Orly is a chanson (song) in French by the Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel. It was recorded on 5 September 1977 and released on Brel's last long-playing record on Disques Barclay on 17 November of the same year. The album by the songwriter, who had returned from the South Seas after a long artistic break, became a public event in France. Orly is considered one of the outstanding songs on Brel's last release.
The song is about a pair of lovers who say goodbye to each other at Paris-Orly airport. Unusual for Brel's work is the narrator's role as an observer and the not primarily male point of view, which is directed towards the abandoned woman at the end. Orly can be interpreted not only as a sad love song, but also, with its allusions to illness and death, as the terminally ill songwriter's farewell to life. In the refrain, Brel concludes that life doesn't hand out gifts. By naming his colleague Gilbert Bécaud, he refers to his much more optimistic song Dimanche à Orly about longing for distant places at the airport.
Lyrics and Music
Sundays in Orly: over two thousand people stream through the airport, but the narrator only has eyes for two, a pair of lovers standing in the rain, hugging each other so tightly that their bodies merge. They affirm their love in tears, but make no promises to each other that they cannot keep. Finally, their bodies slowly separate, holding each other again, until the man abruptly turns away and is swallowed up by a staircase. The woman is left behind, open-mouthed, suddenly aged, as if she had met her death. She has often lost men in the past, but this time it is love that she has lost. She feels fragile, as if she were for sale. The narrator tries to follow her, but then she is also swallowed up by the crowd.
The chorus goes:«La vie ne fait pas de cadeau
Et nom de Dieu c’est triste
Orly le dimanche
Avec ou sans Bécaud»
– Jacques Brel: OrlyJacques Brel: Tout Brel. Laffont, Paris 2003, , pp. 355–357.Which can be translated as: "Life doesn't give presents. And in God's name (also stronger: damn it), it's sad on Sundays in Orly, with or without Bécaud."Hubert Thébault: Orly. In: Christian-Louis Eclimont (ed.): 1000 Chansons françaises de 1920 à nos jours. Flammarion, Paris 2012, , p. 548.
The verses take some liberties with the rhymes, but strictly adhere to the verse meter of half alexandrines. The melody is decidedly monotonous. It begins with the alternation of two simple chords on a gently strummed guitar, which, according to Hubert Thébault, creates the effect of a heartbeat: the tonic and dominant seventh chords in C minor to the first and third quarter notes of a three-quarter bar.Cf. the arrangement for choir by Martin Le Ray, excerpts on La Boite à Chansons While Brel accompanies himself alone throughout the first verse, the orchestraMarc Robine: Le Roman de Jacques Brel. Carrière, Paris 2003, , p. 542. conducted by his long-time arranger François Rauber only enters explosively after the first refrain. The four accentuated entries have the effect of "an acoustic exclamation mark."Ulf Kubanke: Spätes Meisterwerk, kurz vor seinem Tod. Review of Les Marquises in laut.de. From the second verse onwards, the strings set the rhythm, while the wind instruments support Brel's characteristic crescendo in the third verse. Ulf Kubanke speaks of a "blown, echoing brass echo", Hubert Thébault recalls the fanfares of the trumpets as reminiscent of a bullfight. As was typical of the collaboration between Brel and Rauber, Brel had precise ideas about the musical style and instrumentation from the beginning, including the trumpet part, but then let Rauber work out the details.Fred Hidalgo: Jacques Brel. L’aventure commence à l’aurore. Archipoche, Paris 2014, .
Background and origins
In May 1967, at the age of just 38, Brel gave his farewell performance as a songwriter on stage.Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , p. 422. The following year, one last LP was released, after which Brel only appeared in a musical and various films. In November 1974, the singer, who was suffering from lung cancer, had to undergo an operation to remove part of his lung.Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , p. 627. In December of the same year, he and his lover Maddly Bamy set off on an Atlantic crossing by sailing ship.Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , p. 632. A few weeks earlier, he had said goodbye to another lover named Monique, whom he never saw again. Eddy Przybylski assumes that this separation at an airport (not in Orly, but with Paris airport as the destination) is the biographical background to the song Orly.Eddy Przybylski: Brel. La valse à mille rêves. L’Archipel, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-8098-1113-1. Brel's journey took him to the Marquesas Islands over several stops, where he settled permanently on Hiva Oa in June 1976.Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , p. 660. On the island where Paul Gauguin had already spent his last years, Brel once again found the inspiration for seventeen new songs about "a few things that have been on my mind for fifteen years".Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , p. 702
In August 1977, Brel surprised his old companions by returning to Paris at short notice. He hid in a small hotel near the Place de l'Étoile from the French public, where there were rumors that the songwriter was terminally ill. In his luggage he had a cassette with rehearsal recordings of his new songs. Gérard Jouannest criticized the monotony of the melodies, but François Rauber embellished them with his arrangements. Eddie Barclay rented a studio in Avenue Hoche for the recordings. Brel recorded the songs together with an orchestra conducted by Rauber, but never more than two songs per session, which had to be completed in just a few takes. Brel's voice had deteriorated and he could only sing for a maximum of three hours at a time before he had to take a break. He tried to lighten the tense mood in the crowded studio with jokes about his missing lung.Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , pp. 706–710. Orly, with Jojo, was one of the first two songs Brel recorded on 5 September.Marc Robine: Le Roman de Jacques Brel. Carrière, Paris 2003, , p. 647.
When Brel's last record was released on 17 November 1977, it triggered an enormous response from the public. The record had no title, the cover showed only the four letters of his surname against a blue cloudy sky. Barclay did not do any conventional advertising, but by demonstrating secrecy, delivering locked containers and opening the combination locks at the same time, he created a special advertising hit that caused expectations to skyrocket and resulted in 1 million pre-orders. Brel, who had already left Paris for the South Seas, was annoyed by the hype.Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , pp. 719–721. He lived in Hiva Oa for another six months until his health deteriorated to such an extent that he had to return to Paris in July 1978, this time for chemotherapy.Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , pp. 738–739. Three months later, he died of heart failure on 9 October 1978 in Bobigny near Paris.Olivier Todd: Jacques Brel – ein Leben. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 1997, , p. 751.
Interpretation
Love and separation According to Maddly Bamy, Brel described Orly as "une belle chanson d'amour" ("a beautiful love song").Sara Poole: Brel and Chanson. A Critical Appreciation. University Press of America, Lanham 2004, , p. 27. With reference to: Maddly Bamy: Tu leur diras… Fixot, Paris 1999, , p. 181. For Sara Poole, it is on a par with songs such as Ne me quitte pas or Madeleine, which powerfully and dramatically evoke despair and being at the mercy of deep passions.Sara Poole: Brel and Chanson. A Critical Appreciation. University Press of America, Lanham 2004, , p. 32. Monique Watrin's "mini-tragedy" Orly is reminiscent of the early, passionate Brel from 1959,Monique Watrin: Brel. La quête du bonheur. Sévigny, Clamart 1990, , p. 212. the year in which he wrote the "love song of the century" (according to Frédéric Brun) with Ne me quitte pas.Thomas Weick: Die Rezeption des Werkes von Jacques Brel. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1991, , p. 230. From the point of view of his song colleague Serge Lama, Brel only wrote four real love songs: Ne me quitte pas, La chanson des vieux amants, Orly and Jojo. For Anne Bauer, Orly is even the "only song by Brel in which there is love without reservations, without ulterior motives and without lies".Anne Bauer: Jacques Brel: Ein Feuer ohne Schlacken. In: Siegfried Schmidt-Joos (ed.): Idole 2. Zwischen Poesie und Protest. John Lennon. Van Morrison. Randy Newman. Jacques Brel. Ullstein, Berlin 1984, , p. 159.
Orly describes the painful separation of a couple who love each other but are unable to stay together due to unfulfilled circumstances. Unlike songs such as Je ne sais pas (1958) or La Colombe (1959), the separation does not take place on a train platform, but in the midst of the crowds at a busy airport. And also unlike earlier songs, Brel stays completely out of the action and limits himself to describing what he sees. In doing so, he uses quasi-filmic stylistic devices and focuses the lens alternately on the couple as a whole and the individual people, their behavior, their gestures, their looks and their tears, with which he paints a disillusioned picture of human existence. The introductory lines "Ils sont plus de deux mille / Et je ne vois qu'eux deux" ("They are over two thousand and I only see them both"), which are repeated twice in the course of the first two verses, serve as a kind of leitmotif. They serve to focus the narrator's gaze from the general to the particular.Jean-Luc Pétry: Jacques Brel. Textes et Chansons. Ellipses, Paris 2003, , p. 64.
At the beginning, Brel shows the couple as a unit with expressions such as "eux deux", "ces deux", "tous les deux" and "ils" ("they both", "these two", "both of them" and "they"). It evokes the image of a very close, intimate union in the listener. This is reinforced by the external circumstances, the rain that covers them both and is reflected in their tears, as well as the shared fire that burns within them both. During the first, reluctant attempts at separation, the movement of the two bodies in relation to each other is reminiscent of natural elements, of ebb and flow. The couple stands out from the surrounding crowd, not only through the focus of the viewer, but also by living a love that remains incomprehensible to the others, condemned by them. It is a love that knows its limitations, that does not need false promises and that grows through the obstacle between the lovers.Monique Watrin: Brel. La quête du bonheur. Sévigny, Clamart 1990, , pp. 212–214.