Jacques Brel.indd - Stratford Festival

If We Only Have Love
by Lois Kivesto
Below | Director Stafford Arima (centre) with (from left) Mike Nadajewski,
Jewelle Blackman and Brent Carver.
Facing page, from top | (Left to right) Brent Carver, Jewelle Blackman,
Nathalie Nadon, Mike Nadajewski; Stafford Arima; Brent Carver.
Following page | Nathalie Nadon; (From left) Nathalie Nadon,
Mike Nadajewski, Brent Carver, Jewelle Blackman and Todd L. Underwood
(Musical staging); Mike Nadajewski. Photography by Erin Samuell.
“I never sing for audiences; I sing for people.”
– Jacques Brel
Born in Brussels in 1929, Jacques Brel declined the
comfortable future awaiting him in the successful
family business. Brel instead pursued his deep
interest in music and literature by writing and
singing his own chansons (lyric-driven French
songs). Those songs carried him to the fertile
artistic and creative sphere of Paris in 1952, where
he continued to develop them for presentation to
Parisian publishers and nightclub patrons.
Brel regarded songwriting as a craft, one that
he once depicted in mime as a carpenter at work
with a saw and plane, claiming, “There is nothing
more exacting than to put a note of music above
a word.” The balance of passion and reason, and
the expression of truth, compassion and respect for
ordinary people became the hallmarks of his work.
Brel’s songs illuminated his own dreams and fears
in a world impacted by the Great Depression and
World War II (and later the Algerian War and the
radical 1960s). Brel’s songs reflected life’s spinning
carousel of family, love, politics, social injustice and
a pervading desire to maintain or at least reclaim
one’s sense of humanity.
A mesmerizing performer of great physical and
emotional intensity, Brel personified the characters
of his songs, often building to a defiant and
explosive conclusion with what came to be known
as the “Brelian crescendo.” He was a favoured
performer of the Parisian sophisticates, yet his
desire to explore and enhance the popular song
took him on tour throughout France for ten years.
Brel sang in bars, converted cinemas, barns and
churches, all the while aware that no matter the
complexity of his song structures, the feelings they
conveyed were of utmost visceral simplicity.
Brel’s strenuous touring next carried him beyond
France to include the United States, Canada, Great
Britain, South Africa, Finland, Sweden and Russia.
On the world stage, he brought the poetry-set-tomusic
of the “art song” back to mainstream cultural
life, much as the nineteenth-century composers
of German lieder had done. Brel transformed
and elevated the popular song into an art form of
universal relevance.
Nat Shapiro, a music-publishing associate,
was among the innumerable New York listeners
captivated by Brel. In 1960, Shapiro introduced
the wonders of Brel’s musical world to his friend,
Eric Blau, a writer-producer-translator with a
background in the classics and 1930s left-wing
literature. Blau then wrote and co-produced an off-
Broadway revue entitled O, Oysters! at the Village
Gate in Greenwich Village. In the revue, Blau’s wife,
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