We are in the middle of Dry January, many are abstaining from alcohol. Well! The liver is slowly defatting, new evening routines are established, sleep quality and cardiovascular system have improved and with it mood, well-being and sexual performance. But the humour. It seems to go down with blood pressure.
While any health benefits of drinking even small amounts of alcohol may have been refuted by now, we owe intoxication cultural and intellectual achievements that may have made us human in the first place. And the nice thing is that you don’t have to do without them even in Dry January.
Take, for example, the work of the duck-headed singer Ingo sans Flamingo, which was originally sung on Mallorca and then spread to all the wet parties. Here is an excerpt from the refrain: “Drink, morning, noon, evening, I want to drink… The tap has to run… The main thing is alcohol! … Drinking, in the morning, at noon, in the evening I want to drink.” etc. The captivatingly clear text is in good hands with the accompanying music, which is still cantabile even at 2.8 per mille, i.e. you can slur and bawl with it. What more do you want?
The composer Simon Mack has now succeeded in extracting transcendent and emotional dimensions from the text using the means of classical form by setting the text to music as a chamber cantata à la Bach. There is a gorgeous recording, available on YouTube, with tenor Magnus Dietrich, blow-dried well and with a poet’s gaze, announcing his desire, and Anna Gebhardt swinging into the languor on the grand piano with brave impudence.
Nice how the rooster has to “run” in foaming fountain coloratura or how the syllables of “alcohol” expand in a consciousness-expanding way. And it is far more than just funny when Dietrich climbs up on the third repetition of the line “I can already walk again” with tender feet, seems to float away with designed uncertainty and, even before he falls to the ground of sobriety, the barely regained motor skills for quick reloading. What jumps off as a Ballermannhit ends up as a spiritual elegy of flight from the world, loneliness and systematic self-destruction. A glass of buttermilk!