Richard Cocciante goes solo

New album from hit musical maker

Paris 

30/11/2005 - 

Richard Cocciante, the French-Italian singer renowned for his romantic ballad Marguerite, has also written a series of hit stage musicals including Notre-Dame-de-Paris and Le Petit Prince. Cocciante is currently back in the spotlight with a new album, Songs. This highly personal album, featuring songs in French, Italian, Spanish and English, crowns a thirty-year career.

For the first time since 1996, Richard Cocciante has taken a temporary break from writing stage musicals and turned his attention to his own solo career once again. Songs, the title track from the singer's new album, sums up exactly what this artist has attempted to do over the past three decades: "recounting, in the space of just a few minutes, the inner workings of man!" Songs is a "reflection about what popular 'chanson' actually represents. It's a readily accessible genre, but it can end up touching people at the deepest level." "What I find most appealing about this form of expression", says Cocciante, "is the challenge of saying something meaningful about people in such a short space of time. Art, in general, allows man to reach a higher realm through thought, and music has the added bonus of allowing you to physically represent a non-physical entity. It's a mysterious abstraction."

While Cocciante has provided the music on his new album, he looked further afield for the lyrics, calling in a crack team of his favourite songwriters. These include Tonio K (for the English songs), Jorge Voss (for the Spanish) and Paquale Pannella and Enrico Ruggeri (for the Italian). Jean-Loup Dabadie, Alain Boublil, Elizabeth Anaïs and Jean-Jacques Goldman represent France. "JJ Goldman is someone I really appreciate for the things we have in common," says Cocciante, "We're both reserved and discreet kind of people... and I like artists like that." In real life as on stage, Cocciante has never been one for showing off and the songs on his new album celebrate basic human values rather than self-worth. However, Cocciante does admit that Tellement, the opening track on the album "is slightly autobiographical... (Songwriter) Elizabeth Anaïs spent some time observing me and my wife. We've been together for thirty years now. And when you've lived together all those years, it's not always easy. There are moments of crisis. You have to learn to forgive certain things on both sides. Over thirty years you merge together at a deeper level than physical love. And that means when you go through a bad patch, your love becomes stronger than ever."

From Marguerite to Notre-Dame-de-Paris

Richard Cocciante is a man open to the idea of exploring his feelings and this has not always been to his advantage in France. Indeed, for many long years songs such as Marguerite (1978), Coup de soleil (1979) and Question de feeling (a duet with Fabienne Thibault in 1985) had critics pigeon-holing him as a 'romantic singer'. "I only ever did about forty concerts in France," says Cocciante, "But I did thousands in Italy. I was always a lot more aggressive when it came to pushing myself there than I was in France where my career was marked by long periods of silence... Marguerite was a beautiful song. After that, I did a whole series of songs that were more successful, but they didn't have the same weight. I confess, I didn't always end up doing what I'd have liked to do."

While Cocciante takes a mitigated view of certain parts of his track record to date, he defends the choices on his new album, Songs. "I wanted to do something totally non-formatted," he says, "These days, everyone sits down and calculates how to come up with a hit and songs have to fit into certain formats... But I ask you, where's the artist in all that? I think it's a pretty sorry state of affairs! On my new album we recorded all the musicians together with all the minor imperfections that entails, but we got a lot of pleasure out of working that way. Let's just say it's a meeting of souls, rather than a merging of sounds!"

In recent years, Cocciante has instigated other "meetings of souls", working on collaborative projects such as Catherine Lara's rock opera Sand et les romantiques and writing scores for hit musicals such as Notre-Dame-de-Paris and Le Petit Prince. However, despite being hailed as the man who singlehandedly revived the fortunes of the musical in France, Cocciante is unhappy with the term. "When I was working on Notre-Dame-de-Paris," he s

ays, "the first thing I asked myself was how a composer should express himself within the context of musical drama – or "melodrama", to borrow the real term from opera - today? Opera has become a totally inaccessible genre now. It's totally lost its popular appeal. Rossini and Verdi were very much popular authors in their day. People would leave the opera singing their songs. Opera's been replaced by the musical now. That's a much lighter, typically Anglo-Saxon genre which isn't part of our culture. Anyway, when I started work on Notre-Dame-de-Paris I said to myself, 'What I have to do is take the passionate, lyrical elements of opera and transpose them to the world we live in today.'"

Boosted by the success of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, Cocciante went on to write scores for a whole series of musicals. "I've just done an Italian version of Roméo et Juliette which I presented at the Coliseum. It's going to be staged in Verona in 2007," he says, "And I've just finished two new musicals. One's a commission from Russia, the other from China." Meanwhile, the international success of Notre-Dame-de-Paris has not gone to it's composer's head. "Success can only be measured after you're dead!" he quips. For the moment, Cocciante declares, his mission is to concentrate on "transmitting soul and emotion. The rest is just instruments!"

Ask Richard Cocciante what he'd like to see change in the world in his lifetime and he wastes no time coming up with an answer. "Inequality! I'd like to see people living more easily alongside other races and religions. I'd like to see them trying to understand why other people have other cultures. That's an urgent issue if we want to maintain peace in this world." Is Cocciante on some sort of spiritual mission then? "I'm a believer," he says, "but not a practising one. Don't forget, spirituality is the basis of expression in music. There'd be no art without spirituality!" Another good reason – if any more were needed – to sit back and meditate on Richard Cocciante's Songs. Richard Cocciante Songs (CD + DVD) (Naïve) 2005

Richard Cocciante Songs (CD + DVD) (Naïve) 2005

Anne  Greffe

Translation : Julie  Street