Jacques Brel’s song “Ne me quitte pas” and its performance versions: genre-stylistic and linguistic aspects

Abstract

Statement of the problem. One of the hallmarks of pop music culture is that in this sphere the song is much more associated with its performer than in classical music, let alone folklore. We know the songs mostly by the name of its performer, not by the lyricist’s or composer’s. In those conditions, practice of continuous appeal of different singers to the same song becomes even more significant and calls for its research. The article is devoted to “Ne me quitte pas”, a song that has interpretations differing in era, style, genre traits, language, whose first performer, Jacques Brel, is one of the most prominent figures in French chanson of the XX century. The purpose of the article is, at first in Ukrainian musicology, to compare selected renditions of “Ne me quitte pas” taking into consideration genre-stylistic and linguistic aspects. The main research method used in the article is comparative, applied both to different interpretations and to translations of the lyrics. Results and conclusion. In more than 60 years of its existence in performance tradition, the song “Ne me quitte pas” was interpreted multiple times. And its every performer was adding something to it, enriching it with something individual, but to a different degree. The performers like Mireille Mathieu suggest their own vision of this song, which does not result in drastic transfiguration of stylistic and genre parameters of the song, it remains roughly the same, just performed by another singer, albeit he creates his own individual image. The others versions fundamentally rethink the spirit, the essence of “Ne me quitte pas”: Barbara turns it in almost prayer-like recitation, Juliette Gréco transforms it into something akin to theatrical monologue with rather unusual instrumental part, Wyclef Jean makes out of it a modern hip-hop track, etc. This diversity of variants betokens almost endless creative potential enshrined in this song, its openness to various experiments, in other words, its possibility to be actively used in modern musical life, which is interpretative in its core essence. Moreover, this song having two fundamentally different English translations (rather free one and almost literary one) shows that there is “public demand” in these tools of broadening the potential audience of French chanson, even despite significant problems arising when doing these kinds of tasks for translators.