Serge Gainsbourg. A romantic hiding behind a mask of a cynic

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Serge Gainsbourg is the stage name of Lucien Ginzburg, the legendary French composer, actor, chansonnier, poet and screenwriter. He was a man of unique talent, scandalous reputation and extraordinary capacity for work.

During his life, Serge Gainsbourg, as a poet and composer, released more than twenty records with author's songs, recorded about forty soundtracks for films. As an actor, he starred in almost two dozen films, as a director he directed four films.

Childhood

Lucien Ginzburg was born in Paris on April 2, 1928 in a family of Jews who left Russia immediately after the 1917 revolution. The family was very musical, parents graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Father, Iosif Karlovich, talented pianist and composer, Lucien's mother, Olga Borisovna, chamber singer.

There was a cult in their Paris apartmentmusic. Every morning, my father sat down at the piano and played classical pieces, and my mother accompanied with her voice. Children from a very early age received a home musical education, learned to play music and practiced choral singing. There were three children in the family: the eldest daughter Jacqueline and twins Lucien and Liliana. Lulu and Lily, as their loved ones called them.

Then Lucien was expected to study at the Condorcet Lycée, one of the oldest and most prestigious Parisian lyceums. Education in it was given exquisite and elite, not in vain in different years Paul Verlaine, Jacques Cocteau, Boris Vian, Louis de Funes studied in Condorcet. Within the walls of this Lyceum, Lucien realized that he wanted to become an actor, a poet, a composer, and an artist. And in order not to choose, he decided to prove himself in all these guises.

Artist

Besides music, Lucien had another passion - drawing. Since childhood, he has been drawing with enthusiasm, not being afraid to experiment, mastering different styles, copying the masters. In 1947, he entered the Paris Academia Monmartre, where he studied painting and met Elizaveta Levitskaya, who later became his first wife. Levitskaya was also an artist, like Lucien, she came from a family of Russian emigrants. This gave their relationship a special spiritual intimacy.

One of Gainsbourg's teachers was Fernand Leger, a famous painter, sculptor and decorator, a well-known communist in France. Then, at the academy, Lucien changed his usual ordinary name to a bright and sonorous one - Serge. It was a tribute to the memory of the beloved Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Then heHe also changed his surname in the French manner, with an emphasis on the last syllable - Gainsbourg. He never became an artist; moreover, he destroyed all his drawings. They lived together with Elizabeth for six years, from 1951 to 1957, then their paths diverged. Only the song "Elise" reminds of those times, because Serge Gainsbourg devoted all his best songs to women.

Chansonier

Gainsbourg is a recognized master of beautiful, catchy melodies. They still sound on the radio, do not leave the lips of performers and admirers for half a century. Serge Gainsbourg wrote music for films throughout his life. His songs have been and are being performed by many French pop stars - Catherine Deneuve, Vanessa Paradis, Isabelle Adjani, France Gal, Michel Mercier and others.

Wrote Serge easily. The music clung to him by itself, he first whistled the texts and only then clothed them in words, periodically puffing on his Zhitan cigarette. Gainsbourg smoked a lot, sometimes lighting each next cigarette from the previous one. Without cigarettes and alcohol, he could not imagine his songs. Serge Gainsbourg combined cigarette smoke and frank, full of outrageous poetry, whiskey taste and touching gentle melodies. Spirals of wine vapors and sonnets of Baudelaire twisted in it, and the tart smell of “Gitan” permeated the exquisite aromas of the perfumes of his beloved women.

Poetry

All women of Serge Gainsbourg were beautiful, and ordinary and inconspicuous bypassed him. After all, a short man with a hooked nose and protruding ears could only interest real beauties. And he was interested in what– endless versatile creativity.

His music envelops with its simplicity and erotic message. His poems seemed to mock the French language, they had a hidden meaning, allusions and metaphors, virtuoso rhymes and dazzling puns.

The theme of Serge's songs was often violence, death, drugs, In each line, Gainsbourg told all the listeners the story of his life, his love. He talked about the rejection of his reflection, his ordinary and ugly appearance. He complained about the injustice reigning in the world, pointed to it frankly, clearly. He hid his vulnerability behind the image of a brawler and a vulgar man. He was extremely honest.

Women

The second wife of Serge Gainsbourg was Françoise-Antoinette Pancrazzi, but their marriage was short-lived, from 1964 to 1966. From this marriage there were wonderful songs and two children, Natalia and Pavel. Gainsbourg never officially married again.

In 1967, the general public was shocked by his love affair with Brigitte Bardot. The piquancy of this story was added by the fact that at that time Brigitte was married to millionaire Gunther Sachs. That is why Bardot refused to perform the song Je t’aime… moi non plus written for her, and a few months later, frightened by the sizzling passion, she fled from Gainsbourg.

The new muse was not long in coming. The young Englishwoman Jane Birkin, singer and actress, calmed Serge for twelve years and gave him her beloved daughter Charlotte.

His relationship with Birkin made a splash in France, they instantly became the most fashionable couple. The French liked freedom and a challenge to established norms in them. They also liked Jane's easy beauty and her gracefulness, and Serge next to her changed and became handsome in his own way. But happiness was not eternal. At some point, tired of Gainsbourg's daring and outrageous antics, of his long drunken sprees, Jane left. Serge was left alone again.

The last love in his life was the actress and singer Caroline von Paulus, better known under the pseudonym Bamboo. She was the granddaughter of the same Friedrich Paulus, who was taken prisoner by Soviet troops near Stalingrad. Bamboo brightened up the last decade of Gainsbourg's life and gave birth to his son Lucien.

Care

Serge Gainsbourg died from a fifth heart attack in his office. He was so busy creating that he did not notice his own departure.

On March 2, 1991, a genius, a great chansonnier, a brilliant intellectual, an outstanding poet, ended his life. A subtle romantic hiding behind a mask of a cynic and a bully.