GEORGES MOUSTAKI, THE SENSITIVITY OF AUTHOR MUSIC

Georges Moustaki

Today, The Grandma has been talking with The Watsons about Georges Moustaki, the French singer-songwriter of Jewish Italo-Greek origin who died on a day like today in 2013.

Georges Moustaki is one of the best songwriters of the history and his lyrics have become hymns for different generations.

The Watsons must start to create a song for Rennette Watson and listen to George Moustaki is always a great source  of inspiration.

Georges Moustaki (born Giuseppe Mustacchi; 3 May 1934-23 May 2013) was an Egyptian-French singer-songwriter of Jewish Italo-Greek origin, best known for the poetic rhythm and simplicity of the romantic songs he composed and often sang.

Moustaki gave France some of its best-loved music by writing about 300 songs for some of the most popular singers in that country, such as Édith Piaf, Dalida, Françoise Hardy, Yves Montand, Barbara, Brigitte Fontaine, Herbert Pagani, France Gall, Cindy Daniel, Juliette Gréco, Pia Colombo, and Tino Rossi, as well as for himself.

Georges Moustaki was born Giuseppe Mustacchi in Alexandria, Egypt, on 3 May 1934. His parents, Sarah and Nessim Mustacchi, were Francophile, Greek Jews from the ancient Romaniote Jewish community.

More information: All Music

Originally from the Greek island of Corfu, they moved to Egypt, where young Giuseppe was born and first learned French. They owned the Cité du Livre −one of the finest book shops in the Middle East– in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, where many ethnic communities lived together.

Moustaki's father spoke five languages whereas his mother spoke six. The young Giuseppe and his two older sisters spoke Italian at home and Arabic in the streets. The parents placed Giuseppe and his sisters in a French school where they learned to speak French.

At the age of 17, after a summer holiday in Paris, Moustaki obtained his father's permission to move there, working as a door-to-door salesman of poetry books. He began playing the piano and singing in nightclubs in Paris, where he met some of the era's best-known performers. His career took off after the young singer-songwriter Georges Brassens took Moustaki under his wing.

Georges Moustaki

Brassens introduced him to artists and intellectuals who spent much of their time around Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Out of gratitude, Moustaki adopted the first name of the only musician he called master.

Moustaki said that his taste for music came from hearing various French singers -Édith Piaf, Charles Trenet, Henri Salvador, Georges Ulmer, Yves Montand, Georges Guétary and Luis Mariano- sing.

Moustaki was introduced to Édith Piaf in the late 1950s by a friend whose praise of the young songwriter was so flattering that Piaf, then at the peak of her fame, requested somewhat sarcastically to hear him sing his best works. I picked up a guitar and I was lamentable. But something must have touched her. She asked me to go and see her perform that same evening at the Olympia music hall and to show her later the songs I had just massacred.

He soon began writing songs for Piaf, the most famous of which, Milord, about a lower-class girl who falls in love with an upper-class British traveller, reached number one in Germany in 1960 and number 24 in the British charts the same year. It has since been performed by numerous artists, including Bobby Darin and Cher.

Piaf was captivated by Moustaki's music, as well as his great charm. Piaf liked how his musical compositions were flavored with jazz and styles that went beyond France's borders. Moustaki and Piaf became lovers and embarked on what the newspaper Libération described as a year of devastating, mad love, with the newspapers following the 'scandal' of the 'gigolo' and his dame day after day.

More information: UNESCO

After a decade of composing songs for various famous singers, Moustaki launched a successful career as a performer himself, singing in French, Italian, English, Greek, Portuguese, Arabic and Spanish.

Moustaki's songwriting career peaked in the 1960s and 1970s with songs like Sarah, performed by Serge Reggiani, and La Longue Dame brune, written for the singer Barbara (Monique Serf).

In 1969 Moustaki composed the song Le Métèque -métèque is a pejorative word for a shifty-looking immigrant of Mediterranean origin- in which he described himself as a wandering Jew and a Greek shepherd.

Serge Reggiani rejected it and the record companies refused to produce it. Moustaki then sang it himself, on a 45rpm disc, and it became a huge hit in France, spending six non-consecutive weeks at number one in the charts.

Georges Moustaki

A small, subliminal settling of scores became the hymn of anti-racism and the right to be different, the cry of revolt of all minorities, Moustaki said of the song.

In 1971 Moustaki adapted the Ennio Morricone/Joan Baez song Here's to You under the new title Marche de Sacco et Vanzetti for his album Il y avait un jardin. One year later, Moustaki popularized the translation of two songs by Mikis Theodorakis, l'Homme au cœur blessé and Nous sommes deux, the latter being a French version of Imaste dio.

Moustaki's philosophy was reflected in his 1973 song Déclaration: I declare a permanent state of happiness and the right of everyone to every privilege. I say that suffering is a sacrilege when there are roses and white bread for everyone.
 

Moustaki became a French citizen in 1985.

In 2008, after a 50-year career during which he performed on every continent, Moustaki recorded his last album, Solitaire. On it, he recorded two songs with China Forbes.

In 2009, in a packed concert hall in Barcelona, he told the stunned audience that he was giving his last public performance as he would no longer be capable of singing because of an irreversible bronchial illness.

Moustaki married Annick Yannick Cozannec when he was twenty years old and she was twenty-five. Their daughter, Pia, was born the following year. They lived in an apartment at rue des Deux-Ponts on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris for many years, before his lung illness forced him to leave his beloved Paris to seek out warmer and cleaner air in the French Riviera.

In his last interview given to Nice-Matin newspaper in February 2013, Moustaki said, I regret not being able to sing in my bathroom. But singing in public, no. I've done it all... I've witnessed magical moments."

Georges Moustaki died on 23 May 2013 at a hospital in Nice, France, after a long battle with emphysema.

More information: The Guardian

En Méditerranée, dans ce bassin où jouent
Des enfants aux yeux noirs, il y a trois continents
Et des siècles d'histoire, des prophètes des dieux,
Le Messie en personne, il y a un bel été
Qui ne craint pas l'automne, en Méditerranée.
 

Georges Moustaki

ALEXANDRIA: A TRIBUTE TO ALEXANDER THE GREAT

With Alexander the Great in Alexandria, Egypt

Today is a very special date. The trip along the Nile River has a very special stop in Alexandria the ancient city which was witness of the most splendorous ages. Symbol of culture and knowledge, Alexandria is a modern city nowadays which tries to find the ruins of its wonderful past.

Claire Fontaine is very interested in the history of the Lighthouse of Alexandria while Tina Picotes wants to visit the Pompey's Pillar. Joseph de Ca'th Lon loves Archaeology and he wants to dive in the Mediterranean Sea to contemplate the ancient ruins of Alexandria and discover more things about the Cleopatra's Palace.

Before arriving to the Egyptian city, The Grandma has studied two new lessons of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 11 & 12). She is very happy with this visit because she loves the Ancient Library of Alexandria and she considers a great privilege to visit this place which once was considered the capital of knowledge and learning. She also wants to visit the Saint George's Church in Sporting.

More information: The body and the clothes & Every problems

Alexandria is the second-largest city in Egypt and a major economic centre, extending about 32 km along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country. Its low elevation on the Nile delta makes it highly vulnerable to rising sea levels.

Tina Picotes at the Pompey's Pillar, Alexandria

Alexandria was founded around a small, ancient Egyptian town c.332 BC by Alexander the Great.

It became an important center of Hellenistic civilization and remained the capital of Ptolemaic (Greek) Egypt and Roman and Byzantine Egypt for almost 1,000 years, until the Muslim conquest of Egypt in AD 641, when a new capital was founded at Fustat, later absorbed into Cairo. Hellenistic Alexandria was best known for the Lighthouse of Alexandria (Pharos), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; its Great Library, the largest in the ancient world; now replaced by a modern one; and the Necropolis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages. 

Alexandria was at one time the second most powerful city of the ancient Mediterranean region, after Rome. Ongoing maritime archaeology in the harbor of Alexandria, which began in 1994, is revealing details of Alexandria both before the arrival of Alexander, when a city named Rhacotis existed there, and during the Ptolemaic dynasty.

More information: Ancient

From the late 18th century, Alexandria became a major center of the international shipping industry and one of the most important trading centers in the world, because it profited from the easy overland connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, and the trade in Egyptian cotton.

The Grandma at Stanley Bridge, Alexandria

Alexandria is believed to have been founded by Alexander the Great in April 332 BC. Alexander's chief architect for the project was Dinocrates. Alexandria was intended to supersede Naucratis as a Hellenistic center in Egypt, and to be the link between Greece and the rich Nile valley. Although it has long been believed only a small village there, recent radiocarbon dating of seashell fragments and lead contamination show significant human activity at the location for two millennia preceding Alexandria's founding .

Alexandria was the intellectual and cultural center of the ancient world for some time. The city and its museum attracted many of the greatest scholars, including Greeks, Jews and Syrians. The city was later plundered and lost its significance.

In the early Christian Church, the city was the center of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, which was one of the major centers of early Christianity in the Eastern Roman Empire. In the modern world, the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria both lay claim to this ancient heritage.

More information: UNESCO

Alexandria was not only a center of Hellenism, but was also home to the largest urban Jewish community in the world. The Septuagint, a Greek version of the Tanakh, was produced there. The early Ptolemies kept it in order and fostered the development of its museum into the leading Hellenistic center of learning, Library of Alexandria, but were careful to maintain the distinction of its population's three largest ethnicities: Greek, Jewish, and Egyptian.

Alexandria underwater

By the time of Augustus, the city walls encompassed an area of 5.34 sq.kilometres, and the total population in Roman times was around 500-600,000.

In AD 115, large parts of Alexandria were destroyed during the Kitos War, which gave Hadrian and his architect, Decriannus, an opportunity to rebuild it. In 215, the emperor Caracalla visited the city and, because of some insulting satires that the inhabitants had directed at him, abruptly commanded his troops to put to death all youths capable of bearing arms. On 21 July 365, Alexandria was devastated by a tsunami, 365 Crete earthquake, an event annually commemorated years later as a day of horror.

Due to the constant presence of war in Alexandria in ancient times, very little of the ancient city has survived into the present day. Much of the royal and civic quarters sank beneath the harbour due to earthquake subsidence in AD 365, and the rest has been built over in modern times.

Pompey's Pillar, a Roman triumphal column, is one of the best-known ancient monuments still standing in Alexandria today. It is located on Alexandria's ancient acropolis, a modest hill located adjacent to the city's Arab cemetery, and was originally part of a temple colonnade.

More information: This is Africa

Alexandria's catacombs, known as Kom El Shoqafa, are a short distance southwest of the pillar, consist of a multi-level labyrinth, reached via a large spiral staircase, and featuring dozens of chambers adorned with sculpted pillars, statues, and other syncretic Romano-Egyptian religious symbols, burial niches, and sarcophagi, as well as a large Roman-style banquet room, where memorial meals were conducted by relatives of the deceased. The catacombs were long forgotten by the citizens until they were discovered in 1900.

The Grandma and Claire visit the Qaetbay Castle

Temple of Taposiris Magna was built in the Ptolemy era and dedicated to Osiris, which finished the construction of Alexandria. It is located in Abusir, the western suburb of Alexandria in Borg el Arab city. Only the outer wall and the pylons remain from the temple. There is evidence to prove that sacred animals were worshiped there. 

Archaeologists found an animal necropolis near the temple. Remains of a Christian church show that the temple was used as a church in later centuries. Also found in the same area are remains of public baths built by the emperor Justinian, a seawall, quays and a bridge. Near the beach side of the area, there are the remains of a tower built by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The tower was an exact scale replica of the destroyed Alexandrine Pharos Lighthouse.

The most famous mosque in Alexandria is El-Mursi Abul Abbas Mosque in Bahary. Other notable mosques in the city include Ali ibn Abi Talib mosque in Somouha, Bilal mosque, al-Gamaa al-Bahari in Mandara, Hatem mosque in Somouha, Hoda el-Islam mosque in Sidi Bishr, al-Mowasah mosque in Hadara, Sharq al-Madina mosque in Miami, al-Shohadaa mosque in Mostafa Kamel, Al Qa'ed Ibrahim Mosque, Yehia mosque in Zizinia, Sidi Gaber mosque in Sidi Gaber, and Sultan mosque. Alexandria is the base of the Salafi movements in Egypt.

More information: Lonely Planet

After Rome and Constantinople, Alexandria was considered the third-most important seat of Christianity in the world. The Pope of Alexandria was second only to the bishop of Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire until 430. The Church of Alexandria had jurisdiction over most of the continent of Africa. After the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, the Church of Alexandria was split between the Miaphysites and the Melkites. The Miaphysites went on to constitute what is known today as the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. The Melkites went on to constitute what is known today as the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria.

Saint George's Church in Sporting

Today, the Patriarchal seat of the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church is Saint Mark Cathedral in Ramleh. The most important Coptic Orthodox churches in Alexandria include Pope Cyril I Church in Cleopatra, Saint George's Church in Sporting, Saint Mark & Pope Peter I Church in Sidi Bishr, Saint Mary Church in Assafra, Saint Mary Church in Gianaclis, Saint Mina Church in Fleming, Saint Mina Church in Mandara and Saint Takla Haymanot's Church in Ibrahimeya.

Alexandria's once-flourishing Jewish community declined rapidly following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, after which negative reactions towards Zionism among Egyptians led to Jewish residents in the city, and elsewhere in Egypt, being perceived as Zionist collaborators. Most Jewish residents of Egypt fled to the newly established Israel, France, Brazil and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s. The community once numbered 50,000 but is now estimated at below 50. The most important synagogue in Alexandria is the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue.

More information: The Planet D

The Royal Library of Alexandria or Ancient Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. It was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, with collections of works, lecture halls, meeting rooms, and gardens.  

Alexandria was considered the capital of knowledge and learning, in part because of the Great Library. The library was part of a larger research institution called the Musaeum of Alexandria, where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied.

The library was created by Ptolemy I Soter, who was a Macedonian general and the successor of Alexander the Great. Most of the books were kept as papyrus scrolls. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height.

Claire at The Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha

Arguably, this library is most famous for having been burned down resulting in the loss of many scrolls and books; its destruction has become a symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge. Sources differ on who was responsible for its destruction and when it occurred. The library may in truth have suffered several fires over many years. 

In addition to fires, at least one earthquake damaged the city and the library during this time. Possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria include a fire set by the army of Julius Caesar in 48 BC and an attack by Aurelian in the 270s AD.

After the main library was destroyed, scholars used a daughter library in a temple known as the Serapeum of Alexandria, located in another part of the city. According to Socrates of Constantinople, Coptic Pope Theophilus destroyed the Serapeum in AD 391, although it is not certain what it contained or if it contained any significant fraction of the documents that were in the main library.

More information: Ancient History

The real tragedy of the Library 

at Alexandria was not 

that the incendiaries burned immensely, 

but that they had neither the leisure

nor the taste to discriminate.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

ALEXANDER THE GREAT & THE HELLENIZATION

Alexander the Great

Alexander III of Macedon (20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great, Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας, was a king of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon and a member of the Argead dynasty. He was born in Pella in 356 BC and succeeded his father Philip II to the throne at the age of twenty. 

He spent most of his ruling years on an unprecedented military campaign through Asia and northeast Africa, and he had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world by the age of thirty, stretching from Greece to northwestern India. He was undefeated in battle and is widely considered one of history's most successful military commanders.

During his youth, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle until the age of 16. After Philip's assassination in 336 BC, he succeeded his father to the throne and inherited a strong kingdom and an experienced army. Alexander was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this authority to launch his father's Panhellenic project to lead the Greeks in the conquest of Persia. In 334 BC, he invaded the Achaemenid Empire, Persian Empire, and began a series of campaigns that lasted ten years. Following the conquest of Anatolia, Alexander broke the power of Persia in a series of decisive battles, most notably the battles of Issus and Gaugamela. He subsequently overthrew Persian King Darius III and conquered the Achaemenid Empire in its entirety. At that point, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River.

More information: History.com

He sought to reach the ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea and invaded India in 326 BC, winning an important victory over the Pauravas at the Battle of the Hydaspes. He eventually turned back at the demand of his homesick troops. Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, the city that he planned to establish as his capital, without executing a series of planned campaigns that would have begun with an invasion of Arabia. In the years following his death, a series of civil wars tore his empire apart, resulting in the establishment of several states ruled by the Diadochi, Alexander's surviving generals and heirs.

Alexander the Great

Alexander's legacy includes the cultural diffusion and syncretism which his conquests engendered, such as Greco-Buddhism. He founded some twenty cities that bore his name, most notably Alexandria in Egypt. Alexander's settlement of Greek colonists and the resulting spread of Greek culture in the east resulted in a new Hellenistic civilization, aspects of which were still evident in the traditions of the Byzantine Empire in the mid-15th century AD and the presence of Greek speakers in central and far eastern Anatolia until the 1920s. 

Alexander became legendary as a classical hero in the mold of Achilles, and he features prominently in the history and mythic traditions of both Greek and non-Greek cultures. He became the measure against which military leaders compared themselves, and military academies throughout the world still teach his tactics. He is often ranked among the most influential people in human history.

Apart from a few inscriptions and fragments, texts written by people who actually knew Alexander or who gathered information from men who served with Alexander were all lost. Contemporaries who wrote accounts of his life included Alexander's campaign historian Callisthenes; Alexander's generals Ptolemy and Nearchus; Aristobulus, a junior officer on the campaigns; and Onesicritus, Alexander's chief helmsman. 

Their works are lost, but later works based on these original sources have survived. The earliest of these is Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC), followed by Quintus Curtius Rufus (mid-to-late 1st century AD), Arrian (1st to 2nd century AD), the biographer Plutarch (1st to 2nd century AD), and finally Justin, whose work dated as late as the 4th century.

More information: History of Macedonia

 I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; 

I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion. 

 Alexander the Great