A01=David L. Looseley
audience
Author_David L. Looseley
Category=AVLP
Category=AVP
Category=JBC
celebrity
concert
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
French
icon
performance
popularity
public reception
recording
sensation
singer
star
stardom
Product details
- ISBN 9781501362118
- Weight: 240g
- Dimensions: 126 x 206mm
- Publication Date: 12 Jan 2023
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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From the beginning of her career in 1935 to her death in 1963 and right up to the present, Édith Piaf has been recognized as unique and iconic. She is France’s most celebrated and mythified singing star across the world. Récital 1961 explores her most important album: the live recording of her comeback concert at the Paris Olympia on 29 December 1960, which unveiled her keynote song, ‘Non je ne regrette rien’ (No Regrets). It examines the content, context and significance of the concert in relation to Piaf’s career, her life and her celebrity. What was so special about the performance and why did the ecstatic audiences, that night and at the subsequent performances in 1961, find it so powerful and moving? The book dissects the live show, the album and the songs that feature on it, and at a deeper level their place in the invention of the public Piaf we know today – asking why, more than a century after her birth and 60 years after her death, we still remember her, listen to her and commemorate her around the world.
David Looseley is Emeritus Professor of Contemporary French Culture at the University of Leeds, UK. He writes on the popular music, culture and cultural policy of France, including Édith Piaf: A Cultural History (2015), joint winner of the Franco-British Society Literary Prize, and Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (2003). He was contributing editor (with Diana Holmes) of Imagining the Popular in Contemporary French Culture (2013). He is Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
