22/07/2010

Take This Waltz



For many in Britain, Vienna is less familiar both in reality and in perception than Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, even Prague. It occupies a position perhaps like a distant aunt that one knows is there but rarely visits. There is something vaguely mysterious about her-there are stories of a bohemian, even decadent, past but it can be difficult to pin down current interests. Mozart, the Boys Choir, cakes, coffee?

Pop music, too, has not taken Vienna as an inspiration in the way it has with many other capitals. Both Billy Joel and Ultravox had songs called Vienna, though the lyrics aren’t that obviously about the place. In the Ultravox song, much of the imagery came from the video that accompanied it and that drew heavily on the style, lighting and distorted camera angles of The Third Man film (though much of it was actually shot in Covent Garden). Otherwise, there were a couple of tracks by Falco- and the Third Man theme that has sporadically emerged with releases as diverse as the Band, the Shadows and Herb Alpert.

There is also the dream-like Take this Waltz by Leonard Cohen, from his 1988 album ‘I’m Your Man’, a song of love and loss with the backdrop of a Vienna seen through several prisms. The lyrics are a translation and adaptation of a poem called Little Viennese Waltz by the Spanish poet Federico Lorca, shot by Fascist militia in 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Cohen did his own translation and has said he took 150 hours over it, which given the reputed two years or more spent on Hallelujah seems pretty modest. In doing so, it has become very much his own song with a different view of Vienna. Lorca’s poem was written in 1930 when he was briefly at Columbia University. Increasingly disillusioned by what he saw as the alienation and spiritual corruption of New York life he saw Vienna, where he had never been, as a symbol of the European civilisation he yearned for.

60 years later, Cohen’s take presents a Vienna that now has the magical but crumbling splendour of Venice, with echoes of the grand balls and palaces of the past but decaying and fading with time. From the first line , ‘Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women’, the images of concert halls, the lobby with 900 windows and Hungarian lanterns and the lilting folk-like melody, written in waltz time with mournful violin, mandolin, accordion and the ‘ay ay ay ay’ refrain, transport the listener to Central Europe, to the Vienna of opera, storybook palaces, cobbled streets and chandelier-lit coffee houses. They are a reminder not just of the origins of the waltz in Vienna but of the importance of Vienna as the centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the crossroads of Europe until a time that is still just in reach of a few people’s memory. Cohen’s  rather gravelly delivery, with hints of Jacques Brel and Brecht, strengthen this singularly European feeling.

As with any Leonard Cohen song, there is much beneath the surface. One commentator has described the section towards the end where Jennifer Warnes comes in on the ‘this waltz, this waltz’, chorus - almost as a ghostly echo of a memory -  as ‘sounding something out of a bad Disney movie’: If so, the words are there as a deliberate contrast to the chintz. There are whole websites devoted to the deconstruction of these particular lyrics and their meaning: what each piece of imagery signifies or whether the ending stanza of ‘You’ll carry me down on your dancing to the pools that you lift on your wrist’ signifies a suicide. What comes through most of all is the sense of nostalgia and sadness, the yearning for a reconciliation that is now impossible and the opportunity for ‘an attic where children are playing’ now gone, the imagery of the lost relationship counter-posed to the fading grandeur of Vienna. ‘The desolate ending: ‘Take this waltz, it’s yours now, its all that there is.’

There is always more than one view of a city, however, and Vienna is more than waltzes, The Third Man and ladies in fur coats eating sachertorte in a smoke-stained coffee house off the Philharmonikerstrasse . It was once known as Red Vienna and has a long history of radical politics. I was reminded of this musically through an unusual route, not by a song about Vienna but by a group from Vienna: Schmetterlinge. In a history of the Eurovision Song Contest, Schmetterlinge might warrant a footnote, for as the Austrian entry in 1977 they came second from last with a song called Boom Boom Boomerang. The title sounds like it is in the tradition of oompah, rubbish Eurovision songs-Boom-Bang a Bang or Ding-Dong . It was meant to. In a little coup worthy of the early Viennese surrealists, Schmetterlinge entered with a song with a nonsense Eurovision chorus, a dance routine that has to be seen to be appreciated and lyrics in German that not only sent up the whole contest but saw pop music as part of consumer capitalism


If you then look a little deeper, you find that Schmetterlinge had the year before at the Vienna Festival staged a piece of musical theatre called The Proletenpassion, a musical history of radical politics of the last 500 years, taking in the French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1870, the Russian Revolution, Spanish Civil War, World War 2 and the 1970’s. It’s difficult to imagine Bucks Fizz pulling that off.  Beatrix Neundlinger, the woman singer in Schmetterlinge, was awarded Vienna’s Golden Merit in 2008, for work in culture and music. Different sides of the city continue.

Old Vienna is obvious to the visitor, in the Baroque splendour of the Schonbrunn Palace and in the street hawkers in costume selling tickets for the Opera House and it is easy to have a chocolate-box image of another time, another place. Leonard Cohen’s swirling , slightly sinister, waltz unsettles this but it leaves imagery more haunting and evocative. 'I’ll dance with you in Vienna’: maybe the Austrian Tourist Board should take note.

Link to song

25 comments:

  1. I find his translation so fascinating - it's more of an interpretation than a precise translation. Here is his version next to a standard English translation of the Lorca poem: http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/waltz.htm. For example, I love that "a forest of dried pigeons" becomes "a tree where the doves go to die....."!

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  2. I agree with you Geoff that the song has its counterpoint to any potential Disneyfication, even in the Jennifer Warnes section. You're right that it's because of the lyrics and it avoids sentimentality in part because of Cohen's voice - so raw and growling. Plus the way that he speaks the lyrics often, instead of singing, means it is half spoken poem, half a sung song. And it's almost impossible for a spoken poem to sound like Disney, I think.

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  3. THANK YOU for writing about this song - it's SO GOOD to hear and read about a Cohen song other than HALLELUJAH!!!

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  4. What incredibly bizarre lyrics but so beautiful, so poignant! Surreal, touching, heartwrenching.

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  5. THANK YOU Geoff! This is the first and only good and READABLE analysis of the song I've found. The other analysis I found a while back and tried to understand was this one - http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol33/diehl-jones.htm - a representative sentence being the last one: "Cohen re-members the love song, the love song, by performing the ambivalence of its multiple voicings, its polyphonic traces of supplementarity, by reading contingency with his body"........... huh?? This is my favorite song in the world, it was the song that my husband and I had as our first dance song at our wedding and it'll be the song I play at my funeral, so thank you for writing something smart AND accessible about it!

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  6. It's so tragi-comic that he had to come out of retirement because his former manager misappropriated his retirement finances into her personal account to the tune of $5 million. Apparently, he was left with only $150,000 total in liquid assets after his return from his couple year stint studying Buddhism.......

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  7. A song and a blog posting that offer both darkness and consolation, brilliant stuff Geoff, thanks!

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  8. Beautiful column Geoff!

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  9. Brilliant column Geoff! I first encountered this song in D.L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game" when it played in the West End in 1999. An experience that was only slightly ruined when I saw the film version, with Dick Van Dyke (whow does somehow manage to ruin most things). Here's the link to the scene with the song from the film in case you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRtGvIPiQdg

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  10. I read somewhere that Cohen wrote the song for a tribute alum that was compiled to honour the 50th anniversary of Lorca's murder by Franco's fascists in 1936, and in fact the version on I'm Your Man is just a remixed version of his 1986 version.... adding the violin and Jennifer Warnes's vocals. If this is true, it really adds to the poignancy and gives the song a whole new element of historical memory.

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  11. I agree with J.J. This is a perfect example of creative translation - it takes some liberties but is completely faithful to the mood and surrealistic imagery of the poem.

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  12. This posting made me want to go to Vienna!!!

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  13. Yes, I think Mike is right, I'm pretty sure the song was on the 1986 compilation "Poets in New York." Which just adds to the song's power, if it was a tribute to a poet killed at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War......

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  14. It's so strange that another commentator disliked the Jennifer Warnes part of the song.... it's an incredibly moving and beautiful falsetto, just breaks my heart every time!

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  15. I saw the CBC documentary about Cohen, where he talks with Adrienne Clarkson and says he did 500 drafts of this song. This is incredible. I'd love to see those drafts!

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  16. I think there is a whole book to written (Geoff?) on Lorca's appearance in music - I think Nick Cave references him in "I'm on Fire" (2003) for example, and I bet there are other examples too.

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  17. WOW!! Is that really true about Schmetterlinge??? Are the lyrics translated anywhere online - the ones that critique the contest and consumer capitalism? What an amazing thing.

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  18. I just watched the Schmetterlinge video. Cannot stop laughing, this is GENIUS - the part around 1.34 minutes in, where they are dancing and singing "didgeredoo" is almost impossibly hilarious.

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  19. Steve, these are the lyrics I could find

    http://www.diggiloo.net/?1977at11

    Thanks for those references to the Poets in New York compilation-I wasnt aware of that

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  20. Thank you for mentioning us. As media manager of the Vienna Tourist Board, I certainly take your point about there being more to the city than Baroque splendour and chocolate-boxes. I can point your readers in the direction of The Arena in Vienna Erberg, fixed point in Vienna’s event scene and a site of subcultural history. Punk bands, trendy pop groups, music legends and Drum’n’Bass DJs appear here, one after the other. The industrial charm of the past is still present in the walls of the building. Today, graffiti adorns the old brick walls, while modern technical equipment guarantees unique concert experiences in a subcultural atmosphere - almost on a daily basis. In 1976, the former slaughterhouse was occupied by activists, who were campaigning for a rescue of the area and its use as a location for youth culture, alternative culture and counterculture. More than 200,000 people are purported to have visited the premises during the occupation and Leonhard Cohen was not the only singer to describe the area as the "best place in Vienna". Today, the Arena is Austria's largest alternative culture and communication center. The range of events is enormous: Big names from the international music scene, such as Sonic Youth, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Arctic Monkeys, have already stood on the stage of the large hall. With the Dreiraum and the small hall, the Arena also has two more stages, which offer the ideal setting for smaller concerts and artistic ideas. During the summer months, the approx. 400 square meter lawn area in the courtyard of the Arena becomes one of the most beautiful open-air venues in Austria. In the unique ambience of the old slaughterhouse, the Arena summer cinema also shows a selection of alternative film highlights every year. You can find more information, including a schedule of events, at http://www.arena.co.at/.

    With all good wishes

    Eva

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  21. Thanks for the film link, Martha. Re Dick Van Dyke, I have met people who admire his cockney accent in Mary Poppins!

    Kyle,thats a lovely image of the song at your wedding. Its the sort of song you remember.

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  22. Wait, I like Dick Van Dyke's accent in Mary Poppins, always thought it seemed authentically British working class!!!

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  23. I read somewhere that his voice coach on the film was Irish

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  24. Yes actually I can hear the Irish now - especially at 0.32 mins in this clip......

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_rVzBt20N0

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  25. Great blog and a great place to hang out with like-minded people.

    cheers
    ciao, http://www.angkasangga.org.ph

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