Tu t'laisses all

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Charles Aznavour 1961, here with Caterina Valente

Tu t'laisses aller is a French-language chanson that Charles Aznavour released in 1960 on Disques Barclay both on a single with the B-side J'ai perdu la tête and on an EP with the additional songs Plus heureux que moi and La nuit . It was also included on the studio album Charles Aznavour , also released in 1960 . Aznavour wrote the lyrics and melody himself. In 1962 the singer released the 3:40 minute long song at Barclay / Ariola also in German under the literally translated title You let you go (B-side: I wonder why ); the text for this version comes from the pen of Ernst Bader . This version was also released in 1983 in the GDR on a long-playing record of the same name by Amiga .

In the further course of his long career, Charles Aznavour often performed this song at concerts, including in duets with female singers, for example in 1991 with Liza Minnelli . It can also be found on numerous compilations in which Aznavour's best and most successful titles are put together. In retrospect, the artist himself classified the chanson in the series of his "classics", which many at the time found offensive because "sexual freedom had not yet become established".

Text and music

In the chanson, the male protagonist has already drank a lot of courage to finally tell his wife, who is not named by name but addressed by you, that he is fed up with her (“Tout l'alcool que j'ai pris ce soir afin d'y puiser le courage de t'avouer que j'en ai marre de toi ”) . Then he extensively lists how his perception has changed and what bothers him about her, starting with the statement that she is just sitting there and waiting for him to say or do something, pulling a face (" t'es là, t'attends, tu fais la tête ”) . Her body no longer stimulates him, she sucks him out and tyrannizes him with her evil character; he hardly dares to tell her how much she exaggerates with all this (“Tu m'exaspères, tu me tyrannises, je subis ton sale caractère sans oser dire que t'exagères”) , so that he sometimes prefers her would strangle. He ends this first part of his reckoning with a resigned sigh, “God, how have you changed in the five years! You just let yourself go ”.

This is followed by a second cascade of allegations. All she had to do was look at herself, her slipped stockings, her old, half-closed dressing gown and the curlers. She now reminded him of her mother and had nothing left to arouse his affection, so that he wondered how he could ever have liked her. She exposed him in front of his friends, contradicted him, sniffed at him, sprayed her poison and was quarrelsome ("tu me contredis, tu m'apostrophes avec ton venin et ta hargne") . In general, she has turned into a tyrannical beast without heart and soul ("Tu es une brute et un tyran, tu n'as pas de cœur et pas d'âme") .

In the third and last part of his monologue , his mood turns almost 180 degrees. Now he says what she should do so that she becomes the young girl again who once made him so happy, because after all, she is his wife after all (“Que malgré tout tu es ma femme”) . She should do sports in order to lose weight, make herself pretty in front of the mirror, put on a smile more often and “put on her heart and body” (“Accroche un sourire à ta face, maquille ton cœur et ton corps”) . Then, like at the beginning of their relationship, he would even be happy if she let herself go occasionally - even if that actually contradicted his attitude completely. Because in reality she is mistaken if she thinks that he rejects her (“Au lieu de penser que j'te déteste”) .

For the book author Jérôme Pintoux, this succession of countless attacks and concluding declarations of love is an essential part of the charm of Tu t'laisses alle , which he describes as a "song full of bitterness, annoyance and the blackest cynicism" ("pleine d'amertume, de dépit, du cynisme le plus noir ”) . The chanson connoisseur and book author Gilles Verlant points out that Aznavour had openly placed "black topics such as aging, death, boredom, loneliness [and] physical love" at the center of his texts before.
The German translation by Ernst Bader, who was very closely based on the original, is in no way inferior to the French version.

The melody is composed in C major . On the lower links specified video of the French-language version is vocal only a decentralized jazz of piano , upright bass and a mainly broom played drums accompanied. In the studio recording of the record, an orchestral accompaniment , mainly performed by strings and, less dominantly, brass , is added. In addition, an instrumental intro or outro, each only a few bars long, can be heard.

Successes and covers

In France, the EP sold around 76,000 times, but that didn't make it a top hit . This is of course not surprising, because the very high sales figures "hardly any of the most renowned chansonniers ever achieved, not even Chevalier , Trenet , Gréco , Piaf , Patachou ". For Gilles Verlant, the title marks the beginning of Aznavour's qualitatively best and most productive phase in the first half of the 1960s. And after Frank Laufenberg, the title is also one of the interpreter's most commercially successful songs in France. In the Walloon part of Belgium the chanson was in the top 40 for 40 weeks from June 1960 and reached 3rd place as the highest position.

According to Julia Edenhofer, the "wonderfully smug" Du lets you go " became Aznavour's best-selling record in West Germany, where it reached 14th place in the charts. His record company didn't want to publish the song at first, which, according to the singer, said “We can't do that. We have quite a lot of fat women in Germany ”.

Aznavour recorded the chanson himself in English (You've Let Yourself Go) and in Italian (Ti lasci andare) . There were cover versions in German as a duet by Dana Golombek and Hans Werner Olm and solo by Udo Lindenberg , and in Dutch under the title Mijn ideaal 1963 by Corry Brokken . Aznavour and Annie Cordy sang a duet in French, in which the woman repeatedly replied to her husband's accusations and in turn said what bothers her about him, was sung by Aznavour and Annie Cordy in 1973. More internationally known is a duet version with Liza Minnelli , both of which performed live in 1991 at the Palais des Congrès lectured; The 1995 vinyl long-playing record and CD Paris - Palais des Congrès - L'intégrale du spectacle were created through this performance .

The Austrian band Butterflies also used the composition Aznavours. On their Proletenpassion , published in 1977, two of their members sing in the song The Negotiation, a fictional dialogue between Adolphe Thiers and Helmuth von Moltke , which they conduct about the preliminary peace at Versailles at the end of the Franco-German War . In it, the butterflies use the melody of Tu t'laisses aller to a text that has been newly written by Heinz Rudolf Unger , Willi Resetarits and Georg Herrnstadt and consists of several stanzas . In this song there is also another allusion to a song by a French chansonnier: Moltke, with a French accent, asks Thiers to put his problems on the table, "and time, and time, and time takes them away". Gilbert Bécaud's A Little Happiness and Tenderness (Un peu d'amour) copies this literally and also from the intonation and tempo of the performance .

literature

  • Pierre Saka: La Grande Anthologie de la chanson française. Le Livre de Poche, Paris 2001, ISBN 978-2-253-13027-7 (lyrics on p. 331/332)

Web links

Supporting documents and comments

  1. ↑ In the 1960s, singles in France were often not produced for sale in record stores - the EPs with three to five titles were intended for this - but only for the assembly of jukeboxes and for advertising purposes.
  2. ^ Charles Aznavour: In a low voice. My life - a chanson. Graf, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86220-008-5 , pp. 144 f .; The chansonnier mentions Bon anniversaire , À ma fille and Une enfant de seize ans as further classics .
  3. ↑ Both the French and the German text are linked and accessible under web links.
  4. ↑ 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. 450
  5. ↑ 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. 37
  6. ↑ A sheet of music for the chanson can be found at google.com
  7. ↑ The sales figures can be found at infodisc.fr.
  8. ↑ Pierre Saka: 50 ans de chanson française. France Loisirs, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-7242-5790-1 , p. 78
  9. ↑ Gilles Verlant: L'Odyssée de la chanson française. Ed. Hors Collection, Paris 2006, ISBN 978-2-258-07087-5 , p. 45
  10. ↑ Frank and Ingrid Laufenberg: Hit Lexicon of Rock and Pop. Ullstein, Berlin 2007, 3 volumes, ISBN 978-3-548-36920-4 , volume 1, p. 105
  11. ↑ according to ultratop.be
  12. ^ Julia Edenhofer: The great oldie lexicon. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1992, 2nd edition, ISBN 3-404-60288-9 , p. 31 f.
  13. ^ Siegfried P. Rupprecht: Chanson Lexicon. Between art, revolution and show - the songs and interpreters of a thousand feelings. Lexicon Imprint, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-89602-201-1 , p. 29
  14. ↑ Charles Aznavour told this reason in an interview that was published by welt.de on December 14, 2008 under the heading " Charles Aznavour and the fat German woman ".
  15. ↑ Video of the duet Aznavour / Cordy on YouTube
  16. ↑ see the information on this Minelli Aznavour album including the tracklist at allmusic.com
  17. ↑ See the lyrics of Ein bit Glück und Zärtlichkeit at golyr.de. Bécaud's song made it into the German top 50 charts in early 1974.