Le Bal des Laze (song)

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Michel Polnareff (1967)

Le Bal des Laze (“The Laze Family Ball”) is a nearly five-minute long French-language chanson , sung by Michel Polnareff , who also composed the music and was responsible for the arrangement . In France it was released in February 1968 on Disc'AZ as a single with the B-side Y'a qu'un ch'veu and as an EP (then also the titles Le temps a laissé son manteau and Encore un mois, encore un an ) , also on a long-playing record of the same name. The text, on which the singer also worked, comes mainly from Pierre Delanoë .

This “lament of a man sentenced to death” was boycotted by most French radio stations after its publication because the topic was too explosive for them; a year earlier they hadn't had much reservations about playing another Polnareff song with an explicit sexual statement ( (Je veux faire) L'amour avec toi , in German “I want to sleep with you”), albeit always afterwards 22 O `clock. On the other hand, since they could not just ignore a new release by the international star, they brought the back of this single to the audience instead. Le Bal des Laze was nevertheless rated, albeit only years later, as one of the most qualitatively outstanding titles in Polnareff's repertoire, which is practically none of his best-of compilations .

Text and music

The actual plot of the story can be told very quickly: A young man killed his rival, who became engaged to a 20-year-old from the best circles, whom the killer also loves. For this murder out of jealousy , he also does not regret to the end, he is to death by hanging convicted.

However, the text depicts this process in a lyrical way that hardly expresses anything explicitly, but rather describes it with strong language, yes, lavishly and at best works with small hints. The specific course of events, the person of the fiancé, the questions whether the young woman has ever noticed the protagonist, knows about his feelings for her, let alone whether she reciprocates them, and even the century in which this event took place - all this remains completely open, conclusions are left to the imagination and the ability of the listener to combine . The only precise statement, repeated twice later, is in the first line of the text: “Tomorrow morning I will be hanged” (Je serai pendu demain matin) ; In these only five words, the oppressive mood of the entire chanson is already given before the first-person narrator presents his view of the events and his feelings.

Lord and Lady Laze (a fictional aristocratic family ) held a summer ball in their little London city ​​palace , "the city's biggest social event" to celebrate the engagement of their daughter Jane. The entire upper class, including the queen , was present - the ladies are pictorially characterized by the words "diamonds, rubies, topazes and long white robes" - as was the protagonist, who obviously did not belong to society ("my life was not meant for castles", he is the "idiot you just stare at condescendingly") who therefore had to hide in the garden. From there he had to watch the young couple dance together, clenching his fists and almost bursting with hatred, because it is not he who was promised Jane. He completely ignores what happens then in his description.

His death could be regrettable for the one he loves, he hopes, because he believes that "she would like it very much to sleep with [me] - very peacefully and far from this castle". And "maybe it gives her at least a little pain when she reads the four-line report in the newspapers that this murderer and drifter, who is not worthy of this castle, was executed". His monologue ends with the regretful statement that Jane's parents will soon choose a new fiancé for her, whom he will unfortunately not be able to kill either. These will also be his last words the next morning .

The song is composed of six stanzas , each containing six lines; The rhyme form used alternates: in the first, third and fifth stanzas the form of the interlocked rhyme is used, in the other three the cross rhyme instead . Every second stanza is followed by a four-line refrain made up of paired rhymes, but only in the first two cases is the same word, while the last refrain contains a completely different text. As for the rhyming pairs, the text uses the same word three times in a total of 48 lines, twice château or its plural châteaux, respectively, and once the name of the Laze family.

The serene melody , kept in E minor , is played calmly and at a steady tempo by Polnareff . This underlines the statement quoted above that the chanson is an elegy . The very economical instrumentation also contributes to this almost sacred atmosphere . In addition to Polnareff's singing voice, an organ is mainly used, which is only partially and unobtrusively supported by an electric bass ; In addition, a carillon can very rarely be heard on which only a few notes are struck. No other instruments or sound effects were used during the recording, and background vocalists were also omitted. The outstanding importance of the organ for this chanson was also based on Polnareff's great appreciation for the sound of this instrument; According to his biographer Benoît Cachin, he is said to have dreamed of playing on the great church organ in Saint-Eustache at an early age.

The content, musical design and the covered, sinister mood of Le Bal des Laze differ markedly from the material ( La poupée qui fait non , Love me please love me , Ta ta ta ta , Âme câline ), with which Michel Polnareff has become one since 1966 also internationally recognized greatness of French beat music ( Yéyé ) had become.

Emergence

Pierre Delanoë (1982)

Pierre Delanoë portrayed the very special genesis of the song in such a way that the singer came to him with a melody that had already been composed and to which he wanted a text that would fit the mood. The author was of the opinion that a passionate drama from Elizabethan England , romantic and decadent, was ideal for this music . Whether he was following one of the well-known poems of French poetry in the formulation of the title and the plot - for example, François Villons , Ballad des pendus (ballad of the hanged) from the 15th century, Baudelaire's homage to this, which was also set to music several times in the 20th century Work in Un Voyage à Cythère or Arthur Rimbaud's Bal des pendus from 1870 - is not known. Polnareff had given him no guidelines for the text and the plot; his only condition in terms of content was that the word "Laze" (French, not pronounced in English, so [ ˈlaːz ] instead of [ ˈleiz ]) had to appear in it, because he found that it had “a good sound to its melody”. The word does not exist in French, apart from several place names in the Balkans and the South Caucasian Lasen people . In 2016, Michel Polnareff told the French broadcaster RTL that soon after the record was released, the owner of a small castle from his home region in southwest France invited him to visit him at his Château de Laze; But then he did not accept this invitation.

Pierre Delanoë had also worked with perfectionist musicians before, but in this case "he sweated blood and water, ... went through hell: Polnareff worked through word for word, syllable for syllable, without ever losing sight of the musical background" , and the lyricist had to change his draft again and again until the composer and singer was finally satisfied and gave the green light. This particularly intensive cooperation was responsible for the fact that, in the credits for the text on the plate label, both Delanoë and Polnareff are mentioned.

When it finally came to the first recording session in the Barclay record studio , Michel Polnareff had the room lined with black velvet and placed at least 2,000 candles in it "to create a church-like atmosphere".

Successes and reception

Although its self-censorship authority (Comité d'écoute de la Radiodiffusion française) was abolished, most French radio stations - three months before the outbreak of the May riots  - boycotted the chanson because of the first line of text and its explicit preoccupation with a violent death. The death penalty was not a taboo subject in France , as demonstrated by Michel Sardou's highly controversial but successful chanson Je suis pour from 1976. Rather, it was still frequently imposed in the 1960s and then carried out; It was not abolished until 1981. Instead, the broadcasters preferred to play the carefree B-side of Polnareff's new record, which developed into a party hit that especially young people liked to sing along with. Polnareff commented on this boycott years later, saying that it was “absolutely mad as hell in 1968, because the more important song was clearly Le Bal des Laze ”. His anger even went so far that he only performed Y'a qu'un ch'veu, which was also written by Delanoë , in a concert again in 2002. The discontinuation of many radio stations on the subject of death in popular music continued into the 1970s; Léo Ferré wrote a chanson about it in 1972 which says “Don't sing about death, it's a morbid subject. The word alone makes you shiver, as soon as it has been spoken. "

Nevertheless, the single climbed into the top 20 in France on February 10, 1968 , reached ninth place as the highest position on March 2 and remained in it for a total of eight weeks (until the end of March). It sold 100,000 to 150,000 copies this year. In the Walloon-Belgian Ultratop-50, the highest position was a fourteenth rank; but it remained there for twelve weeks. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the record did not achieve a chart placement, but the song was one of the twelve tracks on the LP The Million Sellers of Michel Polnareff , which was published there in 1970 by twen magazine on the Metronome label.

For the chanson connoisseur Gilles Verlant, everything is right at Le Bal des Laze : "The story is beautifully told, the melody is superb and the interplay of both is perfect". That is why it was one of the favorite songs of Polnareff fans at the end of the 20th century. For him, this recording is even on a par with the Beatles' Sgt.-Pepper album eight months earlier . The fact that this title, according to the music journalist Fabien Lecœuvre, "was only recognized over the years as an absolute masterpiece (chef-d'œuvre absolu) and as a reference title for French chanson" is reflected in Belgium, for example, that it was there, for example appeared in eighth place in the so-called "back catalog" in September 2014 - a classification for titles at least two years old, for which the current sales figures, but also the number of hits via streaming and the frequency with which songs were played on the radio, be taken into account.

In French schools in the 21st century , Le Bal des Laze is treated as one of the “chansons that made history” in music lessons and presented to students in a contemporary context.

Cover versions

A few cover versions of the chanson appeared , mostly in French, and an instrumental version , played by the Raymond Lefèvre Orchestra , in the year of its publication . In English, Marshall Hill and Eileen Fulton brought out the song entitled Shapes .

The stylistic range in which the chanson has been covered since then is remarkable. In 1982, Ange published an almost eleven-minute long progressive rock version on the album À propos de… ., Dominique A , a representative of the Nouvelle Chanson on his tour in 1993/1994, had theirs in 1999 , Louis Philippe and Pascal Comelade each Interpretation of the title for the CD A Tribute to Polnareff , and Pascal Obispo released a live version on his number one album Studio Fan / Live Fan in 2004 . A younger garage rock band like The Craftmen Club from Brittany also sang Le Bal des Laze in 2014 . Finally, five candidates from the sixth season of Star Academy , the French counterpart to Fame Academy broadcast on TF1 , brought the song out in 2006 on the Star Academy LP, which was composed entirely of Polnareff titles, but which was not particularly successful.

literature

  • Fabien Lecœuvre: 1001 histoires secrètes de chansons. Ed. du Rocher, Monaco 2017, ISBN 978-2-2680-9672-8 .
  • Jérôme Pintoux: Les chanteurs français des années 60. You côté de chez les yéyés et sur la Rive Gauche. Camion Blanc, Rosières-en-Haye 2015, ISBN 978-2-35779-778-9
  • Gilles Verlant: L'Odyssée de la Chanson française. Ed. Hors Collection, Paris 2006, ISBN 978-2-258-07087-5 .

Web links

Evidence and Notes

  1. ↑ In West Germany , the single came, exclusively in French, with the reverse Le temps a laissé son manteau in record stores in March 1968 (information from 45cat.com ).
  2. ↑ EP cover and further information at encyclopedisque.fr
  3. ↑ a b c Gilles Verlant, L'Odyssée de la Chanson, 2006, p. 124
  4. ^ " L'amour avec toi by Michel Polnareff ", article of July 29, 2011 in Le Figaro
  5. ↑ The French-language text of the chanson is available under web links .
  6. ↑ Jérôme Pintoux, Les chanteurs français des années 60, 2015, p. 294
  7. ↑ One critic formulates this as “black, baroque, close to tragedy ” - “ Le Bal des Laze turns 50: The story of a damned song ” from April 1, 2018 at culturebox.francetvinfo.fr.
  8. ↑ Stéphane Koechlin's claim that the young man “had a secret relationship with Jane” cannot be substantiated either from the text or from statements by Delanoë or Polnareff - Koechlin's quote from Christian-Louis Eclimont (ed.): 1000 Chansons françaises de 1920 à nos jours. Flammarion, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-0812-5078-9 , p. 357.
  9. ↑ Jérôme Pintoux (Les chanteurs français des années 60, 2015, p. 293) describes the timelessness of this song with the words that one could assume that the events took place in the Middle Ages - at least until the newspapers are mentioned.
  10. ↑ Article “ Le Bal des Laze turns 50: The story of a damned song ” from April 1, 2018 at culturebox.francetvinfo.fr
  11. ↑ “ The return of the tall blonde ” from March 2, 2007 at telerama.fr
  12. ^ For example, in 1957 by Jacques Douai , 1968 by Serge Reggiani .
  13. ↑ Burkhard Küster: Baudelaire's little homage to Villon. from 2011 at archivdigital.info
  14. ↑ a b c d Fabien Lecœuvre, 1001 histoires, 2017, p. 294
  15. ↑ Article “ Michel Polnareff recalls the genesis of Le Bal des Laze ” with video of the interview on December 28, 2016 at rtl.fr
  16. ↑ a b c Article “ Le Bal des Laze, betrayed from its B-side ” from July 27, 2007 at lefigaro.fr
  17. ↑ Fabien Lecœuvre, 1001 histoires, 2017, pp. 205/206
  18. ↑ according to the weekly top 20 at top.france.free.fr
  19. ↑ according to the list of the best-selling singles of 1968 at top-france.fr ( archive )
  20. ↑ data sheet for this plate at ultratop.be; there also a black and white film with Polnareff's song recital. This is probably the first presentation of the chanson on French television in the spring of 1968.
  21. ^ Julia Edenhofer: The great oldie lexicon. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1992, 2nd edition, ISBN 3-404-60288-9 , p. 475; Frank and Ingrid Laufenberg: Hit Lexicon of Rock and Pop. 3 volumes, Ullstein, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-548-36920-4 , volume 2, p. 1717
  22. ↑ 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. 94
  23. ↑ Back catalog from September 27, 2014 at ultratop.be
  24. ↑ see the recording of a radio broadcast at eduscol.education.fr, given under web links
  25. ↑ Lefèvre album with tracklist at discogs.com
  26. ^ Shapes - Hill and Fulton record sleeves, both at 45cat.com
  27. ↑ Ange version of the song on YouTube
  28. ↑ Tracklist of the Tribut and Obispo LP , both at discogs.com
  29. ↑ Video of the Craftmen Club lecture at setlist.fm
  30. ↑ Data sheet for Star Academy 6 chante Polnareff at ultratop.be
This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 21, 2019 in this version .