Bräurosl earthquake: Kappelmeister Menzl gives an honest insight – "It was a shock for us at first"
Created: 09/30/2022, 10:17 am
The Josef Menzl chapel in the new Bräurosl marquee.
© IMAGO / Smith
The dispute over the Menzl brass band in the Bräusrosl tent is also about fundamental issues.
How much is real Bavarian culture at the Oktoberfest?
Munich – After a forced two-year break, the Oktoberfest is back.
At first glance, everything seems the same.
But a dispute about the brass band in the Bräurosl tent brings fundamental questions to light.
Is there a new trend towards party music and Ballermann instead of real Bavarian tradition at the Wiesn?
Kapellmeister Menzel reports the "shock" of the reaction of the Bräurosl audience
The brass band under Kapellmeister Josef Menzl has been at the Oktoberfest in Munich for decades and plays traditional Bavarian music, but also Queen, Abba, Beatles and much more.
"But people just want 'hands to heaven' and 'hell, hell, hell'," says Menzl in an interview with
tz.de
and adds: "I can't sing Helene Fischer, I'm sorry." Last week booed the audience the band: Without party classics like "Layla" the atmosphere in the "Bräusrosl" is missing, so the accusation.
The tent owners reacted quickly and summarily banished the band from the evening to the afternoon program.
"It was a shock for us at first," says Kapellmeister Josef Menzl on the Quer broadcast by
Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) .
and reported whistles and boos.
"I've never experienced that in 30 years.
Of course it's a bit of a stab when you realize something like that."
But there are also many fans of the band.
If you go to the Bräurosl in the afternoon, you will find a good atmosphere.
"Mia doesn't need any party music," said a Menzl fan to BR on Tuesday, and another added: "Nobody needs it like Layla!" While traditional costumes are still trendy at Oktoberfest, the trend seems to be with music to walk in the opposite direction.
Josef Menzl puts the inconsistency at the Wiesn into words himself: “They all want to go to the Oktoberfest, then they want to put on traditional costumes and eat a suckling pig, a duck, a roast pork or 'a chicken', but they want to listen to music that even doesn't fit.
That doesn't have much to do with the Bavarian tradition," says the conductor to the
BR
.
However, "everyone is satisfied" with the new regulation of party music in the evening and traditional Bavarian music in the afternoon, says Bräurosl boss Peter Reichert.
Bavarian customs?
Neither traditional costumes nor Oktoberfest beer tapping are old Oktoberfest traditions
But not everything that looks like tradition at the Wiesn is actually old customs.
"Traditions are always made by people and can always be changed," says folklorist Sabine Egger from the Ludwig Maximilian University in
Munich
.
“That means that what I make into a tradition is then also the next tradition.” A look into the past is enough to show that this is also true for the Oktoberfest.
At the first Wiesn in 1810, people wore traditional costumes - simply because that was the usual clothing at the time.
But the tradition of the traditional costume at the Oktoberfest did not endure since then.
In the 1970s, for example, people wore flared trousers or jeans at the Oktoberfest, dirndls and lederhosen came later.
The former director of the Wiesn, Gabriele Weishäupl, initiated this tradition: In a male-dominated environment at the time, she decided to wear a dirndl at press conferences and started the traditional costume trend back then.
Because she noticed that the dirndl was particularly well received abroad - that was good marketing for the Oktoberfest.
“These images went out into the country and into the world and people, especially the young, followed them.
The young people saw something else in the festival: an event, a party," Weishäupl told the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
.
The tradition of dirndls and lederhosen at the Oktoberfest is therefore less old than most people think.
The same applies to the tapping of the first Wiesn barrel, this custom has only existed since the 1950s.
In any case, Kapellmeister Menzl and his band don't want to pretend.
"Perhaps we can infect people a bit with our attitude [...] what beautiful traditions we have." Who knows, maybe they will succeed in reversing the party music trend at the Wiesn.
After all, traditions are man-made.
