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Hana Hegerova (2001): Greatest successes in the sixties
Photo:
Michal Kamaryt / AP
The Slovak-Czech chanson singer Hana Hegerova is dead. She died on Tuesday in Prague, as the CTK agency reported.
She was an "unmistakable personality," wrote Czech Culture Minister Lubomir Zaoralek on Twitter.
Hegerova's repertoire was international: she sang German folk songs and English dances, French love chansons, Yiddish lamentations and Czech protest songs.
She praises her "beautiful golden city," she tells of "Madonnas on the carousel" and of a Jewish woman who always thinks of her murdered son when she turns on the gas to put water on.
This is how SPIEGEL wrote it in 1967 about the then 35-year-old singer and her thoroughly political and critical songs.
Hegerova, whose real name was Carmen Farkasova, celebrated her greatest success in those sixties.
In 1967 she appeared in the legendary Parisian music club Olympia.
Critics called her the "Édith Piaf from Prague" or the "Juliette Gréco of the East", and she interpreted songs by Jacques Brel and Léo Ferré.
Hegerova later fell out of favor with the socialist rulers of Czechoslovakia.
Until 1989 she was no longer allowed to travel to western countries.
Hegerova received numerous awards, including the Czech Medal of Merit and the Slovak Ludovit Stur Order.
In 2013, France made her the recipient of the Commander's Cross of the National Order of Merit for her services to the chanson.
Hana Hegerova was 89 years old.
sak / dpa