"La Mer" ("The Sea") is a song by the French composer, lyricist, singer and showman Charles Trenet. The song was first recorded by the French singer Roland Gerbeau in 1945. When Trenet's version was released in 1946, it became an unexpected hit and has remained a chanson classic and jazz standard ever since.
Background and history
Trenet said that he had written an initial version of the song's lyrics as a poem at the age of 16, many years before he came up with a tune for it. The tune came to him while he was travelling by train in 1943 between Montpellier and Perpignan as he was gazing out of the window at the Étang de Thau, a lagoon in the south of France. He jotted it down on a piece of paper and in the afternoon he worked out the details with his pianist Léo Chauliac. That evening they performed it in front of an audience without much of an impact.[1]
The song was not recorded before the end of World War II. It was first offered to Suzy Solidor who declined it, then to Roland Gerbeau who recorded it with Jo Bouillon's orchestra at the end of 1945. The orchestration and chorus were provided by Albert Lasry. Trenet himself recorded his song for the first time in 1946.[2]
Over the years the song became popular throughout the world and developed into a chanson classic and jazz standard with a large number of prominent artists recording their own versions. Besides the original in French, the song was also recorded in several other languages, with the English version "Beyond the Sea" being particularly popular and becoming the signature song for the American singer Bobby Darin.[3] In 1966 there were already over 100 different recordings of "La Mer", and it was considered to be France's best-selling song, together with Édith Piaf's "La Vie en rose".[4] By the time of Trenet's death in 2001, there were more than 4,000 different recordings of it,[5][6] with over 70 million copies sold in total.[7]
Despite various translations into other languages, the original French version was popular outside France and with non-French musicians as well. Trenet published his recording in the US in 1947 and Bing Crosby recorded "La Mer" on his 1953 album Le Bing: Song Hits of Paris.
Charles Trenet's recording of "La Mer" is choreographed in Matthew Bourne's 1989 ballet suite Infernal Galop, "a French dance with English subtitles", in which a merman seduces three matelots.[8]
The song was also recorded by Cliff Richard.[9] In 1976 Julio Iglesias included the song on his live album En el Olympia.[10] The song was included on Dalida's 1999 posthumous album Besame Mucho.[11]Demis Roussos included the song on his 1995 studio album Immortel.[12]
In 1970, Belgian singer Lize Marke released a version of the song with added lyrics by Johnny Steggerda and Jack Bess.[16]
"Das Meer"
The first German version was written in 1948 by Hans Fritz Beckmann and Lale Andersen. The latter recorded it with Michael Jary and his orchestra in the same year. However, Beckmann was unhappy with the first attempt and rewrote it. The new version was first recorded by the German actress and singer Liselotte Malkowsky in 1949 and became rather popular in German-speaking countries.[17] Later recordings
comprise the Austrian Schlager singer Lolita, the Austrian soprano Eva Lind, the Italian-German singer and entertainer Caterina Valente, and the German entertainer and band leader Götz Alsmann.[18]
"Волна" ("Volna")
A Russian version named "Волна" ("Wave") was adapted by two Soviet Russian poets and translators, Samuil Bolotin and Tatiana Sikorskaya, in the 1950s for Leonid Utesov, a popular Soviet singer. It was included on the album called Ах, Одесса моя ("Oh, my Odessa").[19]
"La Mer" (Caetano Veloso)
Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso released a 2024 version of the French song, singing it in French. He says he recorded the song at the request of writer Christine Angot, who was in the audience at a Paris performance where Caetano sang "La Mer" as a posthumous tribute to his manager Guilherme Araújo, who had always asked him to record the French song.[20]
"La Mer" also features in Irish Ferries' TV and radio advert in Ireland, as part of their "Sail In Style" campaign to advertise their Dublin–France route.[31]
^Alastair Macaulay: Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Dance: Conversations with Alastair Macaulay. Faber & Faber, 2011, ISBN9780571279890, chapter 3 (excerpt (Google))
^Bart van Loo: Chanson. Een gezongen Geschiedenis van Frankrijk. WPG, 2011, ebook (1952) (excerpt (Google))
^Bob Leszczak: Who Did It First?: Great Pop Cover Songs and Their Original Artists. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, ISBN9781442230682, p. 22 (excerpt (Google))
^La mer at secondhandsongs.com (retrieved 2015-1-4)
^Paul Clinton: Sea Story: At Age 92, Jack Lawrence, out Lyricist of "Beyond the Sea," Talks about His New Autobiography-And about Having Kevin Spacey Sing His Words. The Advocate, 2007-12-7
Lyricstranslate Original lyrics plus crowdsourced translations (not singable) into many languages. Unlike many webpages, this page preserves the French diacritical marks–été not ete, bergère not bergere, etc.—which are part of the spelling.