Episode details

Radio 3,06 Mar 2024,14 mins

Series Edith Piaf in Five Songs

3. Les Amants d'un jour

The Essay

Available for over a year

Edith Piaf in 5 Songs. 3. Les Amants d'un jour 1956. Piaf could conjure worlds wreathed in smoke and fate with remarkable economy. A suicide pact in a dingy hotel room by doomed lovers -that's quintessential Piaf. The writer Muriel Zagha dissects the fated melodrama of her 1956 classic and her performance honed to minimalist heartbreak. 'In her plain black dress, her white face like a ghosts, Piaf looks frail. In four years she will be dead. She announces the song, walks offstage, returning with a white dishcloth and a wine glass, as she starts to sing she begins to polish, mechanically. Like someone in a trance. Such is her psychic, mesmeric power.' Producer - Mark Burman A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 3

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