Bänkelsang

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Banter singer in front of a rural audience ( behind glass picture )
Singer in Basel. The pictures sung about show the Basel earthquake in 1356 and the floods in Hölstein in 1830.

Bänkellieder (also Bänkelsang or Bänkelgesang ) were narrative songs with often dramatic content. Bänkelgesang was a pan-European phenomenon from the Middle Ages until the 19th century. Bailiff singers were important news reporters at that time , in Italy they were called cantastorie . To get from the audience, e.g. B. in the market place, to be seen better, they stood on a wooden bench when they performed moritus , ballads and songs. Boards on which the depicted scenes were painted were used to illustrate what was happening. In order to increase the tension, these pictures were not arranged in chronological order, but the singer pointed with a stick to what was applicable.

history

Since the 18th century, song lyrics were printed frequently. Around 1830, the Viennese engraver Franz Barth produced folded song leaflets with a cover picture and notes. The grave songs of the Upper Swabian pastor Michael von Jung , published in 1839, are also close to the banter . Half a century later, cheaper printing processes replaced expensive copperplate engraving. This made higher editions and wider distribution possible. The heyday of petty singing fell in the 19th century until before the First World War .

The schnitzel benches, which are in the tradition of the paddock singing, are still a key element of the Basel Carnival and are also cultivated elsewhere during the Swabian-Alemannic Carnival . The "Schnitzel" are the texts that are distributed, the speakers usually also point at pictures with a stick and have a catchy vocal melody that they accompany with guitar, accordion or other instruments.

Even in the present there are still some artists who maintain the tradition of the bailiff. Well-known banter singers are and were the Swiss Peter Hunziker, who has been active for 40 years and who died in 2019, as well as the Germans Michael Günther, Peter Runkowski and Paul Kamman. In Vienna, Eberhard Kummer and chamber actress Elisabeth Orth made a recording of petty songs based on historical principles.

Other artists process modern texts by Fritz Grasshoff , Erich Kästner , Eugen Roth and Fridolin Tschudi, among others , and set their own texts to music in the style of a petty song. They appear with their programs in small theaters. Some poets called themselves descendants of the bailiff singers and called their texts morality, for example Grasshoff in the well-known text "The morality of the ice-cold gas company director".

Presentation style

“Die Bänkelsänger” in front of an audience. Etching by Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich around 1740

From the 17th to the 19th century, banter singers traveled from place to place to tell of gruesome stories, of murder, love, catastrophes and exciting political events at fairs , church festivals , marketplaces , in ports, on the streets of the cities or on the village meadow . Flank singers were therefore also counted among the traveling people , and it was not uncommon for war invalids or " cripples " who tried to make ends meet.

During his presentation, the ballad singer on a small bank, which provided Bänkel . He usually pointed with a long staff at a picture board with some drawings that illustrated his morality . He often accompanied his performance musically with a hurdy-gurdy , violin, lute, or later the barrel organ.

Income

Morality teller, Dutch, 17./18. century

Moritaten are gruesome ballads , narrative songs by the petty singer. The origin of the name is controversial. There are several options: Either from Latin , edifying story or from the Rotwelsch moores or Yiddish mora : noise, shock; but maybe also corruption of murder . But it is also plausible to explain that the expression of morality comes from morality because originally all morities all had a moral stanza; often even one was added later on pressure from the authorities. In many places, the texts therefore had to be shown to the authorities first.

Adaptations

"Das Assentat", a satirical denunciation of the attempted assassination attempt by Tschech in 1844

In the 19th and 20th centuries there was a correlation between the field of poetry and petty singing. Cabaret artists and poets resorted to stylistic elements from Moritaten, and bailiff singers became similar to poets. The style elements were mainly the concise black and white painting and the simple verses. One example is The Ballad of Mack the Knife from The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht . At the world premiere in Berlin, all stylistic elements of morality, of petty singing, were used: the singer turned the barrel organ, the cylinder of which had been specially made for this purpose, pointed like a petty singer with a stick at the corresponding sign, the melody was memorable, the words were impressive and pictorial. Many of the early works by the songwriter Franz-Josef Degenhardt also carried on the tradition of petty singing in an artistic way, an example of this is the song Wölfe in the middle of May… .

Picture narratives in other cultures

In the 18th and 19th centuries attracted in Iran (Persian storyteller pardadari "curtain holders") with large oil on canvas images around and sang the tragic theme of the Battle of Karbala . To this day, in the north-west Indian state of Rajasthan, long fabric pictures ( phad ), which contain the entire topic, are attached to the wall and presented by a narrator who belongs to the Bhopa ethnic group. He accompanies his singing on the string Ravanahattha . The 19th century Paithan painting from the eponymous town in Maharashtra in northwest India is a series of individual pictures . A shadow theater group maintains a similar tradition in a rural area there to this day. In West Bengal , the Patua show long scrolls and tell stories about them. In the Indonesian wayang beber , a narrator presents scrolls containing several individual scenes, accompanied by a music ensemble. In medieval Japan there were the picture scrolls emakimono . Also Japanese is the Kamishibai paper theater , in which a narrator on the street pushes paper pictures one after the other into a peep box

See also

Audio samples

  • Elisabeth Orth : Sentimental folk songs about death, robbers and murderers. Together with Eberhard Kummer. CD. Preiser Records, Vienna 1993.
  • Scary morities, 60 poignant German songs . 60 titles with different speakers. 3 CDs. Weltbild publishing house, 2008.

literature

  • Hyazinth Lehmann (Ed.): Bänkel and Brettl , Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden 1953. [1]
  • Eric Singer (Ed.): Bänkelbuch , Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne - Berlin 1955. [2]
  • Wolfgang Braungart (Ed.): Bänkelsang - Texts - Pictures - Comments , Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-15-008041-X
  • Egbert Koolman : Bank songs and fairground prints. Catalog (= publications of the Oldenburg State Library. 22 = Catalogs of the Oldenburg State Library. 6). Holzberg, Oldenburg 1990, ISBN 3-87358-357-7 (review by Gerold Schmidt: Oldenburgische Familienkunde. Jg. 33, H. 4, 1991, ISSN  0030-2074 ).
  • Leander Petzoldt (Ed.): Bank songs and moritats from three centuries (= Fischer. 2971). Texts and notes with accompanying chords. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-596-22971-5 .
  • Leander Petzoldt: Bänkelsang. In: Rolf Wilhelm Brednich , Lutz Röhrich , Wolfgang Suppan (eds.): Handbuch des Volksliedes. Volume 1: The genres of the folk song (= motifs. 1, ISSN  0178-0123 ). Fink, Munich 1973, pp. 235-291.
  • Leander Petzoldt: Bänkelsang and newspaper. Documentation of a murder in the Hamburg media in the second half of the 19th century. In: Monika Fink, Rainer Gstrein, Günter Mössmer (eds.): Musica Privata. The role of music in private life. Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Walter Salmen. Edition Helbling, Innsbruck 1991, ISBN 3-900590-20-6 , pp. 345-352.
  • Leander Petzoldt: Bänkelsang. From historical banter to literary chanson (= Metzler Collection. 130). Metzler, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-476-10130-4 .
  • Leander Petzoldt (Ed.): The joyless muse. Texts, songs and pictures to the historical bench singing. Metzler, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-476-00384-1 .
  • Leander Petzoldt: Horrible deeds have happened. 31 loans from the past century. Heimeran, Munich 1968, (facsimiles).
  • Leander Petzoldt: The decline of a traveling trade. Interview with Ernst Becker, the "last bailey singer". In: Swiss Archives for Folklore. Vol. 68/69, 1972/1973, ISSN  0036-794X , pp. 521-533 .
  • Leander Petzoldt: Social conditions of the petty singing in the 17th to 19th centuries. Problems and examples. In: Hans Dieter Zimmermann (Red.): Leching for tyrant blood. Ballad, Bänkelsang and Song (= series of publications by the Academy of Arts. 9). Mann, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-7861-6158-5 , pp. 13-24.
  • Leander Petzoldt: About the problem of non-simultaneity, or: “The craftsmen could still sing”. In: Bänkelsang and Moritat. (Exhibition of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphic Collection from June 14 to August 24, 1975). Staatsgalerie Stuttgart - Graphic Collection, Stuttgart 1975, pp. 43–51.
  • Hans Peter Treichler (ed.): German ballads. Folk and art ballads, bank singing, sales. Manesse, Zurich 1993, ISBN 3-7175-1840-2 .

Web links

Commons : Bänkelsang  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. For the period see: Harald Fricke et al. (Ed.): Reallexikon der Deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Volume 1: A-G. 3rd, revised edition. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 1997, ISBN 3-11-010896-8 , p. 190.