If you are looking for a definition of the term “text-image-scissors”, you will find it in the video by Theresa Pilsl. The opera singer is standing in a green dress in front of a piano at which a pianist in a smart shirt is sitting. With a lot of feeling she belts out a song whose lyrics don’t fit into the atmosphere at all. It’s the Ballermann classic “Go get a beer” by Mickie Krause.
Thousands of drunks usually roar the song on Mallorca’s party mile. This time it is Pilsl, last heard at the Leipzig Opera as Leonora in “Maskarade” by Carl Nielsen, who interprets the song in a completely new way. It’s not the only video of its kind: Composer, jazz pianist and lecturer Simon Mack has also uploaded several other, similarly curious versions of Ballermann hits.
“Ballermann is also high culture,” writes Mack on his website. “Goethe, Eichendorff and Rilke are dead. The great poets of today are called Ingo ohne Flamingo, Ikke Hipgold and Mickie Krause,” he says. With his projects, he wants to show that classical music is not something “that has to be completely humorless on the throne and that has nothing to do with our living environment,” said Mack “Deutschlandfunk Kultur”.
A year ago, for example, Mack made a Bach cantata out of the Ballermann hit “Saufen”. Text sample: “Drink, morning, noon, evening I want to drink / the tap has to run / morning, noon in the evening it has to run / the main thing is alcohol!” The video has already been viewed more than a million times on YouTube, and you can even order the sheet music from him. Bach, the pious cantor from the 18th century, would probably turn in his grave. Original interpreter Ingo without Flamingo, on the other hand, is happy about what has become of his work: “The idea is simply good and well implemented,” he praises Mack.
The feuilleton celebrates Mack with a somewhat more distinguished choice of words for “winning transcendent and spiritual dimensions from the text using the means of classical form”, as the “Berliner Zeitung” writes. Mack himself feels into the texts in a way that is probably no longer possible with two per thousand. In “Go get some beer” with the line “You’re getting ugly again” he recognizes “the extremely painful question about the transience of youth, beauty and love.” Mickie Krause has probably never thought about it that way.
Sources: Daniel Mack on Youtube / Daniel Mack / “Berliner Zeitung” / “Deutschlandfunk Kultur”
