Marianne Oswald
| Marianne Oswald | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Sarah Alice Bloch January 9, 1901 Sarreguemines, Moselle, Lorraine, France |
| Died | February 25, 1985 (aged 84) Limeil-Brevannes, Val-de-Marne, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | singer, actress |
Marianne Oswald (January 9, 1901 – February 25, 1985) was the stage name of Sarah Alice Bloch, a French singer and actress born in Sarreguemines in Alsace-Lorraine. She took this stage name from a character she much admired, the unhappy Oswald in the Ibsen play Ghosts. She was noted for her hoarse voice, heavy half-Lorraine, half-German accent, and for singing about unrequited love, despair, sadness, and death. She sang the songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. She was friends with Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, François Mauriac, and Albert Camus. In fact, the text for one of her album covers was written by Camus. She was an inspiration for the composers Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger.
Marianne Oswald's parents were Jewish immigrants, exiles from Poland. Both parents died young and she became an orphan in 1917 at the age of 16. Initially she was sent to a boarding school in Munich, but by 1920 she found her way to Berlin where she began singing in the thriving cabarets of the period. During this time, an operation to remove a goiter—she called it "having my throat cut"—left her with a permanent hoarse voice which would have a major, and not entirely negative, effect on her singing career.
In 1931, with the rise of the Nazi party, and the threat it posed—Oswald was after all Jewish—she was forced to emigrate to Paris where she forged a unique new style of French singing incorporating the techniques of German expressionism. She sang at the cabaret Le Boeuf sur le Toit (the ox on the roof), a tavern which had long welcomed the songs of the French avant-garde. She was one of the first to interpret The Threepenny Opera by Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill, with lyrics adapted into French by André Mauprey, for instance singing La complainte de Mackie (a song English speakers know as Mack the Knife) and Pirate Jenny.
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