Seeing 1852 Joshua Norton in a 1930 Song from a Brecht Play
“What is Rice, Actually?”
BEFORE moving to San Francisco in 2010, I lived in New York for 12 years. (I switched coasts again in 2020 and now live in Boston.)
One night in late 1998, about 8 months after taking up residence in Washington Heights, I made my way to Tribeca to see a show at The Knitting Factory (R.I.P.) by a new ensemble that specialized in songs with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956).
The 5-member group called itself Mr. Wau Wa, after an inscription in the following photograph. The c.1920 photo is an advertising image depicting an Octoberfest scene in a show produced and performed in Germany between 1920 and 1922 by the Bavarian comic actor Karl Valentin (1882–1948), with tuba, and his longtime creative partner Liesl Karlstadt (1892–1960), seen here as the top-hatted male impresario and announcer. Valentin and Karlstadt were highly influential in setting the tone for Weimar popular culture.
Brecht is second from left, mock-playing a flageolet. In the show, the character of Valentin Wau — the “reclining” figure in the painting on the front of the booth — is a Herculean muscle man who allows himself to be run over by a car carrying five people.
Advertising photograph, c.1920, depicting Octoberfest scene in show produced in Germany between 1920 and 1922 by the comic duo of Karl Valentin (with tuba) and Liesl Karlstadt (in top hat). Bertolt Brecht is second from left. Source: Valentin Karlstadt Musäum
One song on the program was “Supply and Demand” — memorably sung by Rinde Eckert, who already was becoming established as a respected writer, composer, musician, and performer of experimental opera and musical theater.
“Supply and Demand” — often subtitled “The Trader’s Song” — is one of six songs, with music by Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), originally included in the Brecht play whose German title, Die Maßnahme, generally is translated either as The Measures Taken or The Decision. The play was first performed in Berlin in December 1930.
After the works of Brecht and Eisler were banned by the Nazi Party in 1933, both artists went into exile and eventually found refuge in the United States, with Eisler arriving in New York in 1938 and Brecht arriving in California in 1941.
Eisler joined Brecht in 1942, and both spent the next several years writing for films. After the war, however, both Brecht and Eisler were blacklisted by Hollywood and targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Immediately after testifying before the Committee in October 1947, Brecht fled for Europe. Eisler was deported in March 1948.
Neither ever returned to the United States.
Bertolt Brecht (r) and Hanns Eisler in Berlin in 1932. Photograph: Zoltán Kluger (1896–1977) and Wilhelm von Szigethy. Getty Images. Source: De Groene Amsterdammer
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AN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE recording of “Supply and Demand” — possibly the first — appeared on the 1964 album Songs of Hanns Eisler (Folkways Records), by Eric Bentley (1916–2020).
Bentley was an English musicologist, translator, and theater critic who — after graduating from Oxford — arrived in the United States in 1938 and earned a Ph.D. from Yale in 1941.
Among many other things, Bentley went on to become a recognized scholar and translator of Brecht. After recording “Supply and Demand” in 1964, he recorded it again for his 1965 album Bentley on Brecht: Songs and Poems of Bertolt Brecht (Folkways Records). The translation is Bentley’s.
In Brecht’s play of 1930, “Supply and Demand” is sung by a Trader — representing the Communist Party leadership — to a Young Comrade, symbolizing the eager, naive youth of the party.
The message of the song is crystallized in the Trader’s answers to three versions of the same question. Here is the first verse in Bentley’s translation — the one I heard from Mr. Wau Wa in 1998:
There is rice down the river.
In the provinces up the river
The people need rice.
If we leave the rice in the warehouse
It will cost them more.
Those who pull the ricebarge
Will then get much less rice.
For me the rice will then be even cheaper.
What is rice, actually?
Do I know, do you know,
What's this thing called rice?
God only knows what rice is
I only know its price.
The second verse asks, “What is cotton, actually?” — then the third verse, more darkly: “What is a man, actually?”
The point is that the character of any given commodity is barely relevant. A commodity’s real value lies in how well it can be leveraged for profit.
Of course, the real-life commodities trader that concerns us here is Joshua Norton. Anyone who knows the story of Joshua’s opportunistic attempt, in December 1852, to corner the rice market in San Francisco with its large Chinese population — during a famine in China that had led China to ban the export of rice — will readily make the Joshua connection upon hearing the first verse of “Supply and Demand.”
Here is Eric Bentley’s 1965 recording of the song — followed by a roundup of three more recordings and performances of “Supply and Demand” from 1986, 1996, and 2022.
The German rock chanteuse Dagmar Krause (b. 1950) uses Bentley’s English translation in the recording of “Supply and Demand” that appears on her 1986 album Supply & Demand: Songs by Brecht / Weill & Eisler (Hannibal Records). The following audio of the full album opens with the original German version of the song; the English version is at 49:35.
Two years earlier, the Australian musician Robyn Archer (b. 1948) included “Supply and Demand” on her 1984 album Robyn Archer Sings Brecht, Volume Two (EMI). Archer uses a different English translation by John Willett (1917–2002), an English contemporary of Eric Bentley’s who also was regarded as a Brecht authority.
Willett’s take on the first verse:
Rice can be had down the river.
People in the remoter provinces need their rice.
If we can keep that rice off the market
Rice is bound to get dearer.
Then the men who pull the barges must go short of rice
And I shall get my rice for even less.
By the way, what is rice?
Don’t ask me what rice is.
Don’t ask me my advice.
I’ve no idea what rice is:
All I have learned is its price.
Archer created the following video of the song in Berlin in 1996, for the documentary Solidarity Song: The Hanns Eisler Story.
Finally, the following performance by Bremner Fletcher Duthie (b. 1966) at BrechtFest III, held in New Orleans on 7 March 2022.
Duthie uses the Willetts translation — with minor variations. In the “rice verse,” where Archer sings
If we can keep that rice off the market
Rice is bound to get dearer.
Duthie has
If I can get that rice off the market
Rice will be more expensive.
No doubt, that last line was massaged to make it easier for American audiences to understand.
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One likes to imagine that a chastened and changed Emperor Norton would have been haunted by the reflection of his earlier, profiteering self in this chilling song by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler.
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