Marie Galante — where Youkali was born

In 1934, Jacques Deval adapted his own 1931 novel Marie Galante into a play for the Théâtre de Paris. Deval was a playwright at the height of his Parisian career; the novel — and the play — followed a French prostitute stranded in Panama, an unsentimental story of dispossession and longing.

For the incidental music, Deval turned to Kurt Weill. Weill had arrived in Paris the year before, in flight from Nazi Germany. He was thirty-four years old, profoundly displaced, and writing — with extraordinary speed — some of the most lyrical music of his life.

For Marie Galante he wrote a score of seven numbers. One of them was a tango habanera, instrumental, that would later carry the name Youkali. The lyricist Roger Fernay added the words afterwards. The play closed quickly; the song outlived it by ninety years and counting.

There is a particular pathos in the fact that Youkali — a song about an imagined island where one would be at home — was written by a man who had just lost his country, in a city that would itself soon be lost to him, for a play whose heroine had nowhere to go.