Aznavour: The last song of the last tour

[Azat]

When the novelist Rose Tremain, a lifelong Charles Aznavour groupie, heard that the great French singer was giving his final concert, she had to be there. Aznavour talks to her about his passions for songs, women, shoes - and passion itself

 

OUT in the westerly suburbs of Nice, in an immigrant quarter where crime is high, where cab drivers won't pick up, a brand-new concert hall has been built. It's called Nikaia, but no one seems to know whether this word has been fabricated from the Greek nike (victory) or from the name "Nice" itself.

 

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Chansonnier: Charles Aznavour

 

It has seats for 8,000 people, but no car park and no taxi rank. Made of glass and white aluminium, it has all the architectural finesse of those oddly sculpted French medicine cabinets we bought in the 1970s. Yet it's here in this undistinguished building that France's most durable and distinguished chansonnier, Charles Aznavour, is giving the last concert of his last tour. He will be 77 in a month and he's decided it's time to say goodbye.

 

I meet him in his dressing-room, a clinical space furnished with plastic bottles of Badoit and tilting black chairs. He arrives with his manager of 30 years' standing, Levon Sayan, who was once a successful singer in his own right but decided to dedicate his life to Aznavour's superior talent. Sayan, courteous but firm, warns me not to stay too long, and as Aznavour sits down on the one comfortable sofa, he confesses to me that he's not feeling particularly well.

 

He looks trim and his seductive brown eyes are still mischievous and bright, but he says his neck aches, his stomach's playing up. Sayan is sending for a masseur. Would I mind if we talk in French? Aznavour learned English in New York "from the Greeks who ran my local grocery store" but sometimes he finds it tiring.

 

I say that I don't mind at all. I'm tempted to add that - as a lifelong Aznavour groupie - I'm knocked out just to be here, but Aznavour, who was booed offstage at the age of 18 and once called a "cripple" by the French press, has never trusted flattery, never come on like a star.

 

"I'm an international artist," he says, "and that is not the same thing as a star. Stars are concerned with their image. I'm concerned only with my oeuvre." An impressive oeuvre it certainly is.

 

A protege of Edith Piaf's, Aznavour began writing songs eight years before Jacques Brel, and he was the one who began to steer French chanson away from Maurice Chevalier-style whimsy towards something much stronger, more bitter and melancholic and with an ironic edge.

 

In essence a poet who found his musical inspiration in the Armenian gipsy songs of his boyhood (he was born Shanaur Aznavourian) and whose lyrics chronicled the hopes, sufferings, joys and boredom of ordinary people, he would eventually write - in La Bohèeme, Que c'est triste Venise, Hier encore, Les plaisirs demodés and She (which became Notting Hill's theme tune) - some of the loveliest ballads of all time.

 

One threnody running through the work is the human sorrow for a lost or "wasted" youth, and I ask Aznavour if he finds growing old especially hard.

 

"No," he says, "because I don't feel old - except in the mornings sometimes, before I've had my hot bath! But youth is something you have to keep inside you. Some people are old at 35 because they're blase about the world. I'm blase about nothing."

 

He says he has his parents to thank for this. His father was a singer, his mother an actress, but both sacrificed their artistic careers to run a restaurant on the Left Bank to provide for their children.

 

"They never complained," he says. "Armenians are a shy, proud people, but they never forget what has happened to them and I've never forgotten what it is to have nothing." He looks down at his immaculate Italian shoes. "My one extravagance is shoes," he admits with a laugh. "During the war, in Paris, I had no shoes. Now, I have 60 pairs, 30 which I wear and 30 more which I just go and look at."

 

This seems to be the only faiblesse in an otherwise sternly self-regulated life. Aznavour doesn't drink, doesn't smoke any more. He's been married to his third wife, Ulla, for 25 years. "Women? Of course I love women," he admits, "but I put my crazy life behind me at the age of 39. And anyway it was never sex that really interested me. It was la passion interieure."

 

Edith Piaf was perhaps the archetype: the small, never-beautiful person who attained stature and beauty by expressing so powerfully in song the dreams of the man or woman in the street. Aznavour has said elsewhere that he was in love with Piaf "for eight days" and explains that he's been in love "several times like this, always with singers whom I admired, like Amalia Rodriguez [the Portuguese fado star] and Liza Minnelli. I call it l'amitie amoureuse: more than friendship, less than love."

 

He hates the way couturiers dress women these days "to expose as much flesh as possible". One of his songs, Habillez-vous (Put your clothes on) evokes the forgotten yet seductive power of the female body covered up. And all of this fits with what seems to be the Aznavour philosophy - that Western civilisation, so easily seduced by externals - is doomed to ever-escalating misery unless it can rediscover a passion interieure.

 

"We must live much more in the soul. We must think more. We must remember more. If I had been born rich, blond, tall, good-looking, I would never have had anything to express in song except my own vanity. Luckily for me, I was small and poor. And I knew what my mother's Armenian family had suffered back there. I had a lot to write about."

 

Writing is what he loves most. "I don't express myself particularly well when I talk, but when I write, words, melodies flow. Their pathway is from brain to pen." He's speaking in English now. His pronunciation has, perhaps, something more Greek than French about it, but he seems quite at home in the language.

 

We agree on what conditions writers ideally need in order to create anything. "First we must be exposed to the noise of humanity, to the subject itself, then afterwards left in peace, in tranquillity and silence to do the work."

 

It's this need for peace and a green garden, he says, that's taken him to Switzerland to live. His fondness for Paris hasn't diminished and he takes pleasure from the way people treat him there, as an old friend. But he can't work in cities any more. The modern city is never quiet. Okay for the young, but not for a man of almost 77 . . .

 

He laughs at this, but then looks serious again when I ask about his own children, Katia, Mischa and Nicolas. We discuss the way the sons and daughters of famous parents often find it hard to make something of their own lives.

 

"I don't think that my children suffer," he says, "but perhaps they do, in ways that I don't see." Are they spoiled? I wonder aloud.

 

"Yes, they're spoiled," he admits, "they each have their own apartment, their own car. All of that. But I don't think they take these things for granted. They're not pourri." And Katia is becoming a singer in her own right, doing back-up on stage for her father at the moment, but hoping for a solo career later on.

 

Time is running on. Levon Sayan comes in to say that a masseur has been found and the photographer is waiting, so I begin to gather up my things. As the masseur assembles a peculiar flesh-coloured table, I ask Aznavour about his role as ambassador-at-large for Armenia. He shrugs.

 

"Armenia is my roots. What else can I do? This is little enough. And tonight at the concert I'm not going to end, as I usually do, with La Boheme. I'm going to end with Emmenez-moi, the song I wrote to raise money for the victims of the Armenian earthquake of 1988."

 

So this will be the last song of the last tour. By 7.30, the 8,000 are pouring into Nikaia. The lozenge-shaped auditorium is built for raves and pop concerts with hard plastic seating and lino underfoot, not the ideal venue for the nostalgic and the valedictory.

 

But when the lights go down and Charles Aznavour, dressed in black, as Piaf dressed for her last concert, begins to sing, we are all immediately aware that the big, tremulous baritone voice has lost none of its power. It fills the cavernous space above us, becomes stronger and more resonant as song follows song, the new first of all, including the melodic Quand tu m'aimes, then the "chansons de rappel", the old heart-stoppers, the Aznavour classics the middle-aged fans have come to hear.

 

Applause greets every treasured first line. The audience is hushed, almost tense, everyone waiting for their favourite number. When La Boheme is over and Charles lets drop the white handkerchief he always uses as a stage prop, a melee of women squabble for possession of it. It's a symbol of their youth, a youth prolonged for 30 years or more by a voice which, in a furiously changing world, has hardly changed at all.

 

As we stand to applaud for the last time, it's difficult to believe that this really is the end. How do singers come to term with their own silence? I don't know. I didn't ask him that. But his old admirers like me shouldn't really complain. Charles Aznavour has been singing through my entire life and it's enough. Of course it's enough. C'est formidable.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/