Cabarets

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CABARETS

The word cabaret has been applied to venues ranging from upscale nightclubs to sleazy striptease joints, but the historically most interesting form has been the French cabaret artistique and its imitators. Such locales were notable not only for their witty satires of politics and social and sexual mores, but also for their encouragement of experimentation in the performing and visual arts.

The French word cabaret originally meant, quite simply, tavern, but it acquired its modern meaning in 1881, with the founding of the Chat Noir (Black Cat) in Montmartre. Having entertained themselves with evenings of improvised singing and recitation, Rodolphe Salis (1851–1897) and a number of other young writers, artists, and composers decided that they could earn some much-needed income by opening their revelries to a paying public. Salis presided over a wide range of entertainment, which largely consisted of satirical songs by composers like Jules Jouy and Maurice Mac-Nab. But the Chat Noir also had much to offer the eye: the graphics of Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen and Adolphe Willette adorned posters and sheet music, and the innovative shadow plays of Henri Rivière soon became the major attraction. When the Chat Noir moved to larger premises in 1885, the original venue was taken over by one of its singers, Aristide Bruant. An imposing and flamboyant figure, so memorably captured in a number of posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), Bruant named his venture the Mirliton (the "Reed Pipe," but also, by implication, "Doggerel"). A consummate provocateur, Bruant regularly insulted bourgeois members of his audience, and he expressed sympathy for the downtrodden classes in his biting songs, replete with vulgar expressions and lower-class argot.

Bruant left the Mirliton in 1895, and two years later the Chat Noir closed after the death of Salis, but the commercial and artistic success of these ventures inspired a host of imitators. In Paris itself, most of them were little better than tourist traps, though the Lapin Agile (Agile Rabbit) was a rendezvous for outstanding young writers and artists, most notably Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918). It was in other European cities that avant-garde cabaret flourished. One direct offshoot of the Parisian ventures was Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats) in Barcelona, cofounded in 1897 by Miquel Utrillo (the father of the painter Maurice Utrillo [1883–1955]), who had participated in the Chat Noir. The Barcelona venture became a center of the Catalan cultural revival, and it was especially known for its puppet shows and its exhibitions of young artists, above all Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).

After the turn of the century, the cities of central and eastern Europe were especially receptive to cabaret. The first German cabaret, founded in January 1901 in Berlin, was Ernst von Wolzogen's Buntes Theater (Motley Theater), also known as the Überbrettl (Super-Stage). Performing in a regular theater, rather than a café setting, Wolzogen's troupe addressed an upscale audience and was only mildly critical of Wilhelmine society. A much more aggressive tone was set by Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke), another Berlin venture, which

grew out of the convivial gatherings of a group of young actors, including Max Reinhardt (1873–1943). They began by staging send-ups of the serious dramas in which they performed, but their repertoire turned political when they added the character Serenissimus. Ostensibly a fictitious potentate of a small German state, who sat in the proscenium loge and provided a very benighted running commentary on the performance, the character was clearly a takeoff on Kaiser William II (r. 1888–1918). After little more than a year, Schall und Rauch turned from cabaret to staging one-act plays and later evening-long works, and thus launched Reinhardt's career as Germany's outstanding theatrical director of modern times. His roots in cabaret were significant, though, since it was there that he experimented with the nonverbal performing arts—song, dance, pantomime—that so enlivened his later productions of classical and modern drama.

Not Berlin but Munich was the home of Germany's most innovative cabaret, the Elf Scharfrichter (Eleven Executioners), which opened in April 1901. It was explicitly political from the start, since it was founded in part as an offshoot of an anticensorship movement; that issue was especially acute in Munich, the center of the Germany's sensual Jugendstil (art nouveau) movement, as well as the home of illustrated satirical weeklies like Jugend and Simplicissimus. Many members of the troupe were associated with those journals, most notably Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), who had made a name for himself as an avant-garde playwright and satirical poet. His songs, performed by himself or by the venture's chanteuse, Marya Delvard, pilloried the sexual hypocrisy of the Wilhelmine era. Founded in response to censorship, the Elf Scharfrichter fell victim to it by the end of 1903, as more and more numbers were cut from their repertoire.

Delvard and Marc Henry, a fellow Frenchman who had managed the Munich cabaret, eventually moved to Vienna, where they founded first the Nachtlicht (Nightlight) in 1906, and the Fleder-maus (Bat) a year later. Housed in a small theater whose auditorium, café, program books, and promotional posters and postcards were designed by Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) and other members of the Wiener Werkstätte, the Fledermaus was a showcase of the most advanced Viennese design. By staging the premieres of short plays by Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), it also put itself at the forefront of the theatrical avant-garde. Unlike other cabarets, which focused on songs, the repertoire of the Fledermaus was best known for witty monologues and dialogues by some of Vienna's best-known essayists, such as Egon Friedell, Alfred Polgar, Roda Roda, and Peter Altenberg.

Cabaret rapidly spread farther east, and important ventures were founded in Budapest (the Modern Stage) and Kraków (the Green Balloon), which became important centers of Hungarian and Polish modernism. Cabaret reached Russia in 1908, with the founding of the Letuchaya Mysh (Bat) in Moscow. Like Schall und Rauch, it was launched by actors who at first specialized in parodies of drama. But soon it became visually innovative, as it featured sets and costumes by Leon Bakst (1866–1924). The Letuchaya Mysh became best known for its "living dolls," brightly colored figures who acted out Russian fairy tales. Prewar cabaret attained its epitome in St. Petersburg, where the Brodyachaya Sobaka (Stray Dog) opened in 1911. It provided a forum for recitations by the greatest poets of Russian modernism, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930).

Cabaret was to have a distinguished future after 1914, but already in its first thirty years it was a haven for social and political critics and it served as a laboratory for experimentation in literature and the visual and performing arts.