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30 years since the death of Jacques Brel: his life, his art, his legacy
Link: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/brel-d15.shtml
Jacques Brel was one of the great representatives of French chanson in the post-World War II period. Born into a bourgeois family, Brel rejected the future awaiting him in his father’s cardboard factory and turned to singing. At the height of his success, in 1967, he chose to stop singing to devote himself to theater and cinema. Brel’s boundless enthusiasm toward life, his inexhaustible energy and his respect for ordinary people remain unforgettable. Born on the eve of the Great Depression, he experienced the Second World War and the German invasion of Belgium, the Algerian independence struggle in the late 1950s and the mass radicalization of the 1960s. Those events profoundly marked Brel’s life and art, as well as that of other contemporary singers and artists. Brel was born in Brussels, the Belgian capital, in April 1929. His father, Romain Brel, had worked some 20 years for the import-export corporation Cominex, during which time he spent several years in the Congo, then a Belgian colony. In 1926, he returned to Brussels and, in 1929, held a post on the company’s board of directors. Shortly after, Armand Vanneste, his brother-in-law, offered to partner with him in founding Vanneste & Brel, a company making cardboard. It was into this well-to-do Brussels bourgeois family that Jacques Brel was born, and this would permit him to avoid, for the most part, the miseries brought on by the economic crisis that hit the world in 1929, when the Wall Street crash occurred.
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