He wrote the most famous groaning duet in music history (Je t’aime…moi non plus) and burned a 500-franc note live on television. He recorded a song with his daughter Charlotte, who was twelve at the time, that plays with the themes of incest and pedophilia, he drank and smoked to the max, and otherwise with artistic and erotic escapades hardly missed a scandal: If one attributes the attribute “enfant Terrible”, then Serge Gainsbourg. Although some claim that his scandals and provocations were even greater than his talent, he is rightly regarded as one of France’s most brilliant chansonniers, who has also successfully composed for stars such as France Gall (“Poupée de cire, poupée de son”) and Françoise Hardy .
Dominique Horwitz will dedicate an evening to the multi-creative, who died in 1991 and also had success as an actor and writer, this Friday, March 11 (“Je t’aime”). The program presented by Horwitz, who was born in Paris and now lives in Weimar, will look a little different than originally planned due to the current political situation. Serge Gainsbourg came from a Ukrainian Jewish family who fled from the Bolsheviks in 1919 and ended up in Paris. His father Joseph Ginsburg was born in Kharkiv, which is currently very competitive, and his mother Olga came from the Crimean peninsula. Serge Gainsburg was born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris in 1928. He had a difficult childhood and survived the German occupation of France as a Jew.
Dominique Horwitz, who became known as an actor through films such as “Stalingrad” or “Nachtgestalten” and recently took part in Detlev Buck’s “Felix Krull”, but is more at home on the theater stage, was also born in Paris (1957). He comes from a German-Jewish family who fled during the Nazi era. She returned to Berlin in 1971, but of course Horwitz still has strong cultural ties to his native country. “The chanson had a great influence on me,” he emphasizes again and again. He called his last novel “Chanson d’Amour” and he particularly admires Jacques Brel, whose chansons he has been interpreting for a long time. He calls “Me ne quitte pas”, probably the Belgian’s most famous work, the greatest love song of all time, but the equally famous “Je t’aime…moi non plus”, which Gainsbourg recorded with Brigitte Bardot and his wife Jane Birkin, should come close to him. Love was a big topic for the shy, rather unattractive Serge Gainsbourg, who nevertheless had many affairs, four children by three women and was a notorious erotica. The same applies to Dominique Horwitz, who in some ways is something of a soul mate to Gainsbourg: “Love is nothing but life,” he recently said in an interview, and: “Love is the ultimate goal.” This also means: to unfold passion in all its heat, the ability to tear your heart out and reveal weaknesses and longings without compromise.
Of course, love (like war, unfortunately) is part of the all-too-human, perhaps it doesn’t exist without evil and the abyss. A few years ago, Horwitz impressed the audience in Taufkirchen with his show “Me and the Devil”, this time focusing on the ambivalent and elusive genius Gainsbourg: “Happiness is alien to me, so I’m not looking for it,” says Horwitz as Gainsbourg.
The “Serge Gainsbourg Evening” by Berthold Warnecke and with Dominique Horwitz and a four-piece live band begins at 7 p.m. cards over https://kulturzentrum-taufkirchen.derespectively Munich Ticket.