Eastern Europe’s last tango. A journey through the interwar musical scene

A disc of Vasile’s “Zaraza” - a tango from 1931. Photo: Colectia Mihai Barbulescu (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

But, far from being the last tango, it was this French number which siphoned the rhythms of tango even further away from its Argentine roots and first brought it to the stages, microphones and hearts of Eastern Europe which drank liberally from its shattering sound. Though the refrain stuck, “under the sky of Argentina” it was not.

The old-guard, loutish, Corn Cob Argentine original, packed with double entendres, is better known than the European variant. But in French, as in its later Polish and Russian, “Le Dernier Tango” tells the same compelling, highly tango-esque story of a tumultuous relationship between one impressionable male tourist and one enchanting femme fatale, with their brief and fervent rendezvous ultimately shattered as he is deposited for the affections of another. The traveller then invites her to dance one last tango, during which he murders her. Melodramatic, yes – but it was imbued with the exact feverish, superlative-laced passion which would later become symbolic of an Eastern European tango.

Tango moves East

Wasyl Sydorenko, a reference specialist with the Petro Jacyk Resource Centre at the University of Toronto Libraries, explains that “Le Dernier Tango” was in fact one of the first best-known European tangos from France, seeping East around the mid-1910s. “It came to Ukraine via Odesa and was sung there by Jewish-Ukrainian singer Isa Kremer,” he tells me. “The tragic subject of the lyrics of this tango was used to create the plot of an early Ukrainian silent film.”

Sydorenko knows Ukrainian tango well, with a childhood steeped in classical music and peppered with his father’s collections of old Ukrainian tango scores. But while Sydorenko admits that this early tentative era of modern Ukrainian music petered out following the Russian Revolution and the Spanish flu, the “Le Dernier Tango” had already made its way to Poland. When it was first heard as “Ostatnie Tango” on the stage of the Czarny Kot (Black Cat) cabaret in Warsaw in 1919, it was the opening chords to a vibrant musical culture Poland craved to accomplish after the nation had regained independence.

The Polish version was first performed by the charming, wide-grinned Karol Hanusz, depicted on the song’s sheet music with a cane and top hat in true flâneur style. The song’s legacy ultimately earnt Hanusz the epithet as “King of Polish Tango”. Yet Hanusz, whose influence has been all but forgotten in Polish culture today, did more than just croon about Argentine skies. As “Ostatnie Tango” drew other Polish musicians to more modern sounds, Hanusz too was personally responsible for championing their talents. One of his best-known protégés was the effervescent Eugeniusz Bodo – think a Polish cross between Maurice Chevalier and Clark Gable. Bodo would ultimately become the poster boy for Polish interwar culture with fingers in every cultural pie – stage, screen, music – and even establishing his own restaurant, Café Bodo, in 1939.

In the early days, buoyed by the intoxicating rhythms of musical experimentation in Western Europe and America, Polish music blossomed jazz, foxtrot – and especially tango – from its speakers. One of these was Syrena Records: a behemoth of the Eastern European recording world, established in 1908 which was pumping out millions of records even before the First World War.

Hanusz was one of many eager-eyed Polish musicians whose experiments in modern styles were ardently and irrevocably stamped on the face of the country’s cultural history via the rich, warm tones of Syrena. But three of Syrena’s giants were the Gold Brothers: Artur and Henryk, and their cousin Jerzy Petersburski – whose jazz of the early 1920s had brought a lighter music into mainstream Polish culture. They held a powerful monopoly over Polish music throughout the interwar period and tasted success early. Petersburski’s runaway hit was the 1929 “Tango Milonga”, a more potent cousin of “Le Dernier Tango”, which was sold for 3,000 shillings in Vienna to be transformed into the more western success-story “O Donna Clara”.

Paris of the East

The early Polish interwar music, which merged traditional folk motifs with intoxicating modern rhythms, spoke of a more technologically minded, progressive Polish musical scene where arrangements altered day-by-day as musicians skipped between bands, and new compositions could be finalised overnight. But it was the tango which so often took centre stage. From 1919 to 1939, Syrena Records churned out millions of tangos on brilliant blue, gold-smattered discs, cadences weeping a heartfelt and Slavic melancholia. Many artists who achieved popularity in the burgeoning Polish musical scene had multi-ethnic backgrounds, carving discs in which, for example, lively buoyant Russian melodies could creep into aching Klezmer.

Syrena’s base was the Polish capital Warsaw; which, with its exquisite streets, where porticos dripped from luxurious three-storey apartments and elegant artifices oozed cabarets, became known in the period as the Paris of the East. Its Moulin Rouge was probably the Adria Restaurant, complete with revolving dance floor and winter café garden – bombed in the Second World War, the shell still exists today, but the swathes of silk piling through its doors and glittering neon lights have long since been extinguished.

But, in actual fact, the modern sounds of Polish interwar music were not really nurtured in Warsaw. Instead, the eastern city of Lviv, with its linguistic, ethnic and social panorama, became a Polish cultural heartland in the interwar period, the birthplace of many celebrities of the age. From 1933 every Sunday, Polish Radio dutifully transformed into a Lvovian locale, as the comedian duo Szczepcio and Tońcio giggled their way through their “Lwów’s Merry Wave”, a transmission broadcast from Lviv, which leached a distinct accent of Polish yesteryear. This interwar Polish brand of Received Pronunciation was a Lvovian-esque patois from the East, which merged elements of Ukrainian pronunciation with Polish, and became the multi-ethnic signature to all Polish cultural production of the age.

Lviv would come to be a bastion of Polish culture even after war had again shattered the region, when the Polish King of Jazz – Henryk Wars, an already prominent player in cultural spheres – established his Tea Jazz Orchestra in the city, protecting the last vestiges of the Polish golden age of music. Bodo played there, touring with the orchestra across the Soviet Union before being held on trumped-up charges of espionage by the Soviets and starving to death in a Gulag in 1943. Another musician in Wars’s eclectic Tea Jazz blend was Irena Yarossevich, performing under the name Renata Bogdańska. She would later marry the Polish General Władysław Anders, becoming the Polish cultural sweetheart Irena Anders.

Unmistakable undertones

But Yarossevich rose to fame singing in Ukrainian in the interwar period, when Lviv – apart from being an artery of Polish music – was also home to budding young Ukrainian musicians. She performed in the Ukrainian jazz-band Yabtso, an orchestra established in 1934 in an effort to curb the domination of Polonia in local music circles. This new Ukrainian band on the scene which, as Sydorenko puts it, “vied for popularity with Henryk Wars”, brought Ukrainian folk flavours to Lviv’s musical output. Where their concerts ran for nine hours at a time, so too did the music flow; a deep, unapologetic, potently Ukrainian liqueur of tradition and modern sound.

Yabtso included Leonid Yablonsky, as well as Anatoly Kos-Anatolsky and Stepan Huminilovych. Their star, however, was the mellow-faced Bohdan Vesolovsky, now known as the father of Ukrainian tango: a composer with dark, inquisitive eyes, always sharply dressed in big collars and tweed and slick side-parting, who left behind him almost 130 classic hits of old-school Lviv. And, whilst his “Pryide Shche Chas” (“The Time Will Come Again”) – written when he was 22 – gained popularity in both Ukrainian and Polish crowds, his “Chy Spravdi?” (“Is it really so?”) spoke to a Ukrainian population saturated by feelings of exile, paralysed by a lack of independence. In fact, these were unmistakable undertones, says Sydorenko, to the Ukrainian musical output of the 1920s and 1930s.

“In some ways,” he explains, “Ukrainian interwar music was just as ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ as in Western Europe, but in other ways it was still 50 years behind the times.” He adds that even in musical circles of today not everyone agrees that there are Ukrainian compositions within the genres popular seventy years ago – back then, Ukrainian music, just like Polish, was decidedly multicultural. The rousing lilt of prized national or regional tunes toyed against more modern harmonies in a landscape shattered by ethnic struggle.

Sydorenko’s view is that Ukrainian music between the wars even varied across the different segments of the Ukrainian landscape, beginning with the world of “Le Dernier Tango”.

“In Russian Ukraine, which included all the territories following the Third Partition of Poland,” he explains, “tango appeared before the First World War. There were two vectors of dispersal, one originating in St Petersburg, one in Odesa.”

But after 1918, musical production in Soviet-dominated Ukraine was ultimately stifled under a crushing weight of repression. Though modern influences still dripped into this quarter, the taste of new music was far richer in the West.

“In interwar Polish Ukraine,” Sydorenko explains, “the main vector of influence was Warsaw and the many cabarets that visited Lviv.”

Though this helped to increase the popularity of other styles like foxtrot, it was again tango which particularly intoxicated Ukrainian crowds, from Polish to Soviet quarters. And Sydorenko believes this was mainly due to one man: the captivating Petro Leshchenko.

“Recordings by Leshchenko,” he explains, “were probably the single-most important medium for introducing the tango in all parts of Ukraine.”

Grassroots approach

Animated, warm, with a wide, toothy smile, Leshchenko eventually would become known as the “King of Russian Tango”, but he was, in fact, the embodiment of the most sundry of Eastern European melting-pot identities. He had been born into a Ukrainian family and rising to fame singing in Ukrainian and Russian in Latvia, before crooning the tangos and foxtrots of multiple Eastern European nations from his base in Bucharest in Romania. Jerzy Petersburski was one of his favourite composers, but so too was the only female composer of light music in interwar Poland, Fanny Gordon. Gordon – who had Jewish and Russian roots – had taken the Eastern European recording world by storm in 1929 with her “Pod Samowarem” (“Under the Samovar”). This song was popular in Poland and Russia – there performed by Leshchenko – but the song also made its way to Lithuanian speakers.

That country was also brimming with the new, modern sound of the jazz age: Gordon’s heady, jovial tune was sung by the charming Danielius Dolskis, the leading proponent of Lithuanian takes on popular music. Lithuanian interwar culture found its home on the little stages of cafés and restaurants, which hosted a variety of artists from Eastern Europe who interspersed foreign schlagers with more home-grown songs. But it was inherently multicultural too: in cafés across Kaunas, Moishe Hofmekler’s Hofmeklerband dabbled in the light tunes of new Lithuania alongside the classical music in which he had been trained, a trend also prevalent for his Polish and Ukrainian musical cousins. Hofmeklerband also competed with an ensemble founded by Daniel Pomeranc, a Lithuanian jazz pioneer who had initially played in the famed Berlin orchestra led by Marek Weber – a musician who was, incidentally, born in Lviv.

And it was at this grassroots level, even away from recording companies like the Polish Syrena, that musicians really came together to promote the delicious, velvet, cosmopolitan sound of modern styles. As Sydorenko notes about Polish Ukraine, “there were cabarets in the big cities and sometimes even in the smaller towns of Volyn” – but, he told me, with a story evoking the Polish Eugeniusz Bodo’s own gastronomic enterprise, “the most important cultural centre in Eastern Europe for this type of music was the restaurant night club of Petro Leshchenko in Bucharest. The who’s who of Eastern Europe all came to his establishment.”

And the city in which Leshchenko capitalised on an Eastern European hunger for interwar sounds was itself a proponent of the modern music scene. I spoke with Oana Cătălina Chiţu, a singer who has recently released two albums of interwar Romanian classics, who led me to another café: her father’s. It was there, the only café in her village, where as a child she first learnt of Romanian tangos, performed by her father to entertain customers, just as musicians had done back in the 1920s and 1930s across Romania.

But Bucharest was the epicentre. If Warsaw was dubbed the Paris of the East, Bucharest was, strangely enough, known by another variant of the name of that freethinking French capital: Little Paris. As Chiţu puts it, “the city was open, cosmopolitan and vibrant with life.” This oozed into its music too – and particularly its tangos – which were replete with distinctly Argentine, yet Romanian flairs.

Her most recent album is a celebration of interwar star Maria Tănase, whom Chiţu calls “an icon of Romanian music”. With a seductive, plush and brassy alto voice, Tănase – known as the Édith Piaf of Romania – wrapped millions in the beguiling strains of modern and traditional song, earning her a domestic and even international following. But, just as Chiţu’s earlier “Bucharest Tango” album testifies, Tănase was one of many gifted Romanian musicians of the age. As the lăutar Zavaidoc recorded folk songs on Columbia Records, Jean Moscopol, the Romanian Valentino, slipped between Bucharest and Berlin as he brought the most renowned popular hits back to his home country, all imbued with his distinctive, almost purring intonation. Here, as in Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, the musical borderlines of traditional and popular, international and domestic, were decidedly fluid.

A new era

Then there was the youthful Cristian Vasile, now seen as “the last troubadour” of a more dynamic music age. Vasile inundated Romanian crowds in cafés and restaurants with delicious, aching interpretations of tangos fraught with devastation. His classic is “Zaraza”, a tango from 1931 positively saturated with desire and with a melody plucked straight from Argentina. Its devastating narrative and beguiling rhythm ensured success in Romanian interwar music circles. In 1939 it swept north to Poland, where Wiera Gran and Albert Harris also popularised the song among Polish audiences ever-hungry for Eastern European light music. Ironically, it was there that the benign original title of “Zaraza”, Spanish for “chintz”, had to be altered to “Gdy guitar gra piosenkę” (“When the guitar plays a song”) – “Zaraza” is a Polish word for plague. In fact, a few years later it would transform again in Poland into “Pierwszy sierpnia dzień krwawy” (“The First Day of Bloody August”): one of many songs commemorating the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

In its Romanian home, however, “Zaraza”, also achieved semi-legendary status – but here for a darker, more twisted reason. The ambiguous lyrics lent themselves perfectly to the cultivation of a myth which in some circles even today is still entertained with sincerity. The story goes that Zaraza was in fact the name of a captivating beauty, a Romanian Helen of Troy, for whom Vasile had fallen. Incandescent with jealous rage, an antagonist Zavaidoc arranged for Zaraza to be killed – leaving Vasile devastated. He then, of course, did what any distraught tango-esque lover would and, stealing her ashes from the crematorium, devoured them with a spoon. Some say this is the reason behind the real-life deterioration of Vasile’s sumptuous voice – though the more likely cause is cancer.

“Zaraza”, a perhaps more unnerving cousin of “Le Dernier Tango”, signalled that the new era of sophisticated light music was veritably in full swing across Eastern Europe. When war and the communist regime abruptly snatched this beguiling needle away, it appeared an abrupt end to the smooth, mesmerising, polychromatic tones of Eastern European musical enterprise – not least because so many gorgeous interwar artists from across the region did not make it through the war.

Yet, just as there has been a vintage revival in recent years in musical circles in Poland, so too are Chiţu and Sydorenko helping to preserve and cement the velour legacy of interbellum Eastern Europe in a worldwide musical consciousness. Under the sky of Argentina – or of Eastern Europe – there is a woman, or a song, “toujours divine”.

Juliette Bretan studies English Literature at the University of Cambridge and also works as a freelance journalist, specialising in Eastern European culture and current affairs. Her blog, Visions of the Vistula, researches specific cultural pieces from Polish history.

interwar music, Poland, Romania, tango, Ukraine