Main content

3. Les Amants d'un jour

Edith Piaf's song Les Amants d'un jour from 1956. A lovelorn suicide pact in a dingy hotel room - essential Piaf. Muriel Zagha dissects a fated melodrama of intimate economy.

Edith Piaf in 5 Songs.

3. Les Amants d'un jour 1956. Piaf could conjure worlds wreathed in smoke and fate with remarkable economy. A suicide pact in a dingy hotel room by doomed lovers -that's quintessential Piaf. The writer Muriel Zagha dissects the fated melodrama of her 1956 classic and her performance honed to minimalist heartbreak. 'In her plain black dress, her white face like a ghosts, Piaf looks frail. In four years she will be dead. She announces the song, walks offstage, returning with a white dishcloth and a wine glass, as she starts to sing she begins to polish, mechanically. Like someone in a trance. Such is her psychic, mesmeric power.'

Producer - Mark Burman
A Whistledown Production for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 3

Available now

14 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Wed 6 Mar 2024 22:45
  • Wed 29 Oct 2025 21:45

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Podcast