Various   ‎– Der Führer - Rock Opera  
Label: 
Harvest ‎– 1C 188-32 508/09 
Format: 
2 × Vinyl, LP, Album 

Country: 
 Germany  
Released: 
 1977  
Genre: 
Rock, Stage & Screen 
Style: 
Musical 



Tracklist .


A1    Ouvertüre - The Pact     8:02  
A2    Führer Wanted     2:05  
A3    Listen To Me     1:26  
A4    Here I Am     2:08  
A5    Magic Man     2:51  
A6    Look Here     2:04  
A7    Interview     2:54  
B1    Beware Of Him     2:45  
B2    He Can'T Be Bad     1:10  
B3    King Of The World     3:38  
B4    What A Man     2:51  
B5    III. Reich Theme     0:42  
B6    Burning Of The Books     1:24  
B7    Brown Clouds     3:41  
B8    Dying Day     4:07  
C1    Berlin, Berlin     3:21  
C2    I'm Alive     4:40  
C3    Every Morning     3:10  
C4    Stalingrad     6:22  
C5    Tingel Tangel     2:19  
C6    Stalingrad Is Lost     0:42  
D1    We Shall Win     3:29  
D2    Total War     3:19  
D3    The Looking-Glass     3:04  
D4    Nightmare     4:06  
D5    Wake Up     2:02  
D6    Führerbunker     1:12  
D7    Pied Piper     2:19  


Companies etc 

Record Company – EMI Electrola 
Printed By – 4P Nicolaus GMBH 
Recorded At – Rüssl Studio 


Credits 

Bass – Benny Bendorf* 
Composed By – Siems*, Quintus* 
Drums – Berte Engels 
Guitar – Karl Allaut 
Keyboards – Adrian Askew, Jean Jacques Kravetz* 
Lyrics By – Gisela Siems 
Percussion – Okko Becker 
Producer, Engineer – Lothar Siems, Walter Quintus 
Saxophone, Flute – Herb Geller 
Trumpet – Bob Lanese 
Vocals – Adrian Askew, Audrey Motoung Williams, George Hayworth, Ian Cussick, Ingeborg Thomsen, Iris Moore, Lyvia Yim, Marti Webb, Neil Landon, Peter French, Phil Baumgarden 
 

Notes 

Comes in a gatefold sleeve, lyrics and credits are printed on the inner sleeves. 

EMI Electrola GMBH - All rights reserved 
Printed in Germany by 4p Nicolaus GMBH, Koln 

review:
This is easily one of the strangest albums in my collection and it's one I was hesitant to list for fear someone might mistake me as some sort of right wing nutcase.  I'm not ...  in fact as a member of the French resistance my mother was actually arrested by the Gestapo, dumped in a jail and only avoided being deported to a concentration camp when the US Army overran the prison she was being held in ...  hum never thought that story would come up in a record review. 

So what do I know about 1977's "Der Fuhrer (Rock Opera)" ?  German musicians Lothar Siems and Walter Quintus were apparently the brains behind the double album set.  Siems and Quintus' musical partnership stretched back to the mid-1960s including stints in The Chamberlains, The Quintus Quartet, and a pair of early-1970s albums fronting the medieval/progressive influenced band Parzival.  Parzival recorded a pair of albums before calling it quits in 1973.  With that background it sure would be interesting to know how the pair (with an assist from Gisela Siems in the lyrics department), went from recording misdeal influenced tunes to this bizarre concept piece.  Self-produced, the album featured a strange Anglo-German cast including Ian Cussick, Peter French, and Neil Landon.  A 28 tracks, double album set, the plotline was pretty straightforward - tracing the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler.  Condensing  twelve years (1933-1945) into about an hour was itself a pretty impressive feat, but if you believe the hype the recording sessions were surround by lots of weirdness including master tapes picking up weird sounds.  Anyhow, billed as a rock opera, the collection was clearly written with an ear to some sort of stage production.  The songs themselves offered up a mixture of pop and rock pieces (some of the quite good), but much of the set exhibited a distinctive theater feel.  In reviewing the album it was also hard to draw a clear distinction between the music and the story plotline - 'Magic Man' was a perfect case in point.  Musically the song was amazingly catchy sounding like something 10cc might have written, but the lyric's about Hitler's early magnetism on the German psychic made for a real mismatch.  Great song, disturbing lyric ...  A good analogy was The Police song 'Every Breath You Take'.  The track was a major hit when I was in college and I had friends who simply adored the song, not realizing the lyrics detailed the thoughts of a crazed stalker..  Try to remember that when you're humming 'Magic Man' or 'What a Man!'. 


P.S. I believe that the pain the man considered as the subject of this rock opera inflicted upon the civilized world ,is immeasurable , However, our society being pluralistic, there is a proliferation of ideas and artistic manifestations which should not be seen as either glorifying or memorizing this major "misbegotten glitch" in humanity's timeline, but as any kind of glorification.
listen and remember the chaos