NO, I REGRET NOTHING

REQUIEM FOR THE AUTHOR OF AN ANTHEM.

Edith Piaf

Charles Dumont died this week. He wrote scores of songs, many with lyricist Michel Vaucaire, but none more famous that their 1956 collaboration Non, je ne regrette rien/No, I Regret Nothing, destined to become the signature anthem of Edith Piaf. A mere 146.5 cm (4 ft 9¾ in) and seldom weighing more than 40 kilos (90 pounds), Piaf - real name Edith Gassion - never allowed ill health or personal tragedy to curb her determination. At the end of her life,  crippling arthritis had made her an addict to morphine, and she needed a masseuse in the wings to restore movement to her limbs between songs. But still she sang. The evocation of her stage presence by poet Jean Cocteau approached ecstasy. “A voice rises up from deep within, a voice that inhabits her from head to toe, unfolding like a wave of warm black velvet to submerge us, piercing through us, getting right inside us. The illusion is complete. Edith Piaf, like an invisible nightingale on her branch, herself becomes invisible. There is just her gaze, her pale hands, her waxed forehead catching the light, and the voice that swells, mounts up, and gradually replaces her.” Her songs, almost all written specifically for her and sometimes with her collaboration, projected the same sense of indomitable will. Stirred by the insistent pulse of the orchestra and the tremolo of her voice, her rendition of Non, Je ne regrette Rien brought even the most stoic of audiences to its feet.   Ironically, she initially refused to let Dumont pitch his work, thinking it too obviously aimed at pleasing the crowd. It took four years for her to unbend, but once she finally heard this song on October 5, 1960, she recorded it on November 10 and sang it at the Olympia on December 29 – crediting both Dumont and Vaucaire. The chugging accompaniment of that performance, predominantly  of accordions and drums, confers an authentic music hall simplicity missed in subsequent settings for full orchestra. This is le vrai Mome Piaf, the street kid, singing from the heart.