After Paris Attacks, ‘La Marseillaise’ Echoes Around the World in Solidarity
It
rang out at the Metropolitan Opera, with Plácido Domingo conducting,
and before performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Lyric Opera
of Chicago, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and others. Muslim leaders sang it in Paris at the scene of one of Friday’s deadly terror attacks. London’s Wembley Stadium will display its lyrics on large screens to help English-speaking soccer fans muddle through it Tuesday when England plays France.
“La
Marseillaise” has echoed around the world since Friday’s terrorist
attacks — an expression of solidarity with the people of France and of
outrage at the carnage caused by the terrorists who killed 129 people
Friday during a series of coordinated attacks in Paris.
But the ubiquity of the song, the French national anthem, reflects
something else too: the way “La Marseillaise” resonates emotionally
around the world in a way few other national anthems do.
What
other anthem can boast of being quoted by the Beatles (in the
introduction to “All You Need Is Love”), Tchaikovsky (“1812 Overture”)
and Debussy (who used fragments in his “Feux d’artifice”)? Or of being covered by the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and the singer Serge Gainsbourg, who recorded a reggae adaptation? Or of anchoring emotional scenes in two masterpieces of world cinema: Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” and, a few years later, “Casablanca,”
in the unforgettable scene where the regulars at Rick’s Café Américain
sing it as an act of defiance to drown out Nazis singing a German
patriotic song?
Of
course there were other songs taken up after the Paris attacks. Madonna
paid tribute to the people of France, and Édith Piaf, by singing “La Vie en Rose” during a concert in Stockholm on Saturday. Coldplay, at a concert in Los Angeles on Saturday, paid its own tribute to the people of Paris by playing a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
But it is “La Marseillaise” that has provided much of the soundtrack since the attacks — from the French soccer fans who sang it as they were evacuated from the stadium to the mourners who gathered around the world, from the French Embassy in Dublin to Union Square in New York, where French students sang it.
And, since the attacks, the anthem has been played at sporting events around the world, including at N.B.A. games at Madison Square Garden,
where the Knicks played the New Orleans Pelicans, and at the Staples
Center in Los Angeles, where the Clippers played the Detroit Pistons,
and at several N.H.L. games in Canada.
It
is a rousing anthem but, as French speakers can attest, hardly a song
of peace. Its most bloodthirsty verses — especially one calling for
spilling the “impure blood” of enemies — have long attracted
controversy. Over the years there have been calls by prominent French
citizens, including, in 1992, by Danielle Mitterrand, who was then
France’s first lady — to rewrite its most bellicose lyrics. But traditionalists won out, and the call to spill impure blood remains.
The
song took a twisty path to becoming France’s national anthem. It was
written in 1792 by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle to inspire French
troops under siege by Prussian soldiers in Strasbourg, and it was
originally called “The War Hymn of the Army of the Rhine.” It soon
became an anthem of revolutionary France, and was given its current name
after soldiers from Marseilles sang it on their marches. It fell in and
out of favor in France during the 19th century, but was adopted by
liberal and revolutionary movements elsewhere in Europe and around the
world, and officially became the French national anthem in 1879.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire