Theater: Of Love & Deeper Sorrows

The World of Charles Aznavour. He

looks preshrunk, forlorn, anonymous, an obsequious undertaker in a tight black suit—except that dark eyes of mourning seem to have been burned into his head with a blowtorch. He is pale, wary, jumpy, an urban night monkey traveling in the jungle of cities from Paris to New York. The combo behind him breaks into a jazz beat, and he punctuates the air around him with staccato jabs of his hand mike. Nervously he whips the mike cord, and it coils and undulates like a black snake. At the end of it, his slight body stiffens in a convulsive spasm, a lightning rod under a direct hit. The mouth opens in grief, and he sings of losers and a losing game—love.

To France's Charles Aznavour it is the transiency of love that hurts. L'amour c'est comme un jour—it dawns, it dies. C'est fini, he cries, with desolate finality. You've Let Yourself Go is an unsparing plaint of conjugal disenchantment. Aznavour has none of the rakish charm of Maurice Chevalier, the ebullient high spirits of Charles Trenet, or the blatant sex appeal of Yves Montand. But he has two qualities that none of them possess with the same intensity—fire and sorrow. He was trained by Edith Piaf, and if one closes one's eyes, one can hear her pain as well as her phrasing in his voice. Aznavour's notes are wounds into which the salt of life has been rubbed.

Although Charles Aznavour is a Parisian, he is Armenian by blood, and his keening laments have echoes of the Middle East in them. Their deepest roots are not in the Paris streets but in the tavernas of Greece, the souks of Morocco and the wailing wall of Jerusalem. Aznavour has the power to affect an audience the way he does because he sings of a betrayal beyond love, something unutterably sad at the heart of things, the treacherous, tragic nature of life itself.