Project Brassens
About Georges Brassens’s songs
ITALIANO
| An author beyond time and space |
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The appeal of Brassens’s songs to his attentive listeners (which is the main reason for initiating this project) rests on the fact that the ideas behind his songs represent human values and feelings that do not depend on historical periods or political or social trends.
Although Brassens’s work was composed in last century’s France mainly between the early 50’s and the late 70’s, he describes situations and characters that are perfectly applicable to today's society in all parts of the globe. He can, therefore, be considered a modern and acute observer of the human soul, who casts a critical eye and uses irony to deliver a two-sided message: on the one hand, he uncovers societal ills, conformism and bigotry, and on the other hand he celebrates love, friendship, individual freedom and universal brotherhood. His masterly use of irony as communication style, as well as his ability to use the French language in a highly sophisticated manner through double meaning, idiomatic expressions and puns, including a consummate use of ancient argot vocabulary, allow him to tackle a variety of subjects that were certainly considered daring and unconventional in mainstream society, and also in the musical production, of his time. |
| The main themes in Brassens's work |
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The celebration of individual freedom is a major theme in Brassens. This is intended as the indispensable freedom to choose one’s own path, creed, manner and life philosophy by paying little due, if any at all, to societal norms, majority views or top-down instructions. This means taking full responsibility for one’s actions, one’s own life and the results of it, without excuses or blaming others. The individual has a choice to make, at every step of his life, a choice which will be valid for, and limited to, himself only, without assuming the understanding of others or trying to impersonate role models or living examples to be followed. Early examples of this approach to life are the songs La mauvaise réputation (in his first LP album) and La mauvaise herbe, later confirmed by other songs such as Le petit jouer de fluteau, Le vieux Normand and Le pluriel. There is no doubt that privacy was a very important component of individual freedom for Brassens, as amply demonstrated by his lifestyle and his reluctance to disclose details of his private life. With his song Les trompettes de la renommée, he wittily deflects public attention and imposes his preference for keeping his lifestyle and his privacy over the demands of being a public figure. The values of love resound across Brassens’s songs throughout his artistic repertoire. Love is presented in virtually all its forms: as joyful (La chasse aux papillons, Il suffit de passer le pont), idyllic (Le parapluie), melancholic (La marine, Mes amours d'antan, La marche nuptiale), dramatic (Le père Noel et la petite fille, Coupidon s’en fout), light-hearted and natural (Dans l’eau de la claire fontaine, Une jolie fleur, Je suis un voyou, Putain de toi), heroic (La fille à cent sous, Les sabots d’Hélène), romantic (La première fille, Les amoureux des bancs publiques), submissive (Je me suis fait tout petit), erotic (Quatre-vingt-quinze fois, La nymphomane, La fessée, Venus Callypige), adulterous (Le cocu, À l’ombre des maris, La traîtresse, L’orage), quarrelsome (Misogynie à part, Les casseuses). It is hard to comprehensively categorize Brassens’s love songs — those mentioned above are just a small sample of the spectrum of Brassens’s approach to human love. It may be argued that amongst the most touching of his love songs, and one that best explains his unconventional views of marriage, is La non-demande en marriage, a personal plea to his life-long partner to keep loving each other without the obligations of wedlock. Friendship and camaraderie is another major theme in Brassens’s life, not only in many of his songs but also in his life. The song Les copain d'abord has become a renowned hymn to friendship and it is one of his best known songs. Au bois de mon cœur is another song that celebrates the particular relationship that Brassens imagined should exist among friends. Mirroring the theme of love, Brassens ponders over the image and the meaning of death. References to death are scattered throughout his songs, often in an ironic and facetious manner, which nevertheless does not diminish his lucid and dramatic touch upon the subject of death. Brassens died relatively young, at 60, due to cancer and he suffered with kidney stones for a long time. He masterly exorcised his own death with one of his masterpiece songs Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Séte, with which he concluded all his shows in the last years of his life. Other examples of his inclination to sing stories related to death are: Funérailles d’antan, Les quat’z’arts, Le fantome, La ballade des cimetières. Particular mention should be made of the song Bonhomme, in which he describes in a most dramatic way the ineluctability of an old man’s death. As regards politics, this certainly wasn’t a subject that could attract his interest in terms of partisan or dogmatic politics. Brassens consistently refused to publicly take sides in any political movement, including during the period of the students’ movement of 1968 and the Vietnam War. Despite his solitary and individualistic stance on world public affairs, some of his songs are a strong and ironic denunciation of militarism and the scourge of wars, promoting pacifistic ideas (Les deux oncles, La guerre de 14-18, Mourir pour des idées, La tondue) and provoking resentment from the conservative and militaristic sectors of French society. Brassens’s concern for social justice and preference for the poor and marginalised is clearly evident in his work. From his early years, collaborating with publications of anarchic leaning, he would transpose his aversion for arrogant wealth in his writings and songs (Les croquants) and his sympathy for the losers and the unfortunate (L’épave, Pauvre Martin, Le bistrot, L’assassinat). He even composed a song for the thieves who burglarized his house (Stances à un cambrioleur). In Chanson pour l’Auvergnat, the theme of human solidarity reaches the force of a sermon. Despite his declared agnosticism and anti-clericalism (Le Mécréant, Tempête dans un bénitier), Brassens is influenced by his religious upbringing and re-proposes original Christian values such as charity, modesty and forgiveness in a more secular version — as social justice, friendship and tolerance. |
| The language |
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The use of the French language is highly sophisticated in Brassens’s songs. For this reason, translating his texts is particularly challenging due to literary references, idiomatic expressions, double meanings and the use of obsolete words representing an archaic world populated by characters that no longer exist (Le Fossayeur, Pauvre Martin). Also the use of metre, rhythm and rhyme is accurate and always after obsessive research and meticulousness. Some of the best examples of the finesse of his compositions are La marguerite and La cane de Jeanne. In conclusion, Brassens is an evergreen author because he deals with the fundamentals of life and its immutable dilemmas. His importance in the French literary culture is established and recognized, his texts are studied in French schools, and he continues to attract fans and attention from musicians from all over the world. Numerous websites exist dedicated to his work. His native town Sète, in the south of France, hosts a permanent museum and annual festivals dedicated to his work and his memory. The authors of this project intend to contribute to the promotion of Brassens’s work in the world, in the hope that more people will embrace the key messages that he so skillfully engraves in his songs. |