Meeting between Joseph Kosma and Juliette Gréco

26 février 1966
02m 48s
Ref. 00033

Information

Summary :

Joseph Kosma and Juliette Gréco met on a television set. They talk about their meeting provoked by Juliette Gréco who offered to Joseph Kosma to put Queneau (Si tu t'imagines), Sartre (Rue des blancs manteaux) and Desnos (La Fourmi) texts to music, and their long collaboration that followed. Gréco remembers the importance of the song Les feuilles mortes in his international career.

Media type :
Broadcast date :
26 février 1966
Source :
ORTF (Collection: La La La )
Themes :

Context

A conductor for the Berlin Opera during the 1920s, a partner of avant-garde artists such as Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill and even Bertolt Brecht, with whom he shares both aesthetic and political beliefs - Joseph Kosma, born in Budapest, in Hungary, on 29 October 1905, is already a solid musician when he finds refuge in Paris in 1933 following the Nazi rise to power.

He meets the poet Jacques Prévert there in 1934 and starts a collaboration with him that will give birth to over 80 songs, from which several are masterpieces that immediately became part of the nation's patrimony (Les Feuilles Mortes, Barbara, En Sortant de l'Ecole). His songs having been sung by the biggest names in French variety music (Mouloudji, Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand), Kosma became, in a few years, poets' favourite musician (Desnos, Queneau) and he laid the stylistic foundations of intellectual left-bank variety music, which was both sophisticated and mass-appealing.

But, without a doubt, Kosma will have pushed the boldness of his aesthetic stakes furthest in cinema. A partner of the biggest French film-makers - Jean Renoir (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, (1935), The Grand Illusion (1937), Picnic on the Grass (1958)) and Marcel Carné (Jenny (1936), The Night Visitors (1942), Children of Paradise (1944-45) - Kosma will, up until the middle of the 1960's, develop a narrative and distant language, with great artistic ambition. Naturalised as a Frenchman in 1949, he died on 7 August 1969 in La Roche Guyon.

Stéphane Ollivier

Transcription

Juliette Greco
Sir,
(Silence)
Juliette Greco
I'm happy to see you, it's been a long time since we've last seen each other. That's true, we never see each other.
Joseph Kosma
I think that I hear you often.
Juliette Greco
I sing your songs but you don't see me.
Joseph Kosma
Do you remember the first time we met?
Juliette Greco
I remember very well, it was during the summer, it was summertime and the weather was beautiful.
Joseph Kosma
Yes, but I'm not talking about that, there were lyrics to songs that you brought me, songs, well, Quesnau's very pretty poems, "Si Tu t'Imagines". Sartre...
Juliette Greco
The street of the white coats
Joseph Kosma
The street of the white coats, and then,
Juliette Greco
Desnos.
Joseph Kosma
Desnos, the ant.
Juliette Greco
Hmm! hmm!
Joseph Kosma
I have... Well, if you want a reminder, you made them for me in 24 hours. You really inspired me, you know.
Juliette Greco
I don't know if I inspired you, in any case, the lyrics inspired you, you wrote them in 24 hours, that's nevertheless an amazing record. And when I got to your home and I heard the music, I was quite surprised, because, I obviously didn't know how to read music at all, and you had to explain everything to me. Do you remember that you were the one who taught me how to sing my first songs?
Joseph Kosma
We worked a lot.
Juliette Greco
We worked a lot...
Joseph Kosma
And we had to...
Juliette Greco
Ah yes, but it was like that, it was exactly like children in nursery school. Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, huh, you remember that?
Joseph Kosma
My, how intelligent it's become in your interpretation of it.
Juliette Greco
Well, I mean...
Joseph Kosma
It's thanks to you that my songs...
Juliette Greco
We still worked a bit, you know! What did we do aside from that?
Joseph Kosma
Moreover, I think that you've changed the face of the song, because you always choose to use poetry.
Juliette Greco
I love poetry.
Joseph Kosma
Yes, but songs aren't always poetic, and you've really done something very important.
Juliette Greco
I did what I could, I did what I liked.
Joseph Kosma
It's just that...
Juliette Greco
And I didn't do what I didn't like.
Joseph Kosma
You exist and that's enough...
Juliette Greco
Thank you very much! What did we do? We did lots of silly things afterwards, we sang lots of things, and then one day...
Joseph Kosma
Prévert's songs.
Juliette Greco
Yes, yes, oh, lots of silly things, oh my god, day by day, to the night the night, everything, everything, everything, I am the way that I am, everything. And then one day, I was asked to leave, they asked me to go abroad. It bothered me a bit. I was a bit bothered, I didn't know about singing abroad, they asked me to go to New York. To New York. I lived very far from New York, and I really wondered what it looked like. And they told me: ok, you're going to go to New York, and we want you to sing "Les Feuilles Mortes". "Les Feuilles Mortes", for me, it's a bit like a passport to the entire world. And you're the one who gave me this passport, and this passport, the first stamp, it's there.