The Klabrias game
The Klabriaspartie is a play held in Jewish jargon. It was the most successful Jewish jargon farce in German-speaking countries before 1938. The piece, first performed in 1890, had around 5,000 performances by 1925.
The author of the play was Adolf Bergmann (died impoverished in a psychiatric institution before 1925), who premiered it on November 8, 1890 in a performance at the Budapest Orpheum in Vienna. The piece is a translation and free adaptation of a one-act play of the same name (original title: A kalábriász parti ) by the Hungarian author and variety director Antal Orozzi, also known as Oroszi, pseudonym Caprice (d. Fiume 1904).
history
The first performance of the Hungarian original version took place in 1889 in the Jewish entertainment theater Folies Caprice in Budapest . Sándor Rott (1868–1942, known as "Klein Rott", not related to Max Rott, who later portrayed "rice" in Vienna) played the kibitz.
Adolf Bergmann added his own dialogues to the piece, translated it into Viennese-Jewish jargon and moved the plot from the fictional Budapest Café Abeles to the equally fictional Viennese Café Spitzer .
The Vienna version was performed on November 8, 1890 by the Budapest Orpheum Society under the title Eine Partie Klabrias in Café Spitzer . It was directed by Ferdinand Grünecker . The musical composition, the "Klabriasmarsch", was written by MO Schlesinger. The roles were played by Ferdinand Grünecker (Simon Dalles), Max Rott (Jonas Reis), Benjamin Blaß (Kibitz Dowidl), Karl Hornau (Prokop Janitschek), Kathi Hornau (Frau Reis) and Anton Rheder (waiter Moritz).
The "Klabriaspartie" was on the program of the "Budapesters" for 35 years, until 1925. The text was rewritten and expanded several times over the course of the season, including by Adolf Glinger . The line-up also changed constantly. After Grünecker, ensemble leader Heinrich Eisenbach took over the role of Simon Dalles, Josef Bauer of Kibitz and Josef Koller of Moritz.
In the last version the cast was: Adolf Glinger (Dalles), Sigi Hofer (Reis), Armin Berg (Dowidl), Hans Moser (Janitschek), Paula Walden (Frau Reis) and Leo Ginsberger (Moritz).
In 1891 the German-language version of the play was performed for the first time in Budapest (at that time still largely inhabited by German-speaking people), where it was also a great success, as in Berlin (at the Gebrüder-Herrnfeld-Theater ) and was repeatedly performed by many other theaters. The Klabrias part was also performed later in American exile , around 1942 at the Pythian Theater in New York by Kurt Robitschek , with Robitschek as Kibitz, Armin Berg as Reis, Oscar Karlweis as Janitscheck and Karl Farkas as Moritz. In Vienna, the Klabrias part has been shown every summer since 2008 in a slightly shortened version in Café Landtmann .
The Klabriaspartie had at least three sequels: The Klabriaspartie at the Heurigen (probably 1891), The Klabriaspartie in front of the court (author: probably Oroszy, around 1892, or Albert Hirsch ) and The Klabriaspartie in the Ashanti Village (written by Josef Armin in 1896 ), and was also parodied: The classic Klabriaspartie (by Rudolf Schanzer, in the cabaret Schall und Rauch 1901), here the characters of the one-act play were replaced by "classic" Jewish theater characters like Nathan and Shylock .
action
The play is about the fate of small peddlers and scroungers, their lives as "aerial people" and their struggle for their daily bread. They find their consolation in playing cards, dominoes and dice, including the Klabrias card game , a game for three people.
roll
The characters acting in this play are:
- Simon Dalles, Jewish card player
- Jonas Reis, Jewish card player
- Prokop Janitschek, Bohemian card player
- Moritz, waiter
- Lapwing Dowidl
- Mrs. Rice
The main character is Simon Dalles, whose name is derived from the Yiddish word “dáleß” for “poverty” or “misery”. The Jewish characters speak in Jewish jargon, the Bohemian " boehmakelt ".
reception
“The luminosity of Jewish jokes is centuries old. The ice-gray cleverness of his logic, the reality-shy skepticism of his view of the world born out of the most bitter suffering, the unoticism of his content, make it seem hard to explain why the Jewish joke has so victoriously asserted itself against the host people . Even radical anti-Semitism, if it wants to become 'satirical', has to dress up its intellectual inferiority with Jewish jokes. The Jewish joke is, without exaggerating too much, the salt of all aesthetic soups that are prepared in this country today. As astonishing as it sounds, it is true: as the mother of all Jewish jokes from Vienna to Neutitschein and from Budapest to Boskowitz: The Klabriaspartie . It contains in the original seed everything that fifty years of Jewish theater comedy has built on. What Jewish jokes are told nowadays was somehow already there in the 'Klabriaspartie', and when the joke-paper reader or the operetta-goer characterizes today's joke-making with the words: 'God, how old!', One is almost always right: fifty Years old, from the Klabrias part ... "
filming
- Die Klabriaspartie (1916, directed by Danny Kaden ), based on the stage version of the Berlin Herrnfeld Theater
literature
- Georg Wacks: III. Die Klabriaspartie , in: The Budapest Orpheum Society - A Varieté in Vienna 1889-1919. Verlag Holzhausen, Vienna 2002, pp. 56–61
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Georg Wacks: The Budapest Orpheum Society - A Varieté in Vienna 1889-1919. Verlag Holzhausen, Vienna 2002, p. 36
- ^ Austrian National Library: ÖNB-ANNO - The Stage. Retrieved October 3, 2017 .
- ^ Austrian National Library: ANNO, Neues Wiener Journal, 1904-05-05, page 5. Accessed on October 3, 2017 .
- ^ Susanne Korbel: Between Budapest, Vienna and New York. Jews and ("popular") cultural transformations around 1900. Dissertation, Graz 2017, p. 121. Available online: [1]
- ↑ Sándor Rott (in Hungarian) Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Mary Gluck: The Invisible Jewish Budapest. Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle . The University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin 2016, p. 168 ff. Some of the available online: [2]
- ↑ Theater ticket shown in Ich bin Jude, Österreicher, Deutscher by Bettina Riedmann, p. 197 [3]
- ↑ Ulrike Oedl: Theater in Exile [4]
- ↑ Simon Usati: O Tempora O Zores , p. 72 [5]
- ↑ Klabrias part in Café Landtmann [6]
- ↑ Klaus Hödl: Between Wienerlied and Der kleine Kohn , p. 72 [7]
- ^ Jews and the Making of Modern German Theater , ed. by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2010, p. 53
- ^ Jacques Hannak: Fifty Years of Klabriaspartie. Arbeiter-Zeitung , January 1, 1931, p. 13; Quoted in: Wacks, p. 63
