Enigma – Sadeness – Part i

A Romanian-German Producer Working Alone at His Home Studio in Ibiza Built a Single Around Sampled Sixth-Century Gregorian Chants, His Wife Sandra’s Whispered French Vocals to the Marquis de Sade, and a Hip-Hop Beat. It Hit #1 Across Europe, Reached #2 on the US Hot 100, and Sold Twelve Million Copies.

Michael Cretu had been working in commercial pop music for more than a decade by the time he assembled the recording that became Sadeness, Part I. Born in Bucharest on May 18, 1957, classically trained at the Lyzeum Nr. 2 conservatory in Romania, emigrated to West Germany in 1968 at the age of eleven, Cretu had won his first German gold record as a producer in 1980 — at the age of twenty-three — and had spent the rest of the decade producing albums for Hubert Kah, Peter Cornelius, Sylvie Vartan, Mike Oldfield, and most successfully his own wife, the German pop singer Sandra Lauer, whose 1985 debut single Maria Magdalena had reached number one in more than thirty countries on the strength of Cretu’s production. In 1988 Cretu and Sandra moved from Bavaria to the Spanish island of Ibiza, where Cretu built a home studio called A.R.T. Studios around an AudioFrame digital workstation. By 1990 he had begun work on a new project he wanted to release anonymously, without his name or face attached to it, as a deliberate experiment in what he called the writing of moods rather than the writing of songs. The new project would be called Enigma. The deliberately mysterious image was the point. The debut single arrived on October 1, 1990 from Virgin Records.

The recording was built around three principal elements that, in combination, had never appeared on a hit single before. The foundation was a programmed hip-hop drum beat — the same kind of clipped, mid-tempo break-beat figure that had been driving American R&B and hip-hop records throughout the late 1980s. Over the top of the beat Cretu had placed a slow synthesizer pad and a sampled pan-flute melody. Over the top of those, sampled from a Polydor / BMG-Ariola recording of the Munich-based Catholic choir Kapelle Antiqua, came a male-voice chorus singing the sixth-century Gregorian chants of the medieval Roman Catholic liturgy — the unaccompanied unison choral music that had been the central sacred sound of European Christianity for over a thousand years. And finally, layered above all of it, the female-voice element: Sandra Lauer, Cretu’s wife, whispering directly to the microphone in French, addressing the eighteenth-century erotic novelist and Bastille prisoner Donatien Alphonse François de Sade — the Marquis de Sade from whose name the word “sadism” was derived in the nineteenth century. “Sade, dis-moi,” Sandra whispered. Sade, tell me. What is good. What is evil. Has religion ever shown you happiness. The Marquis is asked the questions. He is not heard answering.

The Chart Climb, the Catholic Backlash, and the German Choir That Sued

The commercial response across Europe was almost immediate. Sadeness, Part I reached number one in Germany within three weeks of release and went on to top the charts in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and most other European territories. The combined European chart — the proto-pan-European singles measurement Music & Media compiled at the time — held the song at number one for eleven consecutive weeks. It reached number one on the UK Singles Chart on the chart dated January 19, 1991. The American breakthrough followed the European: the single entered the US Billboard Hot 100 on February 16, 1991, and reached number two on April 27 — held off the top spot by Mariah Carey’s Someday. By the time the chart run ended, Sadeness, Part I had been certified platinum by the RIAA and the parent album MCMXC a.D. had sold over twelve million copies worldwide. The number twelve million remains, more than three decades later, one of the largest commercial figures ever achieved by a debut album from a new-age or downtempo electronic act.

The cultural response was less unanimous. A number of European Catholic-audience radio stations refused to play the single, considering it blasphemous on the grounds that combining religious chant with explicit sexual subject matter constituted a desecration of sacred music. The Dutch national radio network TROS — which had selected Sadeness, Part I as Single of the Week and given it heavy rotation — received three separate bomb threats from listeners objecting to the broadcast. Cretu, an atheist by his own account in subsequent interviews, issued a public statement clarifying that he had no intention of offending anyone’s religious beliefs and that the Gregorian samples had been chosen for their atmospheric sonic qualities rather than as religious provocation. The Marquis de Sade lyric, he argued in a Billboard interview with editor Larry Flick, was a meditation on the relationship between religious doctrine and the natural human desire for pleasure — not a celebration of De Sade’s reputation as a libertine. “I didn’t want to write songs,” Cretu told Michael Azerrad of Rolling Stone the following year. “I wanted to write moods.” A more practical legal problem arrived in August 1991. The Munich choir Kapelle Antiqua — whose 1976 Polydor recordings of Gregorian chants had been the actual source material for the sampled chorus — recognised their own voices on the record, sued Cretu and Virgin Germany for unauthorised use of their performances and damage to what German law called the choir’s “right of personality,” and demanded a written apology along with financial compensation. Cretu and Virgin settled out of court with Polydor and BMG/Ariola for an undisclosed sum. Virgin acquired the retrospective sample licences. The choir kept their apology.

What Enigma Became, the New-Age Wave, and the Three Decades That Followed

Cretu followed MCMXC a.D. with The Cross of Changes in 1993, which produced the second international Enigma hit Return to Innocence — a single built around sampled Taiwanese Amis tribal vocals that would later become the subject of its own well-publicised sample-clearance lawsuit when the elderly Amis singers Difang and Igay Duana of the village of Malan recognised their own voices on a record that had become the theme song of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. The dispute settled. Enigma continued. Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi! (1996), The Screen Behind the Mirror (2000), Voyageur (2003), A Posteriori (2006), Seven Lives Many Faces (2008), and The Fall of a Rebel Angel (2016) followed. The project’s total worldwide sales now exceed seventy million units. Sandra Cretu and Michael Cretu divorced in 2007. Frank Peterson — the German composer-programmer who had collaborated with Cretu on early Enigma work — left in 1991 to form his own Gregorian project, releasing a series of classical-rock-fusion albums under that name across the next two decades. The pan-flute, the breath-driven new-age electronics, the dance-floor downtempo, and the sampled-vocal-from-distant-musical-traditions formula that Cretu invented with Sadeness, Part I went on to define an entire commercial radio format — the “world music” and “chill-out” rotation that radio stations across Europe and North America built around Enigma, Deep Forest, Enya, Adiemus, Era, Gregorian, and the dozens of similar projects that followed in their wake. The whispered question Sandra Lauer asked the Marquis de Sade in 1990 has been answered, in commercial terms, more comprehensively than perhaps any other single question in the recent history of European popular music.