Viewers are currently in the middle of a robust Monday night drama-off, the two Williams brothers – creators of The Missing – having two shows, Rellik (BBC1) and Liar (ITV), going head to head in the battle for the most disturbing start to the week. At just over the halfway point for both, it is a fight that Liar – which started as an intriguing story of a rape accusation and what happens when justice seems out of reach, but has settled into a question of did-he-do-it/will-he-get-caught – is now comfortably winning. But for those not drawn in to made-up stories of deep human misery with seasick plots that sidestep and swerve, Mondays are also shaping up to be an excellent night for documentaries that show the real thing.
Tunes for Tyrants: Music and Power with Suzy Klein (BBC4) is a new three-part series that explores the role of music in 20th-century politics and how the medium has been both celebrated and exploited by those in authority. The first episode takes us to the aftermath of the first world war and shows how music can carry the potential for change, and the dangers of that power.
Pardon my inner ignoramus, but the thought of a BBC4 documentary about classical music doesn’t necessarily get the heart rate up. Tunes for Tyrants is, however, astonishingly good, asking difficult questions about censorship and the power of words without pretending to serve up any easy answers. We begin at the Brandenburg Gate and go back to the cabaret culture of 1920s Germany. Klein explains that political critique was inherent to these subversive, “anything goes” shows, and that this is what made Berlin’s club scene stand out from other cities at that time. She meets Sigrid Grajek, a contemporary cabaret artist who has a lovely way with an English phrase: “I always imagine it as a big … breathe,” she says, evocatively, of one song.
While it is tempting and, no doubt, reductive to draw contemporary parallels with the unfolding narrative, it is, nevertheless, chilling to hear of this Weimar-era radicalism, and how, for example, sexual identity and politics were at the forefront of many performers’ acts, with butch lesbians and made-up men among the songwriters and artists pushing for society to be more inclusive. We all know how that turned out, but Klein is incisive, asking Grajek whether she thinks composers such as Friedrich Hollaender underestimated what was coming. Was satire too weak a response? Was it too soft to treat everything as a joke, and to see mockery as resistance enough? Grajek says the cabaret singers weren’t to blame, that nobody had ever experienced what was to come next. “Now we know what can happen after a funny song,” she says – a warning and an instruction for today, perhaps, as the same questions are asked.
Music is not always a force for progressive change, of course. Such is its manipulative might that it can be used as a unifier for hate and violence. In one of the more arresting scenes, Klein performs Horst-Wessel-Lied, the banned Nazi anthem, on the piano, and discusses the internal debate she has had about whether to sing the words or not. It is an imprisonable offence in Germany, and though she says she does not agree with banning music, she nevertheless decides against it.
Klein judges her level of involvement expertly. She is not too central, as starry history presenters can occasionally be, but neither is she impersonal. She wears leather trousers, which brings to mind Amy Poehler’s “cool mom” in Mean Girls: she is not a regular presenter, she is a cool presenter! She smashes a piano during a segment on Soviet Russia – although, in a very BBC display of politeness, she assures viewers that it was destined for the scrapheap anyway. She has a go at playing the theremin, the democratic instrument approved of by Lenin, and uses flags to conduct a mass orchestra of Moscow’s city noises, to show how brilliantly bizarre Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens must have seemed. She even sings a Hollaender song that lampoons Nazi antisemitism by blaming Jewish people for everything, though she concedes that this is a bit close to the bone, even in this film.
Most extraordinary of all is the part about Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which reminds us that Mack the Knife is actually a song about a brutal murderer. Better still is the 1987 McDonald’s TV advert which reappropriated the central lyric and turned it into “Mac tonight”. The whole hour is excellent, but it’s worth watching Tunes for Tyrants just to see a man with a crescent moon for a head advertising cheap burgers with a song about a serial killer.
