Composer/Singer Jacques Brel

Jacques Brel was a Belgium-born composer, lyricist, and singer who by the mid-1960s was the leading chansonnier, or "troubadour pop artist," in France. Marlene Dietrich called him "the greatest singer in the world," and others used epithets such as "lyric genius" to refer to his dark ballads. By the early 1970s Brel had quit the concert stage and to concentrate on the writing of his soul-searching songs, by then numbering in the hundreds. Musically, his compositions are rooted in old Flemish and French forms, but with a contemporary sound. Brel would become famous to American audiences largely through the revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which contained 25 of his songs translated from the French by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman.

Brel would be part of a tradition of cabaret singing that had a history extending back into the previous century. Cabaret singing would be developed in Europe between the two world wars as an important form of cultural expression. In the seventeenth century the word "cabaret" meant a drinking shop, but it came to refer to entertainment supplied during meals in restaurants, or accompanied by drinks in night-clubs. It became a major force in World War I when many conventional theaters had to close by 10pm. After the war, all the large German cities had their cabarets. The Chat Noir, or the Black Cat, was the first French cabaret and opened in Montmartre in 1881, closing in 1897:

The great success of the Chat Noir, as of

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lf denied all of this and saw himself rather as a craftsman than an artist. Brel would emphasize the hard technical demands made by the process of song writing: You fashion a lovely line carrying a good thought. As a line it sits very well and you might be satisfied with it. But you find it does not quite serve the tune and the tempo, and you must carpenter it. Although you do not want it to happen you have changed your lovely line and perhaps impaired the thought. Brel denied that song lyrics were texts, meaning that they could stand on their own as poetry, and Blau agrees with this assessment. Song texts are partial works that require both music and performance to transform them into a significant whole. They are also limited tools with which to explore human experience, values, and emotions, and they are in part limited in the range of expression they can achieve for technical reasons: Song texts must use words open enough to use music tolerable to the singing mouth, throat, and tongue, arranged to avoid consonant and vowel collisions and awkwardnesses for singers, and which come to the ear of listeners with great intelligibility. . . Song texts, when they are exploited, are locked into rhythmics and tempi, which by

Category: Arts - C