Yesterday while looking at the TV schedule for the evening, Chris discovered we were just in time to watch  the broadcast of Germany’s contest to pick their 2013 Eurovision song, called Unser Song für Malmö, “Our song for Malmö”(Malmö is the city in Sweden where the 2013 Eurovision contest will be held).  So, you’re in luck – I’m here today with a full report. 🙂

I won’t bore you with all the rules — as I didn’t look them all up — but in essence Germany had a live show last night to pick 1 song from 12 finalists to be their entry (both the performer and the song) in the Eurovision Song Contest 2013.  For more background on the Eurovision Contest, you can refer back to some of my old blog’s posts. The fact that the German contest was held on Valentine’s day was not lost on the contest organizers – picture the “v” in Eurovision as a heart flying in to complete the word after each station break. Cute.

Noteworthy from my perspective among the performances:

1. The group LaBrassBanda performed the song “Nackert“; the lyrics were in German,  one of only 3 songs that weren’t sung in English. LaBrassBanda is a  7 or 8 member group of men from Bavaria playing brass instruments. In Wikipedia their name is described as a “portmanteu” word combining the Italian term “La Banda” with its English definition and counterpart, “Brass Band”. Even if you’re a linguist, it’s not often you get to say that something is a portmanteau word, so they get points from me for the name. However, I thought the music wasn’t very good, and their costumes, t-shirts and shorts that Chris thought were supposed to evoke the idea of Bavarian Lederhosen, but seemed to be made out of spandex, just seemed silly.
2. The group Cascada is a trio with a lead female singer who wore a short skirt topped by vaguely warrior-style bustier. Glorious, their song, was a pulsating anthem-like song with a techno-pop feel. Before the voting was announced, I predicted they would be the eventual winners, as the techno-beat seemed just like every other recent Eurovision song winner. BTW, I should note I don’t actually like that kind of music, I’m was just handicapping the odds based on my assessment of the kind of stuff that seems to win Eurovision these days. The last song I actually liked in Eurovision was the Italian entry in 2011 – but that came in 3rd.
3. Nica and Joe – a duo, consisting of a Russian female pop-style singer  and an American opera singer.   You might think that must have been the oddest entry last night, but you’d be wrong. With a different song, that actually could have worked out well; I like the song Barcelona, for example, and also this young duo on Britain’s Got Talent in 2012 perform a song that blends pop and opera amazingly well. Of course, the two young British singers also have an amazing amount of talent, too. Unfortunately for Nica and Joe last night, though, the song, Elevated wasn’t in the same league, and it didn’t show off the potential of combining those two different kinds of voices.
4. Die Priester featuring Mojca Erdmann – a quartet, consisting of 3 priests and an opera singer.  This was, IMHO, the oddest group. While the priests were sort of chanting, the singer was singing a techno-pop take on Meerstern, sei gegrüßt a work from the 11th/12th century (according to Wikipedia). Think pop song beat meets Ave Maria backed by chanting. Anyway, the chanting meets opera didn’t work any better for me than Nico and Joe song-wise, although Die Priester + Mojca  do get my vote for the sheer bizarre spectacle of their performance. You don’t often see 3 priests in full brown cossacks wearing rockstar-style headset microphones, standing behind an opera singer dressed in a white sparkly evening gown, a set of flaming torches standing behind them. Truly, it rarely gets odder than that.
5. Betty Dittrich – a solo singer supported by 2 male dancers and an all-female band. Her song, Lalala, was another one of the three that were sung in German. (BTW,  the final song in German, Lieblingslied, was dragged down by a lackluster tune for its interminable verses, and wound up coming in dead last.) Anyway, the Lalala song was bouncy and catchy, and reminded me of the songs that used to be popular on Eurovision in the 1960s. My take at the mid-way point in the show was that Betty and Lalala  might be able to win, but that was before I saw Cascada; after that,  I figured poor Betty would come in second. If I got to pick the winner based soley on which one I could stand to listen to again —  well, perhaps at a much later date 😉 —  I would have picked Lalala.

Technically the songs are what the competition is about, not the groups/singers. So, the winner was not the group per se, but the song that they sung.

To arrive at the final winner, there were 3-parts to the voting.

1. Part one: The Radio Station votes – For a week or more , all the songs were played on 9 radio stations around Germany, and the public was encouraged to call into the radio stations to vote for their favorite. So, after all the acts had performed last night, a representative from each station announced how the voting had gone with their listeners. After the radio votes were tallied, the big winner by a landslide was …. LaBrassBanda. They were followed not-too-closely by Cascada, and then Betty Dittrich.But the voting isn’t over yet.
2. Part two: the expert panelists come next, and they have some time after they hear the radio voting, and then they announce their votes. Hmm. The jury awarded their lowest number of points to … LaBrassBanda. A shock, since that band had one the radio voting by a huge margin.
   The jury’s third place pick? Cascada, which had been in second after the radio vote.  The jury’s top two picks were actually songs and groups that weren’t interesting enough to me even to jot down in my notes.
   So, after the expert jury has weighed in, their votet effectively throws the outcome up in the air, since no one group/song is out in front by a wide margin any more. The leader after 2 rounds is now Cascada – LaBrassBanda has plummetted to the middle of the pack.
3. Part three:  the call-in viewers watching last night’s show have the final say. Just like any good reality talent show, there was a period after the performances when you at home could call in and vote for your favorite group/song.  Long story short: LaBrassBanda comes in second in the tele-voting, but has too much ground to make up after their disastrous results from the “expert” jury round. So, when Cascada wins the tele-voting round, they win it all. So, Cascada and their song Glorious are off to Sweden in May for Eurovision 2013.

Even though I had predicted Casada to win, Chris and I were still astonished by how different that “expert” panel results were from the popular voting. And how lucky that the “expert” panel’s decision kept up the suspense through the final round of voting, eh? Somehow, it seemed like a potential scandal in the making.

Aren’t you glad we’re watching more TV shows to improve our German? At least I could follow this show more than some of the police procedural shows that we’ve been trying to watch (BTW, Will, I promise I will be blogging about those shows before the end of the month). The hostess of this song contest show periodically lapsed into English, although she’s German, so I didn’t quite follow what was going on with her, but otherwise the commentary was somewhat easy to follow in German. And then, of course, most of the songs were in English.

Anyway, Germany’s entry is now set for Eurovision this year – I’m sure you’ll sleep better now that you know what happened here last night. 😉