Lyric Earwig

A song was in my head a great deal this week. And by “in my head,” I mean that every time I woke up in the night for four nights running, this song was playing on my internal soundtrack. I found myself humming it when my mind wasn’t on anything else. I sang it, always in French, though I have only half-memorized the words, so there was a good deal of mumbling inside my head. Over and over and over. For four days, all day, all night, even in my sleep. Even in my dreams.

“Youkali.” It wasn’t even a song, originally. The music was written by Kurt Weill in 1934, during his exile in France, as incidental music for the play Marie Galante.

The music, which I adore, is a tango in the style of a habanera. It’s sweet and sad and exactly captures the longing for escape from what Europe had become in the 1930s, or was about to become. Within a year of writing this music, Weill would flee France for the United States—one of the lucky few.

The song was given lyrics (French ones) in 1946 by Roger Fernay. Fernay, the son of a music publisher, studied to become a lawyer but decided he’d rather be an actor instead. He worked on the French stage for about a decade, then became a writer for stage and screen. He spent the rest of his career unionizing writers and working on international copyright law. “Youkali” is his principal claim to fame.

Here is the exquisite Ute Lemper, the German chanteuse and actress renowned for her interpretation of the work of Kurt Weill, performing it exquisitely: