Humour and Classical Music: 19. Victor Borge
by David Barker
You might have expected to meet this famous comedian-classical pianist a lot sooner than what will be the final article in this series. He probably wasn’t the first classical musician to turn his/her hand to comedy, but he certainly is the best-known from the WW2 era.
He was born Børge Rosenbaum in Copenhagen in 1909, to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, both of whom were musical; his father played the viola in the Royal Danish Orchestra. Børge’s pianistic ability was soon apparent: he gave his first public recital at the age of eight, and was granted a full scholarship at the Royal Danish Academy of Music a year later. He began his career as a concert pianist in 1926, and it was only a few years later that comedic elements began to be included among the piano playing. He toured his show around Europe, including anti-Hitler jokes in his repertoire. It was his great luck that when the Nazis invaded Denmark, he was performing in neutral Sweden. He and his American wife were able to escape Europe on the last neutral ship to leave Finland.
According to his Wikipedia entry, he could not speak a word of English when he arrived in the United States in 1940. That seems very unlikely, given that he had been married for seven years to American Elsie Chiltern, so let’s go with “not much English”. Unsurprisingly, he was a quick learner, doing much of his language education watching movies. He changed his name to Victor Borge, and began performing his show, modifying the jokes for American audiences. Very soon, he was on the radio shows of Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee. He won the award for Best New Radio Performer of the Year in 1942, and by 1945 had his own radio show on NBC, featuring the Benny Goodman Orchestra. His one-man show Comedy in Music ran at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway from 1953 to 1956, the 849 performances earning him a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest running one-person show in theatre history. He continued to perform the rest of his life, still doing up to 60 shows a year at the age of 90. It was not all comedy; he played with and conducted the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic and London Philharmonic, and in 1992, the Royal Danish Orchestra. He died in 2000.
I’m sure that most of you will be very familiar with his comedy style, relying very much on physical humour done with a straight face, as though what has happened was a complete surprise. There is a video (with very poor sound) on YouTube (YT1; see footnote regarding the link) of him conducting Smetana’s Dance of the Comedians. It includes many of the visual jokes that he used throughout his career: the jumbled score, crumpling each page up as he finishes with it, dismissing the concertmaster for poor playing (after which a gunshot is heard offstage), asking the rest of the violins to move forward one seat while playing (not all manage this), and getting to the end of the piece and not having the very last note because he had thrown it away.
One of his most famous sketches is the performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 for piano four hands, where Borge and his partner compete for keyboard space. This was often performed with Armenian-American pianist Şahan Arzruni (YT2), but there is also a memorable version on The Muppet Show with Rowlf the dog (YT3). Also in that episode of The Muppets, Borge plays the opening of Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto with an “orchestra” of babies (YT4), complete with swanee whistles and kazoos.
There are literally dozens of other Borge performances on YouTube and I will leave you to find them, but I will close this series of articles with one of the great comedy-classical music sketches, his performance with long-suffering soprano Marilyn Mulvey of Verdi’s Caro nome from Rigoletto (not that it gets much airtime) (YT5). There are the visual gags – falling off the piano stool when she hits a high note, pulling his collar up to hide from the more florid parts of the singing, putting on a seatbelt, and the verbal gags such as “please take your hand off the piano”, “are you finished yet”, “I thought you knew this” and so on. I like the fact that in the stage show after she has been tormented through the comedy sketch, she is able to sing an aria properly. Obviously doing the sketch for so long helped Mulvey keep a straight face but it must have been a challenge early on. It’s not something that world-renowned recordist Michala Petri managed when playing a duet with Borge in Copenhagen for his 80th birthday concert (YT6).
So that brings this series of articles to a close. I acknowledge that I haven’t covered everyone who has managed to combine classical music and comedy in some way, but hopefully I have inspired you to find some more on your own.
Footnote
Recently enacted legislation in the UK regarding online safety means that MWI will no longer include links to external sites such as YouTube. So for each of the videos referred to in this article, I will provide its title (as shown on YT) and allow you to do the searching.
YT1. Victor Borge – Dance of the Comedians (1996)
YT2. Victor Borge-Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
YT3. The Muppet Show – 405: Victor Borge – “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” (1979)
YT4. The Muppet Show – 405: Victor Borge – “Piano Concerto No. 1” (1979)
YT5. Victor Borge and the Opera Singer Marilyn Mulvey
YT6. Victor Borge and Michala Petri plays Csardas
