Ooohhh! I missed that remark. All the same my gut feeling would be that he would have done a lot of research for that, especially being the debut, and he must have got the idea from somewhere. What a pity he can't let us know what he meant at the time.
C'est la vie.
Believe it or not, it does pain me to be such an awful cynic but I can't get away from the fact that there are three named songs on that programme:
Ballad of Mack the Knife - nuff said
Den wie man sich bettet - from Mahagonny, not 'Mahogany' as CH said
Ballad of Caesar's Death - The Silverlake
In the last-mentioned iirc CH claimed that the lines:
"Et tu Brute, rief er aus Lateinisch
Wie es dort die Landesprache war"
were a killer joke. In fact they just mean <<"Et tu Brute" he cried out in Latin; because that was the language of the country>> and I don't think even Bert Brecht - no shrinking violet - would have claimed it as one of his best gags.
But the worst thing of the lot is that CH was the conductor. It was no part of his job to do an intro. I wasn't in the hall but I wouldn't mind betting the programme had far more interesting and more accurate info - the ones I buy always do. I can't help thinking he didn't trust the audience to 'get' the music/words and thought he'd 'sex it up' for them.
