Нана Мускури: Голос Европы и мира

Greek singer

Ioanna "Nana" Mouskouri (Ιωάννα "Νάνα" Μούσχουρη ; born 13 October 1934) is a Greek singer and politician. Over the span of her career, she has released over 200 albums in at least twelve languages, including Greek, French, English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew, Welsh, Mandarin Chinese and Corsican. Mouskouri became well known throughout Europe for the song "The White Rose of Athens", recorded first in German as "Weiße Rosen aus Athen" as an adaptation of her Greek song "Σαν σφυρίξεις τρείς φορές" (San sfyríxeis tris forés, "When you whistle three times"). It became her first record to sell over one million copies. Later in 1963, she represented Luxembourg at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "À force de prier". Her friendship with the composer Michel Legrand led to the recording by Mouskouri of the theme song of the Oscar nominated film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. From 1968 to 1976, she hosted her own TV show produced by BBC, Presenting Nana Mouskouri. Her popularity as a multilingual television personality and distinctive image, owing to the then unusual signature black rimmed glasses, turned Mouskouri into an international star. "Je chante avec toi Liberté", recorded in 1981, is perhaps her biggest hit to date, performed in at least five languages – French, English as "Song for Liberty", German as "Lied der Freiheit", Spanish as "Libertad" and Portuguese as "Liberdade". "Only Love", a song recorded in 1985 as the theme song of TV series Mistral's Daughter, gained worldwide popularity along with its other versions in French (as "L'Amour en Héritage"), Italian (as "Come un'eredità"), Spanish (as "La dicha del amor"), and German (as "Aber die Liebe bleibt"). It became her only UK hit single when it reached number two in February 1986. Mouskouri became a spokesperson for UNICEF in 1993 and was elected to the European Parliament as a Greek deputy from 1994 to 1999. In 2006 she was a special guest on Eurovision Song Contest 2006's final, presented as the best selling artist of all time. In 2015, she was awarded the Echo Music Prize for Outstanding achievements by the German music association Deutsche Phono Akademie.

Nana Mouskouri was born on 13 October 1934 in Chania, Crete, where her father, Constantinos, worked as a film projectionist in a local cinema; her mother, Aliki, worked in the same cinema as an usher. When Mouskouri was three, her family moved to Athens. and this could well account for her remarkable singing voice (in her younger years ranging from a husky, dark alto, which she later dropped, to a ringing coloratura mezzo), as opposed to her breathy, raspy speaking voice. Mouskouri's early childhood was marked by the German Nazi occupation of Greece. Her father became part of the anti Nazi resistance movement in Athens. Mouskouri began singing lessons at age 12. As a child, she listened to radio broadcasts of singers including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Charles Trenet, Billie Holiday, and Édith Piaf. In 1950, she was accepted at the Conservatoire. She studied classical music with an emphasis on singing opera. After eight years at the Conservatoire, Mouskouri was encouraged by her friends to experiment with jazz music. She began singing with her friends' jazz group at night. However, when Mouskouri's Conservatory professor found out about Mouskouri's involvement with a genre of music that was not in keeping with her classical studies, he prevented her from sitting for her end of year exams. During an episode of Joanna Lumley's Greek Odyssey, shown on the UK ITV channel in the autumn of 2011, Mouskouri told the actress Joanna Lumley how she had been scheduled to sing at the amphitheatre at Epidauros with other students of the Conservatoire, when upon arrival at the amphitheatre word came through from the Conservatoire in Athens that she had just been barred from participating in the performance there owing to her involvement in light music. Mouskouri subsequently left the Conservatoire and began performing at the Tzaki club in Athens. She began singing jazz in nightclubs with a bias towards Ella Fitzgerald's repertoire. In 1957, she recorded her first song, "Fascination", in both Greek and English for Odeon/EMI Greece. By 1958 while still performing at the Tzaki, she met Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis. Hadjidakis was impressed by Nana's voice and offered to write songs for her. In 1959 Mouskouri performed Hadjidakis' "Κάπου υπάρχει η αγάπη μου" (Kápou ipárchi i agápi mou, "Somewhere my love exists"; co written with poet Nikos Gatsos) at the inaugural Greek Song Festival. The song won first prize, and Mouskouri began to be noticed. At the 1960 Greek Song Festival, she performed two more Hadjidakis compositions, "Τιμωρία" (Timōría, "Punishment") and "Κυπαρισσάκι" (Kyparissáki, "Little cypress"). Both these songs tied for first prize. Mouskouri performed Kostas Yannidis' composition, "Ξύπνα αγάπη μου" (Xýpna agápi mou, "Wake up, my love"), at the Mediterranean Song Festival, held in Barcelona that year. The song won first prize, and she went on to sign a recording contract with Paris based Philips Fontana. In 1961, Mouskouri performed the soundtrack of a German documentary about Greece. This resulted in the German language single Weiße Rosen aus Athen ("White Roses from Athens"). The song was originally adapted by Hadjidakis from a folk melody. It became a success, selling over a million copies in Germany. The song was later translated into several languages and it went on to become one of Mouskouri's signature tunes.

In 1979, Mouskouri released another English language album named Roses and Sunshine. This album consisted largely of folk and country material, and included work from sources including Neil Young, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan and John Denver. It was well received in Canada, and one of the album's tracks, "Even Now" (not the same song as the 1978 Barry Manilow hit), became a staple on beautiful music radio stations in the United States. She scored a worldwide hit in 1981 with "Je chante avec toi Liberté", which was translated into several languages after its success in France. The momentum from this album also helped boost her following German album, Meine Lieder sind mein Leben. In 1984, Mouskouri returned to Greece and performed to a large audience at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus; her first performance in her homeland since 1962. In 1985, Mouskouri recorded "Only Love", the theme song to the American TV series Mistral's Daughter – based upon the novel by Judith Krantz – which reached number 2 in the UK charts. The song was also a hit in its other versions: L'Amour en Héritage (French), Come un'eredità (Italian), La dicha del amor (Spanish), and Aber die Liebe bleibt (German). The German version was also recorded with an alternate set of lyrics under the title Der wilde Wein; it was withdrawn in favour of Aber die Liebe bleibt. That same year, Mouskouri made a play for the Spanish language market with the hit single Con Toda el Alma. The song was a major success in Spain, Argentina and Chile. She released five albums in different languages in 1987, and the following year returned to her classical conservatory roots with the double LP The Classical Nana (a. k. a. Nana Classique), which featured adaptations of classical songs and excerpts from opera. By the end of 1987, she had performed a series of concerts in Asia, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand.

Mouskouri's 1991 English album, Only Love: The Best of Nana Mouskouri, became her best selling release in the United States. She spent much of the 1990s touring the globe. Among her early 1990s albums were spiritual music, Gospel (1990), the Spanish language Nuestras Canciones, the multilingual, Mediterranean themed Côté Sud, Côté Coeur (1992), Dix Mille Ans Encore, Falling in Love Again: Great Songs From the Movies. Falling in Love featured two duets with Harry Belafonte. In 1993, Mouskouri recorded the album Hollywood. Produced by Michel Legrand it was a collection of famous songs from films, and served not only as a tribute to the world of cinema, but also as a personal reference to childhood memories of sitting with her father in his projection room in Crete. She recorded several more albums in 1996 and 1997, including the Spanish Nana Latina (which featured duets with Julio Iglesias and Mercedes Sosa), the English language Return to Love, and the French pop classics, Hommages. In 1997, she staged a high profile Concert for Peace at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. This concert was later released as an album, and aired as a TV special on PBS in the United States. On 30 May 2013, Mouskouri was awarded an honorary degree by McGill University, Canada.

Mouskouri was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in October 1993. She took over from the previous ambassador, the recently deceased actress Audrey Hepburn. Mouskouri's first U. N. mission took her to Bosnia to draw attention to the plight of children affected by the Bosnian war. She went on to give a series of fund raising concerts in Sweden and Belgium. She was a Member of the European Parliament for Greece through the centre right New Democracy party from 1994 until 1999, when she resigned from her position as an MEP. Several reasons have been given for the resignation, one being her pacifism, and another being that she felt ill equipped for the day to day work of a politician.

Mouskouri lives in Switzerland with Chapelle, and, until her final performance in 2008, performed hundreds of concerts every year throughout her career. In 2004, her French record company released a 34 CD box set of more than 600 of Mouskouri's mostly French songs. In 2006, she made a guest appearance at that year's Eurovision Song Contest which was held, for the first time ever, in her native Greece. In the same year, she announced her plans to retire. From 2005 until 2008, she conducted a farewell concert tour of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, South America, the United States, and Canada. On July 23 and 24, 2008, Mouskouri gave her two final 'Farewell Concert' performances at the ancient Herodes Atticus Theatre, in Athens, Greece, before a packed stadium, including Greece's Prime Minister and Athens mayor, plus the mayors of Berlin, Paris and Luxembourg, along with fans from around the world and thousands of her Athenian admirers. In 2010, in response to the financial crisis in Greece, Mouskouri announced that she would forgo her pension to contribute to the country's recovery. She commented: "Everywhere I see stories about my country going bankrupt. And people are aggressive about it. It's frightening. And it's painful for me. Nobody wants their country to be treated badly. It's frustrating and very sad." At age 80, she embarked on a three year Happy Birthday Tour; in 2018 she had booked a five month Forever Young Tour through parts of Europe and North America. In 2015, she was awarded with the Echo Music Prize for Outstanding achievements by the German music association Deutsche Phono Akademie. Despite her 'farewell tour' and 'final concert', she continues to make occasional appearances on TV shows, especially in Germany, though increasingly using 'le playback' (miming), which, unlike many other singers, she rarely used through most of her career; the most recent at time of writing was the 2023 12 2 German (ARD1) 'Das Adventsfest der 100 000 Lichter' (advent celebration of 100,000 lights coincidentally the show's title partially reflecting one of her early [1965] German hits), in which she duetted one song and participated in the finale.

The British comedian Benny Hill impersonated Mouskouri on The Benny Hill Show. Wearing a long dress, large glasses and long black hair, he talked and sang with a slow and quiet voice. He introduced a song with a long translation into English of all the events supposedly mentioned in the song and then sang just a single line of "Greek". Andrea Martin played Mouskouri in a sketch, 'The Nana Mouskouri Story', during the 1981–1982 season of SCTV (later included in a DVD compilation). In 1976, Ronnie Barker performed a song in drag as a parody of Mouskouri in The Two Ronnies as Nana Moussaka. Mouskouri was also parodied in the first episode of the 1970s New Zealand political satire A Week Of It. In 1991, British comedian Victoria Wood mentioned Mouskouri in her original song, "The Reincarnation Song." The song was included in Wood's television special of that year, Victoria Wood: Sold Out. In the Ed, Edd n Eddy episode O Ed Eleven, Eddy's brother is shown to have a Nana Mouskouri poster in his old bedroom. Karl Pilkington included Mouskouri as a clue in his contest 'Rockbusters', part of the radio show The Ricky Gervais Show on XFM. Broadcasting on December 31, 2005, the clue was "Me granny's taking a penalty. She better get the ball in the back of the net," initials (NM) = Nana Mouskouri (nanna must score 'ere). Gervais described this clue as "one of his best clues ever." In 2015, Liina Vahtrik parodied her song "Only Love" on the Estonian version of Your Face Sounds Familiar.

Chanter ma vie, by Nana Mouskouri, Grasset ed., Paris 1989. and Το όνομά μου είναι Νάνα (To ónomá mou eínai Nána, "My Name Is Nana"), by Nana Mouskouri, Livani Publishing, Athens 2006. , Mémoires: La fille de la chauve souris, by Nana Mouskouri with Lionel Duroy, XO Éditions, Paris 2007. and Memoirs, by Nana Mouskouri with Lionel Duroy, translated by Jeremy Leggatt, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2007. and Stimme der Sehnsucht: Meine Erinnerungen, by Nana Mouskouri with Lionel Duroy, translated by Ulrike Lelickens, Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2008. and .