The Economist

Oct 1 2018

 

 

 

 

FOR a small guy, Charles Aznavour liked his stage to be big. Really big. He would slip through the curtains at the back and slide into the spotlight, left hand in his pocket, ready to face his audience head-on. Wearing a black rollneck or a skinny tie, he projected an almost jaunty insouciance with his little crooked smile. But his fans knew he was a survivor, someone who got knocked down a lot but always rose again—someone a lot like them. As he lifted the microphone, his face showed a defiant chin, a circumflex of dark eyebrows, closed eyes. For a moment their lids were as white and as curved as a beach in Cuba (one of the many countries that broadcast hours of his music in the days after he died). His dark eyelashes fluttered like palm trees. And then came that voice, crashing on to the heart’s shore.

 

He was born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian near the Latin Quarter in Paris in 1924, and christened “Charles” by a French nurse who could not pronounce his name. His Armenian parents had taken refuge there while they waited for visas to America. Meanwhile, his father took over a restaurant that featured live music and offered free food to the less well-off. When the business inevitably went bust his mother took in work as a seamstress. But it was singing and performing for other émigrés that consumed the family. Both parents had been trained in the theatre. He made his inadvertent stage debut at three when he wandered in from the wings towards the lights.