Under the stage name “Barbara,” Monique Senf became one of France’s most popular singers, always dressed in black, and best known for her melancholy songs. She had reason for melancholy: born in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, at the age of ten she and her family were forced to hide and flee from the German occupiers; her Alsatian father, a fur merchant, and her Moldavian mother, were both Jewish. After the war, they lived in Vesinet, just outside Paris, where she took vocal and piano lessons. In 1946, she began studying at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Paris. Soon the family could no longer afford the rented piano, and she quit formal training to sing cabaret. Around this time her father abandoned the family. In 1950, Monique moved to Brussels where she had a cousin and continued to sing Piaf-style cabaret as “Barbara Brodi” (soon to become just “Barbara”), inspired by her grandmother, Varvara Brodsky. In Brussels, a group of artists befriended her; they congregated at an old house that they had converted into workshops and a concert hall, and there she could sing. Back in Paris in 1953, she began singing at L’Écluse and other small clubs during the 50s. In 1958, she recorded her first single for Pathé Marconi and in 1959, released her first LP in Brussels, “Barbara chante Georges Brassens,” which garnered a Grand Prix du Disque. Her big chance came in 1961 when she opened for Brassens at the Bobino Music Hall in Montparnasse. That same year, her second album, “Barbara chante Jacques Brel” appeared. She started songwriting, one of the first women to perform her own creations; her career took off and she landed a major contract with Philips Records in 1964. The next year she won a prize from the Académie Charles Cros for the album “Barbara chante Barbara.” She toured throughout the late 60s, including with Serge Gainsbourg. In 1969, she announced that she was finished with singing and settled down in Percy-la-Marne, a village east of Paris, in 1973; she resumed singing and touring, however, and received another Grand Prix du Disque in 1982, this one for her contribution to French culture. She also acted in movies, television and on stage, including “Franz,” directed by Jacques Brel, her long-time friend. She herself directed a musical, Lily Passion, with Gerard Depardieu. In the late 1980s, she was an activist in the fight against AIDS, handing out condoms at her concerts. French president François Mitterand decorated her with the Légion d’honneur in 1988. She is sometimes credited with helping post-war Franco-German reconciliation through her song “Göttingen,” which became popular in Germany; a street in that town was even named after her. In 1996, though struggling with asthma, she managed to record a final album that sold over a million copies in just twelve hours. One melancholy song on that album, “L’Aigle noir” is thought to refer to childhood sexual abuse that her unfinished memoir mentions.
