SINGER READY TO BID ADIEU
Juliette Gréco, icon of the classic age of French chanson, kicks off farewell tour
She is the queen in black, with no makeup except for her trademark kohl eyeliner. Juliette Gréco is the last remaining icon of the classic age of French chanson, from the late 1940s to the ’50s. Indeed, she is a classic unto herself, even in her early days when she was the darling muse of heavyweight writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and the rest of the Left Bank coterie. Singing in clubs like the Tabou in an effervescent Paris liberated from the Germans, she embodied the mysterious, the sensuous, and — shall we say — existential. As an early hit emphasized, “Je suis comme je suis.”
On Wednesday, the 88-year-old icon — an overused word that fits her like a glove — needed a little help mounting the podium at the press room of Les FrancoFolies, the festival she plays on Sunday, kicking off her farewell tour. But once plumped into a comfy chair, she was all ears, eyes and ideas. (She seems ageless: One journalist told me he didn’t know whether to call her Madame or Mademoiselle.)
Gréco was asked if she had chosen a special song list for her last concert in the world’s second-largest francophone city. She hesitated: “It’s always unpredictable. I count on my heart and my passion, but the choice is very difficult. I like chansons without limits, I sing songs for which I feel affinity and amour, so it’s very complicated to separate the things you love.”
“I sing what I like, just as I defend what I want to defend. I never sang just for the money. The choice of songs always came from love, and a particular rapport with me. I love the poets. A good song is a piece of theatre in two, three, seven minutes. It’s something parfaitement serene, perfectly profound, perfectly happy, perfectly childlike, perfectly crazy. Voilà, those are the songs I sing.”
Responding to a question about singing contemporary songs, she said that on this tour she will concentrate on the “very old songs, the songs that have been with me for a long time.”
The look in her eyes was, astonishingly, both faraway and up close and personal. As in her singing voice, there is a touch of tristesse in her voice.
But if Gréco was burdened by the happenstance of longevity, of having the responsibility for keeping the great old songs alive, she didn’t show it. Her first concert for a non-French audience was in England in 1954. “I thought they wouldn’t understand a word,” she recalled, “but it was almost the opposite. After all, at that time French was the queen of language, the language of diplomacy.”
Of course, there were the age-old questions about life on the Left Bank after the war, and how the area stacks up today. Sartre, the bug-eyed intellectual, wrote songs for her. “Gréco has a million poems in her voice,” he wrote, like a fan and not the primordial public intellectual of the time. “It is like a warm light that revives the embers burning inside of us all. It is thanks to her, and for her, that I have written songs. In her mouth, my words become precious stones.”
Was that golden era overly mythologized?
“Not at all,” she snapped. “Today there is much less magic. After the war we were filled with an extraordinary sense of liberation, of the country, bien sûr, but also liberation of the lyrics. The intellectuals and the masters of literature and their students had a rapprochement, they were closer together. But unfortunately the distance between them has grown again. Young people find themselves alone and on their own. A child, a young person, needs warmth and love, and now the distance is wide, very wide.
“Things have changed. Perhaps the young have been taken hostage by money. They all wear the same caps, the same blouses, because they are catered to this way. There are some that resist, but it’s difficult to exist in a world of money. It’s complicated, and I don’t know if they’re really happy.”
If she has any advice for the young it would be simple. “Be a human being … and bon courage.” Her voice lowered. “They live in an extraordinarily tragic and fragile world.” The room was silent. She took a deep breath, and said quietly, “Et voilà.”