[aka Monique Andrée Serf]
9 June 1930 – 24 November 1997
BARBARA
from the 1964 Philips LP
Barbara chante Barbara
WITHOUT BAGGAGE
The day when you come, the day when you come
The day when you come, don't bring your baggage
What does it matter, after all, what's inside
I'll recognize you by reading all that in your face
I've been waiting for you for so long
You'll hold out your hands to me, I'll take them
And console the voices which cry out in your voice
I will tame you, turn off the lights
You won't have to say anything, I will know you well
The very small boy with the solitary look
Who hides his unhappiness in lost gardens
Who doesn't know how to play marbles or war games
Who has given everything and received nothing
If I come to you, I will come without baggage
What does it matter, after all, what's inside
You will recognize me by reading it in my face
You've been waiting for me for so long
I'll hold out my hands to you, you'll take them
And console the voices which cry out in my voice
You will tame me, turn off the lights
I won't have to say anything, you will know me well
The very small girl, hair in disarray
Who hides her unhappiness in lost gardens
And who loves the rain and the wind and the straw
And the cool of evening and the forbidden games
When this day arrives, without the past, without baggage
We will go together toward a new spring
That will blend our hands, our bodies and our faces
We've been waiting for that for so long
What use to speak again of childhood dreams?
What use to speak again of lost illusions?
When this day arrives, we will go on together
Forever discovered, forever recognized
The day when you come, the day when you come
I've been waiting for you for so long…
Words and music by
Barbara
© 1964 Universal Music Group
Translated (very loosely) by
BR
See below for original French text
The songs of Barbara, who was born Monique Andrée Serf in the 17th arrondisement of Paris on 9 June 1930, have a lilting, haunting quality that can strike the ears of anglophone listeners as being a little odd the first time they hear them. The words seem to flow in a single unbroken stream while the accompanying music often seems closer to that created by classical composers like Chopin or Debussy — minimalistic, precise yet somehow achingly, almost painfully expressive. The drama that makes chanson uniquely what it is is there, but it's not the high drama of Jacques Brel or Léo Ferré or even the earthy yet tuneful quality we tend to associate with Georges Brassens or an earlier generation of performers like Charles Trenet or Lucienne Boyer. Even Barbara's interpretations of Brel and Brassens material — she recorded an album dedicated to the work of both artists in 1960 — seen to owe little to the original versions, transforming them into what, at times, seems like chansons more reminiscent of the French music hall tradition of the late nineteenth century as popularized by Yvette Guilbert, one of her formative influences.
Barbara's rise to fame was hardly what could be described as meteoric. She grew up in Paris under the Nazi occupation, with her Jewish family frequently forced to move to evade the SS and those who might denounce them either out of spite or in the hope of being financially rewarded for their treachery. Between July 1943 and October 1945 the Serf family was hidden in the home of orchestra leader Jean-Paul Penin, first in the town of Préaux in central France and then in the town of Saint-Marcellin in the southeast of the country. Nor was the threat of being sent to a concentration camp the only horror Monique Andrée Serf was forced to endure as a child. In 1941 she was sexually abused for the first time by her father. 'Un soir, à Tarbes, ' she wrote in her unfinished memoir,
'mon univers bascule dans l'horreur. J'ai dix ans et demi. Les enfants se
taisent parce qu'on refuse de les croire. Parce qu'on les soupçonne
d'affabuler.' ['One night, in the town of Tarbes… my universe collapsed into horror. I was ten and a half. Children shut up because we refuse to believe them. Because we suspect them of inventing tales.']
The Serfs returned to Paris after the war where Monique dreamed of becoming a concert pianist — a dream she had to abandon after a cyst on her right hand required her to undergo surgery, damaging the tendons in the process. She then set her sights on becoming a singer, taking voice lessons from a Madame Dusséqué who had enough faith in her talent to recommend her to the head of the Paris Conservatory who enrolled her there as a student in 1947. Her father soon rented a piano for her, upon which she learned to play by ear by copying songs performed by Edith Piaf and other popular singers of the day. Her father adandoned the family two years later, never to return, with the piano being repossessed shortly after his departure by the rental company.
Determined to become a pianiste-chantant [singing pianist] Monique Serf relocated to Belgium in 1950, living for a time in Brussels with her cousin before he turned violent and she fled to Charleroi where she found some measure of acceptance from its small artistic community. It was in Charleroi that she performed under the name Barbara for the first time, a name she chose as the gallicizied equivalent of Varvara, the name of the Ukrainian-born maternal grandmother who had largely raised her. She performed material made famous by Piaf, Marianne Oswald, Germaine Montero and the rising star of French chanson Juliette Gréco and also met Jacques Brel who, like her, was attempting to make a name for himself on the Belgian cabaret circuit. She was back in Paris at the end of 1951 to audition for a spot at the nightclub La Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons, only to be offered a job as its dishwasher. She returned to Charleroi in 1952 and began performing regularly in a club owned by Claude Sluys, a young lawyer who would become her husband in October 1953 and whom she would divorce two years later.
1955 also saw the release of her debut single for the Decca label, a single that failed to chart and saw her spend the next two years playing a succession of small cabarets in Paris including L'Écluse where, under the name La Chanteuse de minuit [The Midnight Singer], she gradually began to build a following among the city's university students. Encouraged by the now relocated and increasingly successful Jacques Brel, she began to compose her own material, two samples of which appeared on her debut LP Barbara à L'Écluse released by Marconi/HMV in 1959. A few months later she learned that her father, whom she had not seen for a decade and who had been living as a tramp since abandoning the family, was dying in the French city of Nantes. Barbara rushed there to see him, only to find him dead when she arrived, the sight of his corpse filling her, she later observed, with a mixture of emotions ranging from fascination, panic, scorn and hatred to an immense sense of despair. His death would inspire the song Nantes which took her four years to complete and would go on to become one of her signature tunes.
Although she continued to perform in cabarets and as a supporting act for established artists like Félix Marten, it took until 1964, and another supporting engagement with Georges Brassens at the Montparnasse music hall called the Bobino, for Barbara to win over the previously dismissive critics and connect with a mainstream audience. This success was followed by Barbara chante Barbara [Barbara sings Barbara], her first album for the Philips label released in March 1965, another critical success and, more importantly, a commercial one as well. Within a few months she was headlining at the Bobino and being featured in a day long retrospective by radio station France-Inter, an event she found so moving that she wrote a song about it titled Ma plus belles histoire d'amour [My Most Beautiful Love Story] that would remain a beloved staple of her repertoire for the rest of her career.
By 1970, with her presence as a performer and poet in the chanson tradition now firmly established thanks to a series of sold-out appearances at the Paris Olympia the previous year, Barbara branched out into musical theater, performing the role of a brothel keeper in the show Madame for which she also composed the score. The show was not a success, but that didn't prevent Jacques Brel from casting her in Franz, his first foray into film directing, in 1972 — a film in which she gave a moving performance as Léonie, a so-called 'ugly woman' incapable of finding the love she has dreamed of experiencing all her life. The 1970s also saw become a frequent presence on French television and perform in many parts of Western Europe in addition to giving well-received concerts in Japan and Canada.
This habit of continual hard work would not be abandoned in the 1980s, seeing Barbara record and release a slew of new albums including Lily Passion, co-written with Québécois chansonnier Luc Plamondon, which she performed live with actor Gérard Depardieu in January 1986. That summer, she performed in New York at the Metropolitan Opera House with Russian dancer Mikhail Barychnikov interpreting two of her songs live on stage. Concerts increasingly became her preferred medium of expression as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, with her again touring Japan and Canada and performing for the first time in Israel. She gave what was to be her final live performance in the French city of Tours on 26 March 1994, with what would be her final album, simply titled Barbara, released two years later.
She retired to her country home just outside Paris to write her memoirs and was working on them when she died from what was reported as 'sudden toxic shock' (possibly brought about by her long term use of stimulants, anti-anxiety medication, steroids to help her damaged vocal chords plus a poor diet) on 24 November 1997. Because she died without heirs, her belongings were auctioned off in 1999, much to the horror of her friends who had hoped to turn her home into a museum that would serve as a permanent tribute to her life and work.
That work is now recognized in France and elsewhere as being among the best ever produced by anybody working in the chanson tradition, with many of her songs going on to become cornerstones of the repertoire. Yet despite the acclaim she eventually received, Barbara always remained unsure of her talent as a songwriter. 'Chanter c'est chanter, écrire c'est écrire, et chanter ce qu'on écrit c'est encore autre chose,' she once told an interviewer. 'Jusqu'à l'age de trente ans, j'ai chanté, sans écrire: Brel, Brassens, Ferré, Fragson et un tas de gens que j'aimais. Et puis le jour où j'ai envie de parler comme une femme, j'ai écrit Dis quand reviendras-tu? et je ne l'ai pas avoue pendant longtemps. Disons qu'il m'est arrivé d'écrire et que j'en suis la première étonnée. Je crois être plus une femme qui chante qu'une femme qui écrit.' [Singing is singing, writing is writing, and singing what you write is something else… Until the age of thirty, I sang, without writing: Brel, Brassens, Ferré, Fragson and a lot of other people whose work I liked. And when the day came that I needed to speak as a woman, I wrote "When Will You Return?" and didn't admit it for a long time. Let's say that I happened to write it and was the first to be astonished. I believe myself to be more a woman who sings than a woman who writes.]
Use the link below to hear more great music by French singer-songwriter BARBARA:
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BARBARA, c 1959
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SANS BAGAGES
Le jour où tu viendras, le jour où tu viendras
Le jour où tu viendras, ne prends pas tes bagages
Que m´importe, après tout, ce qu´il y aurait dedans
Je te reconnaitrai à lire ton visage
Il y a tant et tant de temps que je t´attends
Tu me tendras les mains, je n´aurai qu´à les prendre
Et consoler les voix qui pleurent dans ta voix
Je t´apprivoiserai, les lumières éteintes
Tu n´auras rien à dire, je reconnaitrai bien
Le tout petit garçon, le regard solitaire
Qui cachait ses chagrins dans les jardins perdus
Qui ne savait jouer qu´aux billes ou à la guerre
Qui avait tout donné et n´avait rien reçu
Si je venais vers toi, je viendrais sans bagages
Que t´importe, après tout, ce qu´il y aurait dedans
Tu me reconnaîtrais à lire mon visage
Il y a tant et tant de temps que tu m´attends
Je te tendrai les mains, tu n´aurais qu´à les prendre
Et consoler les voix qui pleurent dans ma voix
Tu m´apprivoiserais, les lumières éteintes
Je n´aurais rien à dire, tu reconnaîtrais bien
La toute petite fille, aux cheveux en bataille
Qui cachait ses chagrins dans les jardins perdus
Et qui aimait la pluie et le vent et la paille
Et le frais de la nuit et les jeux défendus
Quand viendra ce jour-là, sans passé, sans bagages
Nous partirons ensemble vers un nouveau printemps
Qui mêlera nos corps, nos mains et nos visages
Il y a tant et tant de temps que l´on s´attend.
A quoi bon se redire les rêves de l´enfance?
A quoi bon se redire les illusions perdues?
Quand viendra ce jour-là, nous partirons ensemble
A jamais retrouvés, à jamais reconnus
Le jour où tu viendras, le jour où tu viendras
Il y a tant et tant de temps que je t´attends...
Paroles et musique par
Barbara
© 1964 Universal Music Group
