adriano bassi

The origins of the Café-Chantant melt in the night of times. The term “café” was heard for the first time at Marseilles in 1650, coming from a drink imported from the East and that soon entered the habit of high society.
It did not passed much time and someone had the idea to exploit the success of the café commercially, and so Armenian Pascal, is his restaurant at Foire Saint-Germain, used to offer at the end of the meal the tasting of the new drink. But how did it occurred its transformation into Café Chantant first and café with band after?
Really it was a case. Indeed in 1729, at Paris established the first literature circle, with the purpose to develop the song as a cultural expression and it was a destiny that the seat selected was just a Café, the “Caveau”, near the Royal Palace. In these places, militaries, employees, nobles and bankers etc. met so to entertain and listen, but mainly to see the “chanteuse”, ever available to glance and wink. This way, Paris became the European centre of the “belle-époque”, but locals of Café with band became very numerous in other nations as Austria, Germany, England, Spain and Russia.
Since the success achieved and the competition among owners, each of them decided to improve the spectacle, buy offering the public also acts of jugglers, illusionists and comics.
This transformation of the “bar” from a bar to a place of spectacles occurred in the second half of the XIX century, all over Europe and mainly in Paris, where the Café Chantant got its high splendour in locals as the mythic “Moulin Rouge”, “Le Chat Noire”, “Les Folies Bergère”.
But getting back to our country it did not surely lack café with band that were no way inferior to the Parisian best ones.
In Italy we can quote the “Café Florio” at Turin, the “Greco” at Rome, the “Café of the Science “ a Bologna. Naples had the leadership: the “Flora”, the “Diodato”, the “Veneziano, “I Cavalieri” are only some of the café the most attended by artists, man of letters and wealthy bourgeois.
But which were the main attractions of the café? And which way they could monopolise the attention of persons belonging to the most varied social classes?
Passing time, this kind of spectacle improved and bettered quality. Nevertheless the typical figures kept on being the “chanteuse” and the “ caricaturists”. As regards to the life of the chanteuses it's a lights and shadows frame at all: “She is a creature coming from the underworld, resolute for taking enough space in the world, by the mean of the spectacle, leaving behind traditions, cliché and taboo “ (1).
Salvatore Di Giacomo himself focalises a wondering about chanteuse, rising natural for all: “So what does it compel toward the free stage of the Café Chantant those wretches, a recent and numerous group of them seems the a germination of populace? Which desires, which needs rise the herd till make it achieve places where formerly art brought to the most aristocrat, the most adequate elements to its manifestation and word?”(2).
Almost all the Italian chanteuses used French names in order to ennoble themselves and padding too in the right points so to please the indiscreet glances of the public.
Passing times their rôle become more prestigious and professional at the extent to attract men of culture and spectacle. Here it is the transformation of an element of spectacle into an element of costume, and entering this way in the history of the end of the nineteen-century. From a novel of Ugo Ricci, drawn from the book of Gaslini and telling about the sad end of Nelly Floupette, it's possible to understand the way a chanteuse was and the way she used to dress, that later become the way of dressing of the women of her times: “... a beautiful and heady girl, red-hair, quite made-up and dressed with the daring and artificial simplicity that was in fashion by these times. She, at Turin at the “Café Romano”, made the “act “ of the “centre” staggering along over the high heels of lily coloured of satin shoes. A whole patrimony of jewels shined against her liliaceous skin and in the garland of withered leaves represented by her hairs she was awkward, delicious, delicate, odd and pitiful. Her name “Nelly Floupette, the eccentric”, was highlighted and red framed on the playbill
To quote only some personages we can remind Amalia pharaoh, Olympia Davigny, Rosa de Saxe, Ersilia Sampieri, Joly Fleur, Leda del Cigno, Lucy Charmante, forerunners of the prima donna attitudes of first 20th-century cinema: Anna Fougez, Lina Cavalieri, Elvira Donnaruma, Carolina Otero (the belle Otero), Cleo de Merode.
By a male point of view, the life of the “caricaturist” likens that of the chanteuses: the same desires, sacrifices and struggles. They were well loved by the public since they staged everyone's custom and shortage, by that self-irony bringing men to laugh at themselves.
Names as Petrolini, Fregoli, Viviani kept in the history of spectacle. They featured the time of Umberto I. and the first world war mirroring in the kind of Café the limits and social classes demarcation.
Even. The parlance employed was a clear proof of the cultural thought, dividing into two different interpretations: the dialogue weaved with irony and double meaning disguising a slight truth and the poetical language fascinating nobles and bankers.
On consequence it would be no essential underline the importance of the analysis of this kind of spectacle, for which it has come the time of a cultural reappraisal.