The Yves Montand Voice

Yves Montand (1921-1991) sang and spoke with a baritone that carried the weight of a working man. He was born Ivo Livi in Italy and raised poor in Marseille, and the Mediterranean stayed in his throat even after he scrubbed most of the southern accent off for the Paris stage. The voice sits low and warm. It has grain near the bottom, the timbre of a man who might have loaded ships rather than trained at a conservatory.
His diction made him. He came up through the music hall, where the audience paid to hear the words, and he never forgot it. He shaped each consonant. He let the vowels open. A listener with weak French could follow him because he treated the lyric as speech lifted a half-step into song. Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) wrote the words to “Les Feuilles mortes” and Joseph Kosma (1905-1969) set them, and Montand delivered the song like a confession across a café table, soft at the start, climbing only when the line earned it.
He performed alone. The solo récital was his form, one man and an orchestra behind him on a bare stage for two or three hours. He filled the room with his body. He stood tall and lean and he used his hands, his shoulders, the tilt of his head. Each song became a small play, and he acted it. He gave “Battling Joe” and “À bicyclette” each a character and a situation, then moved through them the way an actor moves through scenes.
He sold a song on conviction more than range. He had no great vocal acrobatics, and he did not need them. What he had was the sense that he meant the line. He could confide. He could drop to a near whisper and then open the voice up, and the intimacy carried the rest.
His speaking voice in film ran measured and masculine, slow to heat and better for it. Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) used the coiled tension in him for The Wages of Fear. Costa-Gavras (b. 1933) used his gravity for the political pictures. Late in life he played the scheming uncle in Jean de Florette and let the voice go dry and cunning.
He talked about politics the way he sang. He stood on the left for years, a fellow-traveler of the Communists, until Hungary in 1956 and a hard look at Moscow turned him. He spoke of that turn with the same plainness he brought to a lyric.
Edith Piaf (1915-1963) found him first. She made him her lover and her project and taught him to strip a song to the bone. That lesson held for the rest of his life. He kept the voice simple, kept the word clear, and trusted the man behind it to carry the song.