31 October
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Author(s): Simon Demmelhuber
Speaker: Irina Wanka
Editor: Frank Halbach
Her actual name is Agnes Pauline. But Bally fits better, says her brother Ferdinand. When he sees his sister, who has just been born, for the first time, so plump and happy as a crow, he immediately falls in love with her: “That’s my ball,” he says, “I’ll never give it away!” The name remains. She wears it like an armor protecting something fragile. Everyone says Bally, including her. Because it doesn’t hurt that much when she bawls louder and funnier than anyone else. And because then no one notices what it’s like when teasing eyes measure her fatness.
It would be best if she could hide. But that’s not possible, the father has big plans. Ludwig Prell is an insurance officer, but lives entirely for folk singing. He writes and composes couplets, plays the guitar virtuoso and dreams of a bounce dynasty. He first bases this on Bally’s older brother. When Ferdl dies at the age of 20, Bally is suddenly solely responsible for his father’s ambition.
Driven up to Brettl-Elysium
“Vatl” can rely on the eight-year-old. The daughter is highly musical, has a warm, deep tenor, a comic talent and is docile. Ludwig Prell arranges their performances and fills the program entirely with his own works. Many of them, such as the “Isarmärchen” or “Die Sankt Anna Vorstadt”, achieve real Brettl fame. But Bally’s indestructible “Beauty Queen of Schneizlreuth” is even more famous. “Vatl” also wrote this song, with which she drives straight to the Bavarian Brettl-Elysium, specifically for her.
On October 31, 1953, Bally performed the showpiece for the first time at Munich’s Platzl, exactly as she had performed it unchanged for 30 years: in a pink ruffled dress, with a delicate lace umbrella that looked like a shy toothpick in her paws. A tinsel crown trembles on the giant skull, and a white and blue sash with the imprint “Miss Schneizlreuth” stretches across the belly.
Nobody looks into someone else’s heart
The number is a stroke of genius! There’s a two-hundred-pound elf spinning and spreading, there’s a Brackl woman showing off and boasting, representing Schneizlreuth’s femininity at the beauty contest in the state capital: “Sending me, the Salvermoser Zenz, to Munich for the beauty competition.” Behind the pretentious posturing, the gaudy village décor keeps breaking through, a gaudy trump card that grandly falls into the trap between self-image and reality. The audience is thrilled: how fun Bally parodies the rampant pageant mania, how precisely every tone and every gesture is right, how unabashedly the gwamped Bummerl throws himself into laughter – simply irresistible!
Bally Prell never got rid of the Salvermoser Zenz again. And as long as the spotlight is on, she shows no quarter for herself and her stage character. But at home everything falls away from her. She lives in seclusion, sings opera arias, composes piano music, and sets Eichendorff poems to music. Nobody looks into someone else’s heart. And who ever knows what’s going on in there?
