Barbara (singer)
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Barbara (also Barbara Brodi, born Monique Andrée Serf ; born June 9, 1930 in Paris ; † November 24, 1997 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) was a French chanson singer and composer.
Life
Monique Serf was born in Paris to a Jewish family. Her father, Jacques Serf (1904–1959), came from Alsace , her mother, Esther, née Brodsky (1905–1967), from Odessa ; they had been married since April 21, 1927. Barbara is her second child, a brother, Jean, was born in 1928, another, Claude, in 1942; her sister Régine was born in 1938. When she was ten years old, she and her relatives fled from the part of France occupied by German troops . After several stops, she arrived in the south-eastern French rural community of Saint-Marcellin ( Isère ) in July 1943 . There she had to hide from the access of the Vichy regime collaborating with Nazi Germany until 1944 . After the liberation, which she experienced in a boarding house in Le Vésinet ( Yvelines department ) near Paris, a music teacher from the neighborhood heard her sing and decided to promote her talent. She received singing and piano lessons. In 1947 she enrolled at the Paris Conservatory and studied classical music with the tenor Gabriel Paulet.
She made her first musical attempts at the end of the 1940s in the cabaret La Fontaine des Quatre Saisons in Paris. From 1950 to 1952 she lived in Brussels , where she frequented artistic circles and sang chansons by Édith Piaf , Juliette Gréco and Germaine Montero in front of friends . After her return to Paris she met Jacques Brel and later also Georges Brassens , with whose songs she performed. On the side she also wrote her own material, which she incorporated into her program. In 1957 she recorded her first single in Brussels .
It was not until the early 1960s that her career really took off. The big breakthrough came in 1965 with the album Barbara chante Barbara .
At the beginning of July 1964, Barbara came to Göttingen as part of a guest performance . She used the impressions she gathered there in the Chanson Göttingen , a contribution to international understanding . The piece was very popular in France and made a significant contribution to Franco-German understanding and, in particular, to the popularity of the university town of Göttingen in France. In 2003, the then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder quoted the text of this song in his address on the 40th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty at a joint meeting of the German Bundestag and the French National Assembly in Versailles Palace .
In 1967 Barbara released an album with German versions of some of her chansons ( Barbara sings Barbara ). Several German versions of their songs are available by Walter Brandin . In the 1970s Barbara also tried her hand as an actress, but she was denied a great success. She released her last studio album ( Barbara ) in 1996. In the last few years of her life, Barbara worked intensively on the fight against AIDS .
Gérard Depardieu , long-time friend of Barbara, performed Barbara's most famous songs in his own show in Paris in 2017.
honors and awards
In 2001, the French Post paid tribute to the French singer's lifetime achievement by issuing a € 0.46 postage stamp.
The city of Göttingen honored the chanson singer several times: On April 24, 1988, Barbara was awarded the Medal of Honor of the city of Göttingen and on November 22, 2002, a Göttingen memorial plaque was unveiled at Geismarlandstrasse 19, the former location of the Junge Theater . In addition, Barbarastraße was inaugurated in the Geismar district of Göttingen on the same day to commemorate the singer.
On June 19, 2018, a station on the Paris Métro was named after her.
Discography (selection)
Albums
| year | title |
Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes) |
Remarks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 FR
|
 BE W
|
|||
| 1974 | Public enrollment at the Théâtre des Variétés |
FR174 (2 weeks) FR |
- |
Chart entry in FR only in 2007
|
| 1996 | Barbara |
FR1 (10 weeks) FR |
- | |
| 1997 | Femme piano | - |
BE W41 (5 weeks) BE W |
|
| 2001 | La chanteuse de minuit |
FR105 (2 weeks) FR |
- |
Live album, re-release by Barbara à l'Écluse
|
| 2002 | Récital Pantin 81 |
FR89 (8 weeks) FR |
- | |
| 2007 | Le temps you lilas |
FR70 (8 weeks) FR |
- | |
| Bobino 1967 |
FR155 (3 weeks) FR |
- | ||
| À L'Atelier - Bruxelles 1954 |
FR195 (1 week) FR |
- | ||
| Les 50 plus belles chansons |
FR105 (12 weeks) FR |
BE W89 (9 weeks) BE W |
Chart entry in FR only in 2012
|
|
| 2011 | Talents vol. 1 |
FR198 (1 week) FR |
- | |
| 2012 | Best of |
FR39 (27 weeks) FR |
BE W52 (57 weeks) BE W |
|
| Une femme qui chante |
FR102 (3 weeks) FR |
- | ||
| 2014 | Le coffret | - |
BE W167 (1 week) BE W |
with Jacques Brel , Georges Brassens & Léo Ferré
|
| 2017 | Lily passion |
FR59 (3 weeks) FR |
- | |
| Ses 50 plus belles chansons (2017) | - |
BE W88 (8 weeks) BE W |
||
gray hatching : no chart data available for this year
More albums
- Barbara à l'Écluse (1959)
- Barbara chante Barbara (1965)
- Barbara sings Barbara (1967)
- Ma plus belle histoire d'amour (1967)
- Le soleil noir (1968)
- Madame (1970)
- L'aigle noir (1970)
- La fleur d'amour (1972)
- Amours incestueuses (1972)
- La Louve (1973)
- Seule (1981)
- Ma plus belle histoire d'amour
Singles
| year | Title album |
Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, album , rankings, weeks, awards, notes) |
Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
|
FR
|
|||
| 1962 | Dis quand reviendras-tu? Dis quand reviendras-tu? |
FR105 (2 weeks) FR |
Chart entry in FR only in 2012
|
| 1965 |
Göttingen Barbara N ° 2 |
FR154 (1 week) FR |
Chart entry in FR only in 2013
|
| 1968 | Mon enfance Le soleil noir |
FR156 (1 week) FR |
Chart entry in FR only in 2013
|
| 1970 | L'aigle noir L'aigle noir |
FR98 (9 weeks) FR |
Chart entry in FR only in 2012
|
gray hatching : no chart data available for this year
More singles
- La Solitude
- Nantes
- Vienne
- Une petite cantate
- Marienbad (1973)
- Drouot
- Parce que je t'aime
- Pierre
- Si la photo est bonne
- La dame brune (with Georges Moustaki )
- À mourir pour mourir
Filmography
- Le Toubib, médecin du gang (1955)
- Franz (1971)
- L'Oiseau rare (1973)
- Je suis né à Venise (1977)
- Barbara, the lady of the French chanson. (Originally Barbara - Chansons pour une absente ) Documentation from archive material, directed by Cyril Leuthy, France, 2016. 62 min (animations by Sébastien Laudenbach )
Autobiography
At the end of 2017, Barbara's unfinished autobiography There was once a black piano ... Unfinished Memoirs. in German translation.
play
On the occasion of Barbara's 20th anniversary of death, the Göttingen Young Theater performed the play Barbara. Against forgetting by Peter Christoph Grünberg.
Web links
- Literature by and about Barbara in the catalog of the German National Library
- Barbara at Discogs (English)
- Élysée Treaty: Soundtrack of Franco-German reconciliation
- Fan homepage with discography, texts, press archive and more (French and partly German)
Individual evidence
- ^ Genealogy by Esther Brodsky, gw.geneanet.org [1]
- ↑ Paris Archives 1927 [2]
- ↑ Article in hr2 of February 10, 2017, 4:30 p.m.
- ↑ Göttingen City Archives: Memorial plaques for people
- ↑ All of Göttingen honors Barbara ( Memento of May 28, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) , press release of the City of Göttingen, November 8, 2002
- ↑ a b Chart sources: FR BEW
- ↑ edited by Andrea Knigge Translated from the French by Annette Casasus, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8353-3076-4 .
- ↑ Barbara. Against forgetting. Play with live music in the Junge Theater Göttingen 2017.
- ↑ Memory of Barbara and Göttingen. Article from October 22, 2017 on goettinger-tageblatt.de
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Barbara |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Serf, Monique Andrée (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French chanson singer and composer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 9, 1930 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 24, 1997 |
| Place of death | Neuilly-sur-Seine , France |