In August of 1980, the 37-year-old Austrian composer Heinz Karl Gruber made his American debut at Tanglewood, at the invitation of Gunther Schuller, who was conducting Gruber’s then-recent hit Frankenstein!! as the featured work of the Festival of Contemporary Music that year. The 28-minute score had achieved a sensation when Simon Rattle premiered it with the Liverpool Symphony, and Schuller featured it as one of the newest trends in contemporary music at a time when complex sonorities drawn from post-serial composers were still all the rage. Gruber’s half-hour score of songs (basically tonal) for a small chamber orchestra with a “chansonnier,” as Gruber called himself, intoning the text in a kind of speech/song. On top of the regular instruments, each of the non-string players had some kind of toy, like paper bags to be inflated and popped. This amusing piece was a late 20^th-century echo of the satirical echo of the serious political songs created by German composers and lyricists a century ago.

HK Gruber (he does not use periods for his initials), known almost universally by the nickname “Nali,” is Viennese born and trained; he is apparently a descendant of that Franz Xaver Gruber who composed “Silent Night.” He sang in the Vienna Boys Choir between the ages of 10 and 14, then pursued further studies in music, including a degree at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, where he studied double bass (he made his living for a number of years as an instrumentalist) and composition. His teachers included Erwin Ratz, Hanns Jelinek, and Gottfried von Einem. So he is familiar with the 12-tone and serial conventions of contemporary music; those conventions, though are not at the core of his work.

Indeed, as Frankenstein!! showed, Gruber’s most important inspiration came from the composers of cabaret music of the early 20^th century, which he offered at Tanglewood on August 4^th. For this program of songs by Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), Gruber served again as “chansonnier,” not “singer,” he specified. The tasty performances of one song after another did not come to us in a sustained bel canto vocal lyricism (which, he said, made it hard to understand the words), but rather in a kind of speaking on pitch, making the words much easier to grasp. In all this he was supported superbly by Kyrill Gerstein in complicated, stylish, difficult piano accompaniments.

Gerstein and Gruber performed 17 titles by the two composers, often with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, with whom both composers frequently collaborated. We could read the translated texts, as supertitles—a necessary accommodation because they were written in a slangy street language far from the academic German that most non-natives may know. On the whole, the generally more dissonant Eisler settings reflected his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, while Weill cast his theater songs (like the Threepenny Opera and Happy End) in a rather more popular mode, though always with a parodistic tone. The melodies could be catchy to a degree, though that was not their main function. For the most part they were designed to highlight the political meaning of the songs, especially to combat the rising tide of the Nazi Party as it opposed, and eventually brought down, the Weimar Republic.

Eisler’s “Zeitungsauschnitte” Opus 11 (“Newspaper clippings”) consisted of excerpts from the news of the day—reporting such matters as power control by oligarchs of the petroleum industry, and drastically different income levels from between workers and company owners—which sounded strikingly like issues in current political campaigns.

It may be the highly political content of the songs, important in a dark period of the century, that offended perhaps a dozen couples in the audience who slipped out well before the end of the show, or perhaps they simply misunderstood the advertisement of “Cabaret music from 1920s Berlin” as an announcement of excerpts from the Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret. In any case, the evening offered a 90-minute glimpse of an interesting repertoire from a century ago.

As an encore, the duo offered one song in English, Weil composed after he had escaped to the new world and started writing very successful Broadway musicals and music for films. In 1945 he joined with Ira Gershwin to write songs for film called Where Do We Go From Here? Within it, “The Song of the Rhineland” takes some elements of cabaret satire, but with an emphasis on Hollywood humor, which ended the evening with a delicious light touch   

Where the rain is rainier
And the brains are brainier,
And the wine is juicier,
And the goose-step goosier,
Where the heinie’s heinier,
And what’s yours is meinier…

Afterwards, a good part of the audience—old friends and new admirers—gathered around Gruber and Gerstein, and discussion flew in both English and German. I introduced myself to Gruber and told him that I had been present for Frankenstein!! in 1980, a performance that remains very vivid in my mind. His face took on a cheerful glow as he said, “That was my American debut!” But equally memorable to him was something that happened the day before the Tanglewood appearance: he went to New York, where he was able to meet and talk with Lotte Lenya, the widow of Kurt Weill, in the very apartment where they had been living at the time of Weill’s death in 1950. “Weill and Eisler made my career as a composer possible.”

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.