Carlos Aznavour.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
The movie “Notting Hill” started and the song “She” played. The characters of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant had not yet met in London, but everything was already clear to them. “It will be beautiful,” the song said. “I’m not sure about the happy ending, but it will be beautiful.”
Sweet, moving, with humor and tenderness. No molasses or powdered sugar, no fanfare. In silence, sometimes sadly. All this was promised by a song written by Charles Aznavour in 1974 in English for a television series. Now the song is 50 years old, “Notting Hill” is 25 and Aznavour would have turned one hundred.
I’m very happy to have been able to see him on stage and see him outside of the concert. Even at a press conference, where everything is done according to the eternal protocol: a tired elderly artist (in the case of Charles Aznavour, polite), journalists with the eternal question of whether Aznavour liked Moscow, a translator. And Aznavour, who has not come to Moscow for the first time, sits at his table and waits for everything to be over.
Then they talked about Charles Aznavour’s farewell tour, although he later returned: not to the Kremlin Concert Hall, but to Barvikha, where there were only 700 seats for spectators of a certain circle with certain economic capabilities. And at that time I was lucky, Aznavour was 83 years old, but at the concert in the Kremlin he was not felt. It all seemed like a kind of dream: how can a person of that age be on stage for more than two hours, sing, dance, joke with the audience? A couple of times he forgot the words, but this did not turn into a tragedy and was easily interpreted immediately. Daughter Katya did the choirs and sang a song with her father. Very dramatic.
Then the famous “Eternal Love”, a song created for the movie “Tehran-43”, also played. There was an encore and Charles Aznavour performed part of the song in Russian. He warned everyone that he knew the language “badly,” and then he sang, well, well.
Nanny and Shahnur
When Aznavour is mentioned, the first thing they say is: “He’s Armenian.” Yes, his parents, a singer and actress, were emigrants, they left before the revolution and Charles was born in Paris. His name was Shahnu r Vahina k Aznavuryan, but the nanny could not pronounce it and the boy became Charles. He lived in the Latin Quarter, played the violin from the age of five, acted in films from a young age and began composing songs. Small theater, roles, Shakespeare. When the war came, the family began to hide those who were persecuted by the Nazis. And Charles performed in a cabaret, driving around Paris on roller skates. The rollers rattled, the patrol stopped Charles periodically, and then the patrolmen got tired, the inspection stopped, and Aznavour had freedom of movement: no one stopped him for checks. Many of those rescued later attended Charles’s concerts. Only then, in the forties, an eternity passed before real concerts and hits: listeners did not like Aznavour’s voice, so he often wrote songs that were not for himself.
1989 Charles Aznavour during one of the meetings on Armenian soil. Photo by Robert Atayan /TASS Photo Chronicle/
Piaf and goodbye to the wrong nose
Many things changed in 1946. The acquaintance of Edith Piaf, who became interested in Charles, removed Aznavour from the existence of a little-known chansonnier who lived near Place Pigalle (and this is a symptom of financial problems). He later joked that a man from the Latin Quarter knew the Kama Sutra since childhood. What can we say then about Pigalle with its famous brothels…?
They were friends with Piaf, Aznavour always insisted on it. No bed, just cooperation. In fact, he preferred single people and Aznavour had a wife and a son. And Piaf had an affair with Michel Cerdan, world, European and French boxing champion. Michel was married, was not afraid to tell the whole world about his affair with Piaf and soon died in a plane crash. Piaf and Aznavour also had a chance to die, but in car accidents, they became two together.
Piaf “made” Aznavour in many ways. He even forced him to fix his Armenian nose. And one day he realized that he could no longer live in his shadow and forced himself to listen and hear in different languages and around the world.
Charles Aznavour on stage, 1970
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
Miss Piggy and the telephone from the Paris landfill
He was the first Frenchman to have a platinum record in Europe. He wrote songs for Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, sang with Sting, Elton John, Bryan Ferry, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Dalida… He once said that he couldn’t go out of style because he always does the same thing. His songs could be cruel, but listeners who didn’t know French didn’t understand it. This timbre, this damn language with which you can seduce any woman… I remember a wonderful scene from the old “Muppet Show”, when Charles Aznavour, as a guest star, talks to Miss Piggy and whispers something in her ear. Miss Piggy melts with delight and it turns out to be the phone number of a garbage collector in Paris.
They said he had an affair with Brigitte Bardot. She gave a great answer to someone in an interview: “People don’t fall in love because of someone’s fame. Otherwise, it is not love, it is tourism.” He and Brigitte had been friends for about forty years, without tourism. There are some nice photographs from the late 1950s: Aznavour jumps up behind Bardot with a guitar and she is lying on the sofa. They say that at that time the chansonnier was singing “Moscow Evenings.”
Aznavour acted a lot in films. The most famous film was directed by Francois Truffaut: “Shoot the Pianist!” There was also Schlöndorff’s “Tin Drum.” There were films with the eldest daughter from his first marriage, with Gray Aznavour. With Truffaut he could also act in the film adaptation of Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451”, but the American producers rejected the candidacy. Aznavour was upset, but then learned that Jean-Paul Belmondo was not allowed to play that role with the diagnosis: no one knows them. More famous seemed to be Oscar Werner, the Austrian actor who starred alongside Truffaut in the world-famous “Jules and Jim.”
“He is theater, he hypnotizes the French”
Aznavour’s fame soon surpassed Werner’s by a million times. He sang on many stages, in several languages, and sometimes recorded four versions of a song at once to be understood. He said that his music was nothing special, that it only served to make people listen to his poetry. They talked about everyday life, about what they write in the newspapers and not in thick classic books. His bohemia is not a collection of ladies and gentlemen in diamonds and tuxedos, it is a commotion backstage or in the artist’s studio, adventures, models, cabaret dancers, alcohol, a stained palette on the floor, poverty and, suddenly, Sun. . Or longing for the sun, which has already set, warming the sandstone of which that same part of Paris is built, which today is decent and glamorous to the point of impossibility.
In literal translations, these songs sound like evil satire. Jean Cocteau, a legend of French literature of the last century, said an important thing: “Before Charles Aznavour, despair was unpopular.” But we can clarify that sincerity has also become popular. It’s about her. At the level of gesture, look, and always in words. “He himself is a theater, he hypnotizes the French,” said Jean Gabin. And this is not an option: “have mercy on me, I am so unhappy”, but a story of overflow. For another more commercial use of the gift, Aznavour used a calm mode: without rogue sails calling for storms. Simply beautiful songs, with “Amor Eterno”, but still with sadness.
He spent his last years in Switzerland (no longer an eternal love, but an eternal story with high taxes in France). I was on tour until the end. At a concert in St. Petersburg on April 25, 2018, she fell ill. The concert was postponed for a year, but in 2019 there was no one left to sing. 94 years. 94 countries in which she performed…
October 2018. Farewell ceremony for French singer Charles Aznavour in Paris. Photo: ZumaTASS
Aznavour died on October 1, 2018, the farewell took place in Les Invalides, in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. In Armenia a day of mourning has been declared. And the farewell ceremony ended with the performance of the song Emmenez-moi.” Let me translate a couple of lines: “Take me to the ends of the earth, to a beautiful country! It seems that misfortune is not so destructive under the sun.”
