Morbid Vienna - Street ballads and bench singers
Dear Alexandre,
I want to tell you about “Moritaten- und Bänkelsänger” – let’s say street ballad and bench singers.
The most famous Moritat is the famous ballad of Mack, the Knife – in German Mackie Messer. It was composed for the Threepenny opera, a famous originally German play. So it is a fictional Moritat, but from a time where the Bänkel singers where not forgotten yet. They got there name from having a preference of standing on benches or other bit higher structures, to be better seen and heard. From the Middle Ages the bench singers would tell the news and stories that moved the common people. They would stand somewhere crowded and tell there tales to inform people and to get some coins, I imagine. Without newspapers or radio it was tough to spread information. But apart from the news, they sang about interesting events and stories, about romance, conflict, catastrophes and hopefully some good news as well. They usually also showed pictures and posters to illustrate their tales. A hurdy-gurdy, an accordion or a violin went well together with the songs.
But when they sing about gruesome murder, blood and violence, they sing a Moritat. They want to thrill, threaten and warn of the dark side of human nature. I can only imagine what scary stories they had in their repertoire – the next best thing, when horror movies and true crime podcasts aren’t invented yet. “This gruesome murder is still not captured, be careful when you walk the street at nights! The strangler that terrorized the city? He was caught and torn apart alive! There is a murder, they call the butcher – beware of his big knife!”
Remember the story I told you about the composer Joseph Haydn and how he lost his head? Maybe someone wrote a Moritat like this, my naive try on that art form:
You think at least in death you lie
In peace and all the others cry
But listen up and pay attention
What devil’s play I have to mention
Remember the great Joseph Haydn?
Your eyes will prob’ly soon big widen
Cause someone’s lurking in the night
On the cemetery, in lantern light
The shovel calls for blood and bone
Digging up Haydn’s last throne
And with a single gruesome strike
The head was his, so was the night
The skull is mine, he cried ecstatic
He was a bloody skull fanatic
For seven years he held the bone
Till someone noticed “The head – it’s gone!”….
A good place to find a bench singer was also close to the places of execution. They would tell the tale of the culprit and why they are now about to be hanged or decapitated. I know of two such places in Vienna. One is close to the U4 station Rossauer Lände. There – a bit uphill, I believe - the Rabenstein (Ravenstone) was standing, where culprits lost their head. Another one was on the top of the hill that is behind the main train station at the “Spinnerin am Kreuz”.
With the invention of printing, those execution places attracted “song women” (Liederweiber). They would sell the stories in written down form. Although the government wanted to stop that practice, it went on and finally evolved into the first newspapers. One crown did a pamphlet with a widely exaggerated story over the wrongdoings of the prisoner sell – eine Krone. And this is the beginning of one of Austria’s biggest newspapers, the Kronenzeitung. They still love writing about murder and violence.
The newspapers marked the end of the old Bänkelsänger tradition, but I still like to think about them. Would I have been a bench singer back in the day? Standing on a bench singing my stories? I guess it was not a very high praised job. But I also heard it was a chance for disabled people to make money. Can you imagine getting your news from a bench singer? Like you leave your office and go to Mariahilferstraße to the next bench singer and that guy sings a tale of a country far away that got now a new leader that you know is a really bad one. And it is your home country. Wouldn’t that be scary? “And the U4 isn’t running between Schottenring and Schwedenplatz for the entire month” – even scarier!
Enjoy Vienna
