L'Orange (song)

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Label of the French-speaking single in West Germany (1965)

L'Orange is a nearly three minute long French-language song by Gilbert Bécaud , that of La voix de son maître 1964 in France both single as well as EP and a year later in the Federal Republic of Germany by Electrola as a B-side of the single Nathalie published has been. The text is by Pierre Delanoë , the music was written by Bécaud himself, as usual. He is accompanied, as was often the case during this period, by the Raymond Bernard orchestra ; The alternating song between the soloist and a (nameless) choir plays a special role here .

Behind the “simple, harmless sounding title” hides “a strong, timeless message”: the song uses artistic means to counter prejudice , xenophobia and lynching , and it appeals to the acceptance of the different and the diverse. Jérôme Pintoux calls the chanson “a psychodrama about scapegoats , hatred of loners and witch hunts (collective hysteria )”.

The song is now considered one of the most succinct pieces from Bécaud's career and is also featured on most of the more recent compilations of his greatest successes.

Text and music

Plot and staging

Gilbert Bécaud (1965)

The song describes a dialogue between an anonymous group of people and an individual (motive of “all against one”) whom they accuse of stealing an orange from a merchant.

As is typical for many of Gilbert Bécaud's chansons, a rather everyday situation with concise participants is also shown here. The listener is addressed by a dense atmosphere, which the singer reinforced with his inclination for theatrical presentations in his stage and film appearances. L'Orange's theme was “perfect for a dramatic production”. The alternating singing between a mixed choir - in the first two stanzas only the male, then also the female voices - and the soloist creates an atmosphere that causes the listener to feel anxious because of its increasing aggressiveness . This acoustic impression is also visually underlined in a French black and white TV video clip from the 1960s and made visible to the viewer, because the anonymous crowd in the middle of which the singer moves back and forth like an animal in a cage, can only be heard, but is never recorded by the camera. For the group of people it is clear from the start that this young man is the thief (“Tu as volé l'orange” - “You stole the orange”) , whereby the repetition of as volé (which comes close to the textual equivalent of an ostinato ) develops a threatening situation for the accused right from the start, because apart from a short, shouted “No!” he does not get a word at all. And when he does that from the third verse on, he partly sings against the choir, which can be understood as an expression of ignoring the group or of talking past one another.

In response to his reply that he did not steal the fruit and that he himself was far too afraid of thieves (“trop peur des voleurs”) , the choir replied that it could only have been he because he was evil and ugly (“méchant et laid ”) , and fruit juice sticks like blood to his thieves (“ comme du sang sur tes doigts ”…“ avec tes mains crochues ”)  - and finally someone saw him doing the deed. The individual allegations are made alternately by a woman's or a man's voice; the soprano voice increases here selectively up to a range that evokes the impression of a howling fury or goddess of revenge in terms of pitch and timbre . The accused replies that he had not even been to the merchant's, but rather, with his eyes turned to the sky, wandered through the surrounding mountains in search of a blue bird (“je cherchais dans la montagne, les étoiles dans les yeux, l'oiseau bleu ") . In French literature, the blue bird has been a symbol of longing and love, related to the blue flower of Romanticism , since Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy published a fairy tale of the same name in 1697 . This term also appears repeatedly in chanson texts, not infrequently also in combination with the phrase “avoir des étoiles (or la lumière ) dans les yeux” (in German “to have eyes shining with happiness or amazement”), for example in Marie Myriam's winning title L'oiseau et l'enfant at the Eurovision Song Contest 1977 . It is used to describe children or adult dreamers .

This comparatively naivety of the accused's reply to a tangible accusation also adds to the drama of the plot; here, as it were, two worlds collide. In addition, his attempts at justification do not change the fact that everyone else is convinced of his perpetration, apparently regardless of what other arguments he could bring up. However, he does not do the latter, but merely repeats the two stanzas with his explanation. Instead, the situation culminates through the “ verdict ” of the crowd: the man with his wolf teeth has been observed for some time, and now the rope is tightening around his neck (“longtemps qu'on te guettait avec tes dents de loup ... t'auras la corde au cou! ") . This is his last day, and in general he is just a dirty thief, moreover a stranger who brings bad luck ("tu n'es qu'un sale voleur ... D'abord tu n'es qu'un étranger et tu portes malheur" ) . The accumulation of stereotypes or clichés in the accusations and statements made by the choir underscores the fact that the man was recognized as the perpetrator from the outset for the crowd. The contrast between the alleged cause and the possible punishment also contributes to this impression and to the threatening nature of the scenario; the value of a single orange ( mouth theft , but not an independent criminal offense in France even then) bears no reasonable relation to the exaggerated characterization of the possible delinquent by the people's voice and the consequences that threaten him.

The song ends as it began - with the repeated statement "Tu as volé as volé as volé ... l'orange" by the choir, in which the condemned by the crowd adds a final, rather helpless "Vous êtes fous!" ( "You are crazy!") Calls into it.

The missing stanza

The original text by Delanoë contains one last stanza, which is on the official website of the lyricist, but neither on the original record nor in the cinematic performances of the chanson from the 1960s. The ominous suggestion that he will wear the rope around his neck becomes certainty:

Tu as volé as volé as volé
l'orange du marchand.
Tu la vois,
elle est là,
la corde qui te pendra
la corde qui te pendra.

You stole it, stolen it, stolen
the merchant's orange.
You see it,
it is there,
the rope that will hang you,
the rope that will hang you.

The question of who initiated this cut - the record company, for example - and why this happened cannot be answered from the available sources. Whether this was intentional or not - as a result, this failure to speak out or floating in uncertainty with regard to the last step of the events also helps the listener to become a “participating, compassionate observer” in the sense of psychological suspense research .

music

Musically, the melody, held in G minor and in four-four time , is characterized by a fast, taut, sometimes rousing tempo , at which the singer can hardly sit at the piano , as a later film shows. This song is also a forty seconds long instrumental intro supplemented where Bécaud at the piano - accompanied only by a rhythm section of drums , upright bass and electric guitar  - a jazzy presented opener, the strong similarities to Hit the Road Jack by Ray Charles has. At the end of this film recording in particular, Bécaud works his instrument in a highly aggressive way - for example, he hits the keyboard cover several times against the sound box, a playing style that has made Jerry Lee Lewis particularly popular in rock 'n' roll - which also makes it clear , which is why the French was widely known as "Monsieur 100,000 Volts". Nothing is known about the identity of the choir singers, who have an unusually high proportion of singing here and who by no means act only in the background , but on an equal footing with the soloist. The names of background vocalists and studio musicians were the mid-1960s in the popular music but also rarely documented.

Emergence

The genesis of this chanson is not untypical for the way the long-time duo Delanoë / Bécaud worked: In September 1963, Bécaud needed some new material for an upcoming performance at the Olympia , but the lyricist had nothing in stock. The singer then asked him to tell him the first word he could think of spontaneously - that was the word orange. Something as simple as picking, peeling, or selling this fruit was out of the question for both of them; instead, they ended up stealing, which, according to Delanoë, “added a dramatic dimension. The anti-racist aspect then inevitably came in. "

In the meantime, the two had also been concerned with the question of which title this song should get. Initially , they talked about L'étranger (The Stranger) , but also more ironic things like La belle et douce ville (The beautiful, lovely city) or Plein d'hônnetes gens (Full of honorable people) , before they decided on L'Orange .
Even before the text was written, Bécaud apparently had a very specific style of music in mind - it was supposed to be something in the direction of gospel . After composing the music for it, including the choir parts, the lyricist found the result to be “a particularly strong piece”.

Reception, successes and cover versions

Gilles Verlant points out that L'Orange was by no means the only, but an essential, example in which Bécaud's humanistic attitude was expressed. This also has a biographical background, because the chansonnier had performed messenger services for the resistance movement ( Maquis ) there as a youth during the German occupation of France in the Savoyard Vercors ( Venthon near Albertville ) from spring 1944 . For Pierre Saka, who wrote texts for a whole series of chansons after the Second World War and published several books on this musical genre, Bécaud entered new territory in France with this socially critical content in the mid-1960s. For the Belgian TV journalist Sébastien Ministru this is no coincidence, because since the end of the war in Algeria and the Algerian independence (1962) had migrated more than 300,000 people from the former colony to France, although had French citizenship, but there very often not as equal Fellow citizens were considered. As it is summed up in L'Orange, this expressed itself in fear of strangers and even racism. Delanoë's and Bécaud's considerations regarding the title for this song, mentioned above, fit in with this. Another argument is that Bécaud has also countered racism in other songs such as Mustapha Dupont with his idea of integration .

At that time, Bécaud's version of the song was not enough for a hit parade placement. Nevertheless, the title is counted among his most important musical milestones and is considered "one of the most striking pieces of his career". L'Orange is also featured on a number of newer best-of compilations . Even when he presented it live for the first time at the Olympia at the end of 1963 - with the renowned film director Henri-Georges Clouzot taking over the staging of this appearance - the audience is said to have applauded for a long time, and in the following years it was always, no matter where he appeared demanded by the audience. In the soundtrack of the 1974 film A Lifetime (Toute une vie) by Claude Lelouch , the chanson was heard by a wide audience again , as well as in two other films: Léolo by Jean-Claude Lauzon (1992) and Lauzon Lauzone by Louis Bélanger (2001).

In 2003, two years after the singer's death, a cover version of his chanson became a top international hit. In the third season of Star Academy , the French equivalent of Fame Academy broadcast on TF1 , eight of the candidates sang this song together. The single produced by it was number one in France and Belgium and sixth in Switzerland, which brought "this beautiful, committed song to a whole new generation". And presumably with this version in tow, the original came to a belated honor: EMI released a CD that contained the studio recording from 1964 and two versions that Bécaud performed at the Olympia in 1966 and 1988 . This record entered the French Top 100 in January 2004, stayed there for five weeks and achieved 89th place as the best place.Jean -Christophe Averty , a French pioneer of video clips , has embedded the chanson in an artistic short film , France 3 in It was broadcast again in February 2017 as part of a documentary about the "Golden Age of Variety". In it , Averty only assembled Bécaud's face with oranges while singing the song, and in the final sequence shows a gallows on which a person who is also made of oranges is hanging.

In 1966 a German-language version of the chanson was published under the title Der Orangendieb , translated by Kurt Hertha and sung by Dietmar Schönherr , which also contains the final stanza that Bécaud missed. Suzanne Gabriello Delanoë's text had already been rewritten a year earlier and the song L'Orange de l'agent was released on an EP; In this parody , an agent policier questions a driver who is said to have ignored the yellow flashing light of a traffic light - in French, passer à l'orange . In the GDR , Amiga released the original French version in 1980 on a Bécaud long-playing record titled Natalie (without h). Other cover versions published in the mid-1960s were by Gilles Dominique and, purely instrumentally , by the musette - accordionist Aimable and - on a Letkiss EP - the trumpeter Georges Jouvin .

literature

Web links

Evidence and Notes

  1. ↑ Fabien Lecœuvre, 1001 histoires, 2017, p. 243 f.
  2. ↑ At that time, the death penalty was still in force in France (abolished in 1981), and it was carried out in more than 30 cases in the Fifth Republic between 1959 and the summer of 1964.
  3. ↑ Article “ Une orange qui a fait le tour du monde ” from January 18, 2019 in L'Orient-Le Jour ; The author of the article " B-side pearl from the sixties: Gilbert Bécaud, L'Orange " of March 23, 2016 on tedaboutsongs.60herz.de assesses this in a similar way, according to which the chanson is "about exclusion and peer pressure Violence against those who look different “ go.
  4. ↑ a b Jérôme Pintoux: Les chanteurs français des années 60. Du côté de chez les yéyés et sur la Rive Gauche. Camion Blanc, Rosières-en-Haye 2015, ISBN 978-2-35779-778-9 , p. 432
  5. ↑ Lyrics at lyricstranslate.com
  6. ↑ a b Gilles Verlant: L'Odyssée de la chanson française. Ed. Hors Collection, Paris 2006, ISBN 978-2-258-07087-5 , p. 41
  7. ↑ Recording of this television program , in which Bécaud performs the chanson, on YouTube.
  8. ↑ Theft of food (vol de nourriture) fell and falls under the French criminal law ( code pénal ) , Article 311-1, under theft  - as in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1975 ( § 242 StGB ).
  9. ↑ Text version on pierre-delanoe.fr
  10. ↑ a b Article " Chanson à la Une - L'orange, par Gilbert Bécaud " by Maryse Duilhé at podcastjournal.net
  11. ↑ At least it would not be atypical of the time if La voix de son maître had cut away this stanza in anticipatory obedience . Because in the 1960s, explicit descriptions of death were frowned upon even on many European radio stations and led to broadcast boycotts - this is what happened around the turn of the year 1959/1960, for example, Teen Angel by Mark Dinning , who with the words "Blood Runs in the Grooves" (Blood runs through the record grooves) in the USA and Great Britain (Fred Bronson: The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. Billboard Publications, New York 1992, 3rd edition, ISBN 0-8230-8298-9 , p. 65 ), and so it happened in 1968 Michel Polnareff's chanson Le Bal des Laze in France (Fabien Lecœuvre, 1001 histoires, 2017, p. 294).
  12. ↑ A score for soloist and choir, arranged by A. Lapeyre, can be found as a PDF at webetab.ac-bordeaux.fr.
  13. ↑ Video of this undated studio live version of L'Orange on YouTube
  14. ↑ Annie and Bernard Réval, Gilbert Bécaud, 2001, p. 94 f.
  15. ^ After the interview with Pierre Delanoë on March 28, 2005 at L'Express
  16. ↑ a b c d Fabien Lecœuvre, 1001 histoires, 2017, p. 244
  17. ↑ Annie and Bernard Réval, Gilbert Bécaud, 2001, p. 95
  18. ↑ Gilles Verlant (ed.): L'encyclopédie de la Chanson française. Des années 40 à nos jours. Ed. Hors Collection, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-258-04635-1 , p. 33; Annie and Bernard Réval, Gilbert Bécaud, 2001. p. 22 ff. - the relation of these personal experiences to the fact that L'Orange is set in a place with surrounding mountains is obvious.
  19. ↑ Pierre Saka: 50 ans de chanson française. France Loisirs, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-7242-5790-1 , p. 43
  20. ↑ During this war in 1956 there was an unsuccessful operation by the French foreign secret service SDECE in Kabylia called "Oiseau bleu" (Blue Bird) - cf. for example Camille Lacoste-Dujardin: Opération oiseau bleu. Des Kabyles, des ethnologues et la guerre d'Algérie. , La Découverte, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-7071-2666-7 . However, it is not known whether Pierre Delanoë also referred to it in his text.
  21. ↑ " L'Orange est une chanson post-guerre-d'Algérie ... " from January 25, 2017 at rtbf.be
  22. ↑ Annie and Bernard Réval, Gilbert Bécaud, 2001, pp. 165 and 251
  23. ↑ so Annie and Bernard Réval, Gilbert Bécaud, 2001, p. 251
  24. ↑ For example on " 20 Chansons D'or (2006) ", " Immortal: His Biggest Chansons (2011) " and in the " Anthology (1953-2002) " from 2016, which includes 20 CDs .
  25. ↑ Annie and Bernard Réval, Gilbert Bécaud, 2001, p. 136
  26. ↑ after Pierre Delanoë's database entry in Internet Movie Database
  27. ^ According to the chart overview on lescharts.com, for Switzerland also on hitparade.ch ; this Star Academy version can be found as a video on YouTube.
  28. ↑ Information at lescharts.com
  29. ↑ Averty video clip at jukebox.fr and excerpts from tendances.orange.fr
  30. ↑ Record cover of the Schönherr version on 45cat.com and video on YouTube
  31. ↑ Record cover of the Gabriello parody at 45cat.com and video of its recording from the holdings of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel
  32. ↑ These three pieces of information are also from 45cat.com .
This article was added to the list of excellent articles in this version on March 18, 2019 .