Georg Kreisler:BIRD LOVERS in central Europe can sleep easy again. Austrian-born cabarettist Georg Kreisler, who shot to fame with his song Poisoning Pigeonsin the Park, has died in Salzburg on Tuesday aged 89.
The son of a Jewish lawyer, he was 16 when his family fled their Vienna home after the 1938 Nazi Anschluss of Austria.
Settled in California, the young Kreisler studied music, found work as an arranger and pianist and, aged 19, married the daughter of fellow émigré Friedrich Holländer, whose songs were immortalised by Marlene Dietrich. Taking American citizenship, he served in the entertainment corps of the US army in England. After the war, as a German speaker, he served as translator in Allied interrogations of top Nazis, including Der Stürmerpublisher Julius Streicher and Hermann Göring.
Leaving the army he returned to film music and in Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux – Chaplin whistled the melodies, Kreisler transcribed it and gave it to composer Hans Eisler to score.
In the early 1950s Kreisler moved to New York but his material – a show entitled Please Shoot Your Husband!– was considered too dark for American audiences and early recordings made during this time vanished until recently.
Kreisler returned to Vienna in 1955 where he soon made a name for himself with his subversive, self-composed songs such as Non-Aryan Arias or When the Circus Went Up in Flames.Kreisler mined his love-hate relationship with his homeland throughout his career, in songs such as Vienna would be beautiful without Viennese and Death must be a Viennese.
It was a relationship that was never resolved: on his 80th birthday he forbade the Austrian president from issuing an official letter of congratulations. Kreisler’s anger, his daughter said, was because “in 40 years no one in Austria ever thought of giving the emigrant Georg Kreisler back his Austrian citizenship”.
Kreisler said his distinctive marriage of macabre lyrics with light musical accompaniment to create “everblacks, not evergreens” was drawn from his anarchist political views and a lifetime embracing pessimism.“The optimists landed in Auschwitz, the pessimists in Beverly Hills,” he remarked.
Kreisler’s passing leaves unanswered one important question: who decided to poison the pigeons first? Around the same time as Kreisler, American humorist Tom Lehrer released his own song with an identical title and similar melody and lyrics.
Lehrer, with no small measure of irony, later thanked Kreisler "for introducing my songs to German audiences". Fans soon noticed similarities in other Kreisler material, such as his song The Girl with the Three Blue Eyesand an Abe Burrows song of the same name. Kreisler rejected all accusations of plagiarism and his death was marked in Germany and Austria as the passing of one of the last great practitioners of the political cabaret tradition.
Kreisler is survived by his fourth wife, Barbara Peters, and three children.
Georg Kreisler: Born July 18th, 1922; died November 22nd, 2011