Lucy Messal z Orkiestrą - Pragnę twoją być [I Crave To Be Yours] Tango z teatru Morskie Oko (from theatre Morskie Oko) (Artur Gold – Andrzej Włast) Syrena 1928 (accoustical recording) Polish NOTE: Lucyna („Lucy”) MESSAL (b. 1886 in Warsaw, Poland – d. 1953 in Warsaw, Poland) – Polish operetta diva and cabaret performer. One of artistic legends in the history of Polish cabaret & operetta. Born in family of a railway man, she managed to climb on the top of stage career of her time. Still in her teens, Messal took singing lessons with the world-famous Polish tenor Jan Reszke and in the age of 20 y.o. she became a sensational debut in the Warsaw staging of the Gypsy Baron in 1909. Strongly and shapely built, with a daring character and strong soprano, which “made the crystal chandeliers tremble when she sung”, as the critics wrote, Messal overnight became a darling of Warsaw and signed a lucrative contract with Syrena Rekords. She was also invited to perform in Russia, where she recorded for the Russian Victor (The Writing Amor records) and became one of stars of the St. Petersburg operetta. In 1913 she and Polish operetta heart throb Józef Redo became the first Polish performes of the novelty dance tango, which they presented in theatre Nowości in the operetta “Targ na dziewczęta” (The Marriage Market). During the 1st WW Lucyna Messal performed in Russia, and after the Bolshevic revolution of 1917 she returned to Warsaw and continued performing in Nowości theatre. Billed as “primadonna” she involved herself in a fierce and long-lasted competition with another Polish operetta diva Wiktoria Kawecka, also living in Warsaw.
In the late 1920s, Lucyna Messal’s name started to wane with the onset of the new Operetta stars which appeared in Warsaw, such as Lucyna Szczepańska, Tola Mankiewiczówna, Barbara Kostrzewska. During the 1930s she opened her own Operetta theatre “Teatr Lucyny Messal” and occasionally appeared in revues in the Warsaw cabarets. In 1938 - one year before outbreak of the 2nd WW - Lucyna Messal appeared in a film comedy “Szczęśliwa 13-tka” (A Lucky Thirteen) in a memorable episode: accompanying herself on piano, she sung in a small tea-room with her still strong and beautiful voice, a slow waltz “Młodym być i więcej nic” (Just To Be Young, And That’s It!)
During the war Messal managed her own music café in Warsaw, located in a ground floor of the apartment building which she owned. The building was burnt by the Germans at the end of the war, during the mass demolition of Warsaw following the collapse of Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. After the war, Lucyna Messal – whose name was for the communists the symbol of prewar “bourgeois culture” – was still loved by her fans but hardly tolerated by authorities as merely the episode performer in Teatr Nowy in Warsaw. Today, one of Warsaw streets bears her name.
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This tango is one of the few cabaret performances recorded by Lucyna Messal. Unfortunately it is fairly worn-out, however the quality of performer and rarity of her recordings rewards all these noises. Lucy Messal’s outstanding soprano still can be admired and her interpretation of the extremely graphomaniac lyrics of the apache tango from theatre Morskie Oko, becomes a small masterpiece of the fallen woman’s pathological entanglement and almost a vivisection of her insane desires. That sort of songs – which derived from the murky big city folklore of the early 20th century – turned out to be only a short period in history of the European chanson and in the early 1930s it disappears from the cabaret stages.
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