513/917 Ingrid Peters: Über die Brücke gehn (Germany 1986)

If in the late 1960's and early 1970's Germany made a habit of borrowing their Eurovision artists from Scandinavia (Siw Malmkvist from Sweden, Wencke Myhre from Norway and Gitte Haenning from Denmark), the 1970's and 1980's belonged to established female stars, who did not find it awkward to boost their career on Eurovision Stage. Ingrid Peters was one of them.

What I love about these schlager queens is that when they came on stage you didn't have to be worried one bit about whether they could carry the tune and whether they were professional enough to handle the pressure and excitement of a popular, world wide television show. Like Katja Ebstein, Lena Valaitis, Mary Roos and Ireen Sheer before her, Ingrid Peters took the stage and sung her song with no nervousness in sight and no flat note anywhere to be found. A professional is always a professional.

The composer Hans Blum was no beginner either, he had already written the German entries of 1965, 1967 and 1969. Über die Brücke gehn was maybe not the most original song he'd ever written but it suited Ingrid Peters perfectly and with nice build up to the chorus and the change of key in the right place it went straight into my heart as a musical package well done and beautifully finished.

The final result of the song (8th place among 20 participants) correlates well with my feelings to the song. It did well but the final push needed to pass the perky uptempo pop songs like the entries from Belgium, Denmark, United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden and the traditional French ballads (from Switzerland and Luxemburg) was missing.

Unfortunately the 1986 contest marked the end of era of established German stars on Eurovision stage. Like in so many countries, now also in Germany the big acts started to shy away from the Eurovision Song Contest which allegedly in more cases hurt already established careers than promoted them.

My points 4/5.