PerfectlyWritePoetry: Where the Cage Bird Was Forced to Sing

Sunday 1 November 2015

Where the Cage Bird Was Forced to Sing

When the Basque composer, Sebastian de Iradier composed La Paloma - his universally loved habanera (Cuban dance melody) - little could he envisage that one day it would be used to accompany a grotesque death march.

But this is what happened when Jewish jazz musician Heinz (‘Coco’) Schumann was incarcerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and was forced to play the song by the side of the ramp that sent streams of fellow inmates to their deaths.

“I've played La Paloma all my life. It's a great piece”, he says, “really great, and I love it, but it doesn't get under my skin. Thank God. Otherwise I couldn't play it now”.

Like countless other Holocaust survivors, the German-Jewish drummer and guitarist repressed his dreadful experiences for almost a half-century before being persuaded to recount them.

He has since appeared in a documentary and written a memoir that has been translated into English and will be published on 01 January 2016.

But here I’m concentrating on the history of the song, which was composed after Iradier visited Cuba circa 1860:

“In Zanzibar they play it at the end of weddings, in Romania at the end of funerals, in Mexico as a protest song, and in Germany as a sailor’s lament. Written a century and a half ago … and first performed in Cuba, La Paloma — the most frequently played song in the world — has circled the globe like a dove to touch listeners’ hearts with longing”.

The oldest recording of the song, made on a metal disc between 1883 and 1890, is kept in Havana's Museum of Music. It is said that the song's rhythm defines the style of the habanera, a popular music genre in the 19th century and which first gained admirers in Mexico and Hawaii. It was then performed by a wide range of singers ranging from pop stars to jazz artistes and even opera singers.

In the 1939 Romanian film Juarez the song is played for the dead and consoles the bereaved throughout the Hapsburg Empire and to this day in Romania the song is played at funerals.

Then the tune somehow arrived in Zanzibar, Tanzania, Africa and while older locals insist it was there before they were born, it is unarguable that the melody of La Paloma accompanies the words of the marriage ceremony.

“The Dove

When I left Havana, help me God!
nobody saw me leaving, it was just I.

And a pretty artful-flatterer, there I go!

she just was after me, yes sir, she was.

(Refrain)
If to your window happens to come a dove,
treat it with loving care, for it's my own.
Tell her your love affairs, my loving one,
and crown her with flowers, for she is mine.