“All those times I hit rock bottom, I always managed to bounce back. Sure, I had to love life a lot...” In Il était un piano noir, her unfinished autobiography published in 1997, a year after her death, the singer Barbara tells with modesty and poetry of her childhood stolen by incest and by the occupation, of her bohemian years in Belgium, and of her early career in Parisian cabarets. She writes about the dream that haunted her throughout her life: to sing, write, compose, and be onstage with an audience, her “most beautiful love story.” Those pages, among other sources, are at the heart of the story for voice and piano imagined by Juliette Binoche and Alexandre Tharaud. The singer's writings mix with the performers' memories of her, using the texts and songs, from the most famous to the most secret, to create a sensorial landscape. A pen and a piano that celebrate life, love, pain, anger, but above all else hope, which, even at its darkest and most desperate, forever remained the vibrant engine driving this icon, who Juliette Binoche says was able to turn “her shadows into light, her dark velvets into suns.”
Distribution
Texts Barbara
Lights, stage design Éric Soyer
Artistic collaboration Vincent Huguet and Chris Gandois
With Juliette Binoche, Alexandre Tharaud (piano)
Production
Production Les Visiteurs du soir
With the help of Onde Théâtre Centre d'art de Vélizy-Villacoublay
With the kind participation of Yamaha Music Europe
Il était un piano noir..., Mémoires interrompus de Barbara is published by éditions Fayard, dans la collection Le livre de poche.