Die Kardosh-Singers & Miss Louise Gordan – 1932

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Here are two recordings from the closing months of the Weimar Republic by a vocal harmony group, the Kardosh-Singers, that was regarded as the closest rival to the better-remembered Comedian Harmonists.  After the Nazis came to power, despite their enormous popularity, both groups were ultimately forced to dissolve because some of their members were Jewish.

Joining the group on one of the recordings is a jazz and scat singer credited as Miss Louise Gordan, who has long been a source of mystery for fans of the era’s music. On other recordings, she was credited as Louise Jordan.  Some sources suggest that she was American.  Others suggest she was British.  Other than the fact that she performed and made several recordings in Germany and appeared in engagements in other European countries during the early 1930s, little is known about her, including her real name.

Note: A reader has advised that Miss Louise Gordan appeared in a 1934 Danish film called 7 19 13. That film is available in its entirety on YouTube, and you can see her appearance in which she sings in English, scats, and starts to tap dance by scrolling to 35 minutes 30 seconds into the film:

https://youtu.be/wW79HJDNMOw?si=FBJiVi_hP0KIDo7c&t=2130

The reader also notes that she provides the vocal, here, too, in English, for a 1932 waltz recording by Jack Presburg’s orchestra on the Pallas label, credited as F. Gordon, which can also be heard on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/3-vAFOEDn0c?si=Bz98R2gOOZp4yY38

The Kardosh-Singers were founded in May 1932 by Hungarian pianist, arranger, and composer István Kardos, who, for his work in Germany, used the Germanized spelling of his name, Stephen Kardosh.

Kardos had already been working in Germany for a few years when he took over as the musical director for the Abel-Quartett, a successful vocal harmony group, after the 1929 departure of its founder, Pál Ábel.  Like the Comedian Harmonists, the Abel-Quartett based its style on the American harmony group, The Revelers, whose recordings were popular in Europe.  Under Kardos, the group remained successful under the name The 5 Songs.

By 1932, Kardos determined that leading his own group offered greater potential career and financial rewards than leading the 5 Songs as a mere employee.  Once he formed the Kardosh-Singers, he was quickly able to line up stage performances, recording sessions, and even a film appearance.

By 1935 the group had made around 80 recordings, toured Europe, appeared in several films, and was regularly heard on radio broadcasts.

What the German public and even the other members of his group were not aware of, however, was that István Kardos and his wife Olga were both born to Jewish parents.

After the Nazis came to power in late January 1933, it quickly became difficult for Jewish entertainers to find work, as venues that hired them were at risk of disruption and even violence by Brownshirt thugs. In September, all musical activities in Germany were brought under state control through the creation of the Reich Chamber of Music.  All professional musicians, composers, and teachers were required to join the chamber in order to legally work. To join, one had to prove “Aryan” lineage.  Members whose works and performances strayed from what the Nazis considered to be “good German music” risked having their membership revoked, thus rendering them unemployable.

Because he was a Hungarian, not a German citizen, Kardos was initially able to avoid the difficulties faced by German Jews by simply not disclosing his or his wife’s Jewish lineage.  Over time, however, keeping this secret became increasingly difficult and stressful.

Ironically, the Kardosh-Singers’ performances received positive reviews in official Nazi publications, and the group was engaged to perform at official Party events.  While such performances must have been extremely uncomfortable for Kardos, to turn down such an engagement would have been extremely risky.

By 1935, the regime had become increasingly zealous about sniffing out and targeting “disguised Jews,” those in mainstream German society who had successfully hidden their Jewish ancestry.  This was one of the motives for the notorious Nuremberg Laws, which required people to provide documentation of the racial background of their grandparents in order to maintain their jobs in various professions, enroll in high school or college, or marry.

While the Nuremberg Laws did not come into effect until after Kardos left Germany, they shed light on the atmosphere he faced during his final months in the country.  Because venue operators and booking agents were coming under scrutiny by Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda for being lax in verifying membership status with the Reich Chamber of Music, his situation became increasingly precarious.

In autumn 1935, Kardos was summoned to a police station in Berlin and informed that if he failed to produce documentation of his ancestry within 30 days, his residency permit would be revoked and he and his wife would be deported back to Hungary.

Deportation, however, was the least of his worries.  Kardos feared the summons was the result of someone already discovering his lineage and reporting him, which, if true, would likely mean he would be arrested before the 30-day deadline. Thus, he and his wife quickly and secretly fled back to Hungary.

During a failed effort in the 1950s to obtain reparations payments from the German government, Kardos explained:

“…the revelation of my ancestry after I had been publicly active for about 3 years on stage, on the concert podium, in film, on the radio and even in party events would have been dangerous, even life-threatening for me, I was forced to flee the Reich; even my singing partners only found out later, when I wrote to them from Hungary.”

The group’s bass vocalist Paul von Nyiri was also eventually forced to flee back to his native Hungary because of his wife’s Jewish ancestry.

Unfortunately, in 1935, Hungary was ruled by a highly authoritarian and deeply anti-Semitic regime.  Kardos was able to resume his career in Hungary, but was not able to replicate the success he had enjoyed in Germany. In 1938, the government implemented the first of a series of anti-Semitic laws and, by 1939, he was unable to find employment and his only source of income was providing semi-illegal private music lessons.

While Hungary entered World War II on the side of Germany, its government did resist German pressure to deport Hungarian Jews to the concentration camps.  However, the situation became dire in 1944 when Germany invaded after learning of Hungarian efforts to broker a separate peace agreement with the Allies.

Like all Jews in Budapest, Kardos and his wife were forced to wear a yellow star, expelled from their home, and forced to relocate to a single room inside a so-called “yellow star house,” one of about 2,000 apartment buildings throughout Budapest where Jews were concentrated as a temporary way station before deportation to the death camps.

Fortunately, they were both able to escape from the yellow star house and, with the aid of forged documents, successfully went into hiding for the remainder of the German occupation.  While Kardos and his wife both survived, 23 members of his family lost their lives in the Holocaust.

After the war, he was at least able to earn a living in music, working as a pianist for Hungarian radio, a music teacher, and a music journalist.  He died in Budapest in 1975.

For more information about the Kardosh-Singers, I highly recommend Kardosch-Saenger.de, which provides a wealth of information about the group and its members. For a detailed biography of István Kardos, visit this page on the website.

Both songs are from 1932 German films and feature what I think are very captivating and memorable melodies.

“Dir möcht’ ich mich gerne anvertrau’n” (“I’d Like To Entrust Myself With You”), written by Bert Reisfeld, Rolf Marbot, and Curt Lewinnek, is from the film Kiki.

“Irgendwo auf der Welt gibt’s ein kleines bisschen Glück” (“Somewhere In The World There Is A Little Bit of Happiness”), composed by Werner R. Heymann with lyrics by Robert Gilbert, is from the film Der blonde Traum (The Blonde Dream).

While the German electronics company and radio pioneer Telefunken dates back to 1903, its record label had been in existence for only a few months when this record was made.

Both sides were recorded in the concert hall of the Sing-Akademie, a choral group founded in 1791. The concert hall was built in 1827 and was world-renowned for its outstanding acoustics.  During the 1920s, the hall was occasionally used for recording sessions by the Electrola label.

The facilities used for the recordings here were installed by Ultraphon, a multinational record label that appeared in Germany in 1929 and was known for its sound quality.  By 1932, after economic conditions forced the company into liquidation, all of its German assets, including its matrices, manufacturing plants, and the recording facilities in the Sing-Akademie, were acquired by Telefunken and used to create its namesake label.

Telefunken continued to record at the Sing-Akademie until 1943, when the building was gutted by an incendiary bomb.  After the war, East German authorities restored the building’s burned-out shell to its 19th-century appearance and constructed a new building inside its walls that has, since 1952, functioned as the Maxim Gorky Theater.

One of the things that has always haunted me about German recordings from this period is the contrast between the music, which is so often beautiful, joyous, benevolent, and incredibly life-affirming, and the unimaginably horrific events unfolding outside the studio walls, events that would later affect and, in some cases, claim the lives of the performers and composers.