jovial, fast foxtrot that simultaneously exudes sadness—was his first shellac record, which he found in his parents cupboard.
This made him leave tranquil Westphalia and the Catholic diocese of Paderborn for Berlin, where he has lived since he was 20. After moving to Berlin at the age of 20, Raabe began taking voice lessons. In order to finance his opera studies at the renowned Universität der Künste Berlin, a young Raabe trimmed hedges, mowed lawns, cleaned house foyers, and sang here and there to the enjoyment of his neighbors. In 1986, he formed a "palace orchestra" to not only subsidize his studies, but also to perform hit songs from the '20s 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, collected old records and films, inspiring what would become his authentic polyphone-sounding orchestral arrangements.
The First Shellac Record
Music as rigid, archaic, and simple as that from the 1920s should sound the way one hears it on 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 an entire year, and then in 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. They may have only played in the lowly foyer, but they were so well-loved that they had to perform their program twice in a row. Afterward, the crowd still refused to go home.
Sweet Frolic
Max Raabe was still just a local legend, renowned in Berlin—sophisticated, urban, and 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 feeling of thousands of people in the age of telecommunication. Back then, 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.
In spring 2004, the singer from Germany with the bewitching soft voice, his orchestra, and a repertoire of more than 400 songs, elicited standing ovations in New York City: two completely sold-out solo concerts in the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, long lines running along Fifth Avenue for coveted tickets to an additional concert, and a culminating invitation to perform at Carnegie Hall.
Upon experiencing their concerts, one is compelled to try and put a finger on what exactly is the formula for the success of this one-of-a-kind artist and orchestra. Is it the music? Is it the lyrics and the melodies? Could it be the pomp and circumstance of the 1920s? Is it the musical seriousness or the ability to break up the poses with self-irony? Is it because of Raabe's charming manner or the elegance and smartness of his appearance? Perhaps it is because Max Raabe's own brand of old-world style is an art form alone and is his guide onstage and off.
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