Recommendations of the Editorial team
Long before there were minstrels, composers, songwriters and singers adored by millions, there were songs. They told stories and praised gods, they served as memory banks and maps. And they changed as they were passed down through the generations from singer to singer. No one could remember who originally wrote it. They’ve just always been there. Today, a song is usually closely linked to an artist or songwriter, and if someone wants to sing it and modify it a little and doesn’t know exactly who wrote it, copyright lawyers can usually help.
Songs hardly have the opportunity to develop a life of their own. But this point is supposed to be about something that has escaped its creator. A song that, through many detours, became one of the most sung on the planet. You hear it in casting shows and subway stations, in films and series, at funerals and weddings. And you hear it far too often. Just as annoyed guitar shop staff like to put up signs warning customers, under the threat of hellfire, from singing the riffs of “Smoke On The Water”, “Stairway To Heaven” or “Seven Nation Army” when trying out the instruments, today people would like to implore every person who stands in front of a microphone not to sing this one song. Everyone knows it. Anyone can quote from it. At least one line: “You don’t really care for music, do you?” But hardly anyone knows who this line is aimed at and what this song is actually about.
Its title, “Hallelujah,” promises something profound, sacred, and sublime, and that’s enough to get on the nerves of most people when they think there’s something to celebrate or commemorate. If these people knew that “Hallelujah” in its most popular version is about someone being thrown off a throne and tied to a kitchen chair, that it’s about doubts about God and love, that nothing is sacred to the song self except the memory of penetrating a woman who has long since turned away, and that at the end it stands in the darkness and sings a cold and very lonely “Hallelujah,” perhaps they would refrain from it, thereby ending their marriage or their deceased loved ones to ring out. A fairly large percentage of people who claim to love “Hallelujah” have no idea about this song, let alone its author. The popularity of the song far outshines him and his other work. The titles of a new compilation of his best-known songs and a documentary currently in cinemas make this clear.
The film by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine is called “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” and, inspired by Alan Light’s book “The Holy Or The Broken” (2012), tells the story of the song and also that of its author and the various performers who made it popular. His record company has named the new Leonard Cohen best-of album “Hallelujah & Songs From His Albums”. A lot of it seems strange. If asked to name Cohen’s best-known song, most of us would probably still say “Suzanne,” “Bird On A Wire,” “So Long, Marianne,” or “Famous Blue Raincoat,” because “Hallelujah” doesn’t seem to really belong to him – other singers’ versions are more familiar to us. Yes, it feels like Cohen just briefly borrowed the song for this retrospective. It is fitting that there is no definitive studio version to be heard here, but rather a live recording from 2008. In order to understand the phenomenon of “Hallelujah” and the irony behind it and perhaps learn to appreciate the song again, we have to go back in time as many years as it took Moses to cross the desert with his people. Namely forty.