Popular amusement
The café-concert offered a varied repertoire at a low price, making it a venue accessible to a wide audience.
The focus was on comical, sentimental, or bawdy songs, for which printmakers illustrated the sheet music. The spectacle also consisted of gaudily costumed dancers, acrobats, and variety acts such as boxing kangaroos.
Print series
The café-concert was so popular that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Henri-Gabriel Ibels devoted a whole print series to it for the publisher André Marty.
The caricature portraits they made of the artistes and of members of the audience slumped in their seats perfectly evoke the easy-going atmosphere of these venues.
Although the ones in central Paris were a little more salubrious than their counterparts in Montmartre, differences of social class were not important at the café-concert. Bourgeois, worker, prostitute, and bohemian sat side-by-side to drink the ‘watery foam from the beer mugs,’ as the introduction to the print series put it.
Henri Gabriel Ibels, Sheet music Les petits vernis by J. Redelsperger and Yvette Guilbert, performed by Yvette Guilbert, 1893
Henri Gabriel Ibels, Cover and introduction, 1893
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Café-concert (Au café-concert), 1894
Further reading
- Georges Montorgueil, ‘Le Café Concert’, in Georges d’Esparbes et al., Les Demi Cabots: Le Café-Concert, Le Cirque, Les Forains, Paris 1896
- Elisabeth Pillet, ‘Cafés-concerts et cabarets’, Romantisme (1992), no. 75, pp. 43-50
- Phillip Dennis Cate et al., The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905, New Brunswick 1996