50

Ne me quitte pas

music by Jacques Brel and Gérard Jouannest (uncredited)

words by Jacques Brel

ACCORDING TO JACQUES BREL, this famous love song wasn’t a love song at all, though if women wanted to think of it that way it was fine. In an interview in 1966, Brel said ‘Ne me quitte pas’ (‘Don’t leave me’) was about the pathetic dependency of men – a hymn, in truth, to their cowardice. ‘This is the story of a jerk and a loser,’ he said, ‘nothing to do with a woman.’ (‘C’est l’histoire d’un con et d’un raté, ça n’a rien à voir avec une femme.’)

The singer of the song certainly appears needy, repeating over and over the phrase ‘Ne me quitte pas’ or, in Brel’s Dutch version, ‘Laat me niet alleen’ (‘Don’t leave me alone’). Rod McKuen’s polite English translation – ‘If you go away’ – doesn’t approach this level of desperation.

It’s seldom a good idea to assume that songs are autobiographical, and in the case of ‘Ne me quitte pas’ it is probably unhelpful. For one thing, there were several women who believed the song to have been addressed to them. Brel was married with three children, the third born around the time ‘Ne me quitte pas’ was composed, but the family had moved to Belgium. In Paris, Brel was having an affair with the singer Suzanne Gabriello, who later declared the song had been written with their break-up in mind. In another theory the song was addressed to his estranged wife. In any case, it seems quite likely that when Brel spoke of the man as a ‘jerk’ and a ‘loser’, he was talking about himself.

Brel recorded ‘Ne me quitte pas’ three times, but he was not the first. The first singer was in fact a woman, Simone Langlois, in January 1959, and so the song’s point of view became female. The arrangement of that first recording by François Rauber is lush and reassuring, but the vocals are anguished – not quite in Brel’s league of loserdom, but close – Langlois and Brel phrase the song similarly. Perhaps she had heard Brel sing it.

Brel made his first recording, in French, in September that same year. In contrast to the arrangement on Langlois’s recording, Brel’s – also by Rauber – is, from its opening moments, a work of angst-ridden expressionism. A high, quavering line of near atonal melody is played by an ondes Martenot, an eerie-sounding electronic instrument beloved of the composer Olivier Messiaen (who spotlit it in his Turangalîla-Symphonie), but more commonly heard in horror movies of the period. Next enters the piano, playing the ‘Ne me quitte pas’ figure, then repeating it an octave higher, a gesture amplified at the beginning of Brel’s second French recording from 1972. By that time the ondes Martenot was gone.

The pianist in both recordings is Gérard Jouannest. We can safely assume from the romantic, rhapsodic manner of his playing that the opening figuration was down to him, but he seems to have had a more pivotal role. The second part of the melody, first heard with the words ‘Moi, je t’offrirai des perles de pluie venues de pays où il ne pleut pas’ (‘I offer you pearls of rain from a country where it doesn’t rain’), quotes – or at least toys with – the central slow section of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 6, which was a popular enough classic, and one the Paris Conservatoire–trained pianist would have known and possibly played.

Brel and Jouannest often collaborated, even trying things out side by side at the same piano keyboard. It has been speculated that at the time they wrote ‘Ne me quitte pas’, Jouannest was not a member of SACEM, the French performing-rights society, and therefore could not receive royalties; but if this were true, why was the attribution not remedied, especially given his other collaborations with Brel? It’s a mystery.

But back to Brel’s own performance. That he considered it a song about male dependency and viewed such men with scorn obviously colours our listening. His Dutch version, recorded in 1961 for the album Marieke, is ripe for consideration in this regard. Though French-speaking, Brel’s Belgian family was of Flemish ancestry and he recorded a number of his songs in Dutch – Marieke contains several. But his Dutch wasn’t fluent and so, with the assistance of the poet Ernst van Altena, ‘Ne me quitte pas’ became ‘Laat me niet alleen’. Perhaps it was the more guttural tones of the Dutch language, but Brel’s performance here, though it uses the same arrangement as his original 1959 recording (ondes Martenot and all), takes a radically different approach. Much of it is adopts a spoken tone, some of it is actual speech, and the overall mood is obsessive and unsettling. This is far removed from the Seekers singing ‘If You Go Away’.

Mind you, the obsession is already embedded within the song. It is not only the repetition of the first line that creates this effect (though it is hard to think of many other songs that repeat their title over and over so many times), but more subliminally, the melodic line that goes with the words, which is heard everywhere. In fact its rhythm never really goes away – even in the ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’ section, the insistent ‘Ne me quitte pas’ rhythm, a beat less here, a beat more there, underpins the melodic invention.

Throughout it all, however, we must remember that Brel was not only a singer and songwriter, but a cabaret performer and film actor. The stage was his world and to watch one of his French TV performances of ‘Ne me quitte pas’ is instructive. The earliest is from 1959 and already he is shot in close up, sweating under the studio lights. But there’s a later version. By now the song is a hit – the audience applauds at the first words – and Brel is in extreme close-up, the sweat running off him as he pleads desperately before the camera. To sing a song for others is to perform; and to perform, as Edith Piaf knew, is to be an actor – at least a little. Is Brel acting here? A lot!