If kd lang’s album last time took us back about thirty years to the Fifties, this album takes us back yet another thirty years to Weimar Republic Germany, as Krause sings songs composed by Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. It’s a little like Les Miserables, if it were German.
If you’re familiar with Brecht’s plays, you’ll know they can be quite abrupt, angular, cold. And this music is similar, lots of short staccato pieces that partly recall the kind of Weimar cabaret style of Marlene Deitrich, but also have that Twenties Modernist feel to them. It’s an anti-war polemic, both looking back at the deaths of the Great War, and also concerns about the future of the country. In A German Mother’s Lament, Krause sings that “My son, I gave you the jackboots, and the brown shirt came from me. But had I known what I now know, I'd have hanged myself, I'd have hanged myself from a tree”. This is not, however, so much that her son has joined the Nazis and she’s ashamed of him, but that he ends up dead because of it, marching off to war.
There must be a German term for Krause’s singing, or almost-singing style. I think Sprechgesang covers it – these aren’t songs in much of a traditional sense, but more like the inter-linking descriptive pieces in an opera, which isn’t something that deeply appeals to me, I have to admit. Interesting for an unusual change of pace, but perhaps not one I’d come back to in hurry. Throughout I couldn't help but think of Madeline Kahn (as Lilli von Schtupp) in Blazing Saddles - "They quote Byron und Shelley, then jump on your belly, und burst your balloons".
And that, oddly enough, is the end of 1988. What an eclectic mix we got for that year, especially towards the end there.
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