here a little gem of the french chanson tradition for you.
1857 – charles baudelaire publishes his collection of poems les fleurs du mal (the flowers of evil). essential reading, i would suggest. to read these poems online in french and in several english translations go here. if you want to download an english version, go here. and if you want to download the french version, go here.
1957: léo ferré, one of the big names of french chanson, publishes his first record with songs to the poems of baudelaire, les fleurs du mal chantées par léo ferré.
straight from 50 year old vinyl, ripped@192 as mp3-files you can get it here.
if you want to hear the man talk, then i can propose you an interview with him, jaques brel and george brassens (yeah, three of the very big ones) to listen to here.
2007 – we are celebrating 150 years of les fleurs du mal and 50 years of léo ferré’s chansons. then one has to know that léo ferré composed a lot more songs to the poems of baudelaire. some of them made it on a second record. and some of them stayed just demos, never published. but french singer jean louis murat actually got the permission to use and re-record these songs and publishes these days his versions of some of these songs. the record is called charles et léo (it should be out since the 1st of october, but seems to have a certain delay). to visit jean louis website, go here.
not sweating yet 