Nana Mouskouri: Singer celebrates 90th birthday

The glasses. It has to be simple, black and made of horn, as simple as a cash register stand. No Nana Mouskouri (90) without glasses. She is indispensable like her clear as a bell voice.

There were actually people who just wanted them without glasses, for example the great Harry Belafonte (1927-2023). In France, some people downright hated their visual aids, such as the head of the Bobino Theater in Paris. He said she looked like a secretary with glasses. That hurt her and stayed with her even after decades.

There is a lot for Nana Mouskouri to remember. She has sung on all of the world’s major stages for over 60 years, although in the beginning the omens were not particularly favorable. On the occasion of her 90th birthday on October 13th, she looks back on a global career that didn’t just have its bright moments.

She feels naked without her glasses

This also applies to her initial appearances with glasses. She was already a star when she made an album with Harry Belafonte in 1966 and he complained about the glasses. So she took off her glasses during the photo shoot for the US cover. “For the European market, they swapped my head for a picture with glasses,” she said now.

After a show manager in France complained about her glasses, she “gave two or three concerts without glasses. It was terrible… It was as if someone had stolen my personality. The glasses, that’s me. They’re my protection, I feel naked without her.” She didn’t think for a second about correcting her poor eyesight and having her eyes lasered.

That wasn’t necessary, because Nana Mouskouri has also achieved incredible success with her glasses – she owns over 100 pairs of them: she sold over 300 million records, her hits “White Roses from Athens”, “Guten Morgen, Sonnenschein”, ” La Provence”, “Only Love”, “I look after the white clouds”, “Plaisir d’amour”, “Johnny Tambour” and “I have a dream” became famous all over the world.

She was “the fat girl with the glasses”

She had no idea about this, at home on Crete, in the port city of Chania, where she was born as Ioanna Mouschouri in 1934. The father was a projectionist in a cinema. She was actually supposed to be a son, that’s what her dad wanted. But now the second daughter came, and in his eyes she tended to be overweight.

He took her to soccer, sent her to basketball practice to lose a few pounds. She was the “fat girl with glasses” who loved to sing because it made her happy. When she was still 22, the organizer of a concert in Piraeus told her how disappointed he was because she “didn’t have a wasp waist like Marilyn Monroe.”

Eventually, her record company sent her to a doctor to help her lose weight. “Doctor Heschberg explained to me what I was allowed to eat and what I wasn’t allowed to eat. He said I could come back in three weeks as long as I had lost five kilograms. I took that seriously. After three weeks I was ten kilos lighter,” she tells him “Mirror”.

She thought less about herself and more about her audience. “The people at my record company said, ‘When you get on stage you have to make people dream.’ After I lost weight, everyone looked at me differently.” So Ioanna Mouschouri finally became Nana Mouskouri, which borders on a small miracle.

A thicker vocal cord

She wasn’t born with the ideal voice. When she caught a cold on tour and went to the doctor, he said to her: “My God, how could you have such a career with those vocal cords?” One of the two vocal cords is thicker than the other. You can hear this when she speaks and her speaking voice sounds breathy, sometimes even croaky, in contrast to her singing voice.

She practices her singing voice every day because she needs a lot of air to get the thicker vocal cord to vibrate accordingly. At the beginning of her career, her voice sounded like a smoky, dark alto, which transformed into a melodious coloratura mezzo-soprano.

Maybe that’s also the reason why she turned to jazz after studying music. As early as 1962 she worked in New York with the legendary musician and producer Quincy Jones (91), who introduced her to Harry Belafonte, with whom she even went on tour. However, the jazz album “The Girl From Greece Sings” produced by Jones failed commercially in the USA; in 1999 the LP was re-released as “Nana Mouskouri in New York”, this time with resounding success in Germany.

Become a global star with “white roses”.

She was a big star in Europe then. Their first singles were released in 1958, initially on the Greek market. In 1961 her first international hit “White Roses from Athens” was released, which in Greece was a title in Manos Hadjidakis’ (1925-1994) film music “Dreamland of Desire” and was originally called: “If you whistle three times”. In France, the white roses did not come from Athens, but from Corfu, the home island of their parents: “Roses blanches de Corfou”.

The “White Roses from Athens” went through the roof, especially in Germany. The single sold over 1.5 million copies within six months – the beginning of her international career. To this day, Nana Mouskouri is grateful to Germany for that.

As a child, she witnessed German soldiers occupying Crete during the Second World War. “One day I was with my sister outside in a square in our hometown of Chania. Suddenly German soldiers appeared. They gathered men and boys from the surrounding houses and forced them to line up. They killed one of them, I have no idea why. I haven’t been able to talk about it for decades.”

And now Germany was the first country where Nana Mouskouri became a star. “My career began in the very country that had plunged my country into misfortune and misery just a few years before. But in Germany I was met with this wave of sympathy that I was almost forced to express my opinion, which was anchored somewhere in me, “To reject the idea that the Germans were my enemies. That’s how Germany became a country that I love to this day.”

The success of the “White Roses” made her a “convinced European”: “I learned to live the way people live in Germany and France. The mentalities are different in the south. Values ​​like discipline and respect are taken less seriously .”

From 1994 to 1999 she was even a member of the European Parliament for Greece and the liberal-conservative Neo Dimokratia party, “but most of the time I felt powerless. I’m a singer, not a politician,” she explained to “Spiegel”.

She will retire at 90

Nana Mouskouri, who also took part in the opposition to the Greek colonels’ dictatorship (1967-1974), has lived in Switzerland since the mid-1960s, first with her first husband Georgios Petsilas, the bandmaster, composer and guitarist of her accompanying orchestra, the Athenians . Their two children, Nicolas (* 1968) and Hélène (* 1970), were born in Switzerland. The marriage ended in divorce in 1976. She has been married to her producer Andre Chapelle, who stood by her after the divorce, since 2003. “At some point friendship turned into love.”

The couple lives in Geneva. “I live in Switzerland,” “, “as a Greek European. That’s how I’m seen in my old homeland: In Greece, people ask me how Europe judges them. They are afraid that people will think badly of them abroad. And that no one wants to visit her anymore.”

20 years ago she started a four-year farewell tour after her 70th birthday, then a comeback followed because she was “so sad”. “Without the stage I felt bad. It felt like I would die if I stopped singing.”

But now at 90 it should finally be over. On the occasion of her birthday, the farewell album “Happy Birthday, Nana” is released with 20 of her best-known German-language songs as well as the new Greek recording “Pios échi Dakria”.

It’s hard for her to stop, but “I can’t pretend to be a young woman. I don’t want to make people suffer. I have no right to go on stage and sing badly, even if the audience agrees with me would applaud. I’ll do a few more performances and then that’s it. I think I’ve done enough.”