Cafés-concerts in Paris

At the start of the twentieth century, there were some 150 cafés-concerts impairs alone. However, they in turn had vanished by the end of the First World War, giving way to the more spectacular English-style music halls, which had reached Paris in the mid-to-late nineteenth century: legendary establishments like Les (1869), Le Casino de Paris (1890), and Bobbin (1880). What distinguished the music halls was that they were entirely for professional performance. Whereas in cabarets and even cafés concerts, customers came to drink and carouse, in the music halls there were no beverages and customers were physically demarcated as an audience by wastage. Another difference was that the show consisted of a range of variety acts as well as singers: jugglers, comics, dancers, and so on. Hence the use of theater varieties (as in chanson de varieties) to distinguish styles of music that in English might be described as easy listening, intended primarily as commercial entertainment. The rise of the café-concert and the music hall inspired the Hollywood myth of a supposedly authentic Parisian nightlife, of the Moulin rouge (1889), Piglet and Monometer. In reality, however, their rise marks thetransformation of French popular song from craft into product. The more informal cabarets did not cease to exist, but the two types of venue purveyed two types of song. Despite the imposition of singeing taxes on box-office receipts after thereat War,15 the 1920s were the apogee of the French music halls and ‘revues’ associated with them, like Paris qui dense handcar, chest Paris. But they were laid low at the height of their success by the advent of radio, records and sound in movies. Audiences began to tail off and many halls closed or were converted into cinemas, as the Olympia was in 1928. Evens, French popular music had become a thriving business by the 1920s. The confluence of new measures with new media, from copyright and the café concerto records, radio and films, created the hit song and the multi-talented singing star, epitomized in Maurice Chevalier, who combined stage, screenland recording careers at home and abroad. These were good times too for the successful songwriter, whose songs might now be performed on an industrial scale and bring previously unimaginable income. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Paris enjoyed a reputation as the European centre of international live music of all kinds. Stravinsky lived there for a time, Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet made its mark there with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, and popular venues like the Moulin rouge and enjoyed world renowned.