![]() ![]() Piaf commanded Aznavour to get a nose job, and he did. Prone to costume and to aggrandizing mythologies of the self, Piaf, who was of Berber ancestry, believed that Aznavour, who stood at only five feet three inches, would not be successful so long as he looked the way he did: foreign, undergrown. (Aznavour denies that the two were ever lovers he has called their relationship “ une amitié amoureuse,” a romantic friendship, or, as he elaborated, “more than friendship and less than love.”) The love that the mentor had for her pupil was a harsh one. She pulled Aznavour under her wing, taking him to North America in 1948, where he opened for her in New York and Montreal, in addition to running her errands and tending to her not-at-all infrequent swoons. Word of a diminutive tenor who could make hearts break reached the singer Édith Piaf. In the late forties, Aznavour was scraping up a living as a singer in Parisian night clubs and cabarets. (Later in life, with a characteristic nonchalance, and an instinctive humanity, Aznavour revealed that his family had sheltered Jewish people at their home in the nineteen-forties.) The musician and musicologist Franz Nicolay wrote in The Paris Review that during the Second World War, Aznavour was mistaken by the Germans for being Jewish, and that, “more than once, he had to produce his uncircumcised penis as proof” that he was not. He also attended a local acting school and joined theatre troupes, where he was cast in roles that fit his age and distinctly ethnic appearance. Eventually, Charles dropped out of school and did his part to support the family by hawking bric-a-brac on the street. The Depression came, and Aznavour pére lost the restaurant. “I have that tragedy in my blood,” Aznavour once said. They transferred these passions to the next generation, along with a prideful melancholy that their children might never know the home country. Both parents held onto their love of popular theatre, staging lively performances in the family home. Charles and his sister, Aida, were taught Armenian language and folklore. ![]() Although displaced, Misha and Knar resisted the obliterating effects of assimilation. Bouncing around Paris’s quartier latin, Misha became Michael, the owner of a Georgian restaurant, and Knar, a seamstress. Back home, his father, Misha, had been a singer, and his mother, Knar, an actress. ![]() “In order to die at home in an armchair? Non merci.”Īznavour was born Shahnour Aznavourian, in Paris, in 1924, to parents who had escaped the Armenian genocide in Turkey. “But why would I ever stop?” he told the Daily Telegraph this spring. The artist’s nature was one of warm Gallic self-deprecation, but on the subject of living and working long he could be gravely serious. At the time of his death, Aznavour was planning a ninety-fifth-birthday tour, and expressed a desire to perform in a centennial concert, on May 22, 2024. After breaking his arm in May, he healed up and had his last performance, in Osaka, in September. As his hearing went and his vision deteriorated, the nonagenarian simply got hearing aids and a teleprompter. Since 2006, he had been on an on-and-off global farewell tour. Yet Aznavour really did seem to possess some counterforce. Age must do its ravishing, even to those who have acquired the sheen of the immortal. Logically, his death should not have been a shock. His music, animated by an earthy interest in what addles and excites the common man, had a revolutionizing impact on French pop, extending its lifetime well past its mid-century golden age, and its influence well beyond the borders of Aznavour’s nation. Aznavour’s career spanned nearly eighty years, at least a thousand songs, three hundred albums, dozens of tours, and many, many films. ![]() On October 1st, Charles Aznavour, the world’s last and greatest troubadour, was found dead in the bath at his home in the small village of Mouriès, in southern France. Photograph by Reporters Associes / Gamma-Rapho / Getty Called one of the enduring “faces of France” by Emmanuel Macron at his state funeral earlier this month, the crooner was a self-consciously global pop star. ![]()
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