Marianne Oswald (January 9, 1901 â€" February 25, 1985) was the stage
name of Sarah Alice Bloch, a French singer and actress born in
Sarreguemines in Alsace-Lorraine. She took this stage name from a
character she much admired, the unhappy Oswald in the Ibsen play
Ghosts. She was noted for her hoarse voice, heavy half-Lorraine,
half-German accent, and for singing about unrequited love, despair,
sadness, and death. She sang the songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt
Brecht. She was friends with Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, François
Mauriac, and Albert Camus. In fact, the text for one of her album
covers was written by Camus. She was an inspiration for the composers
Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger.Marianne Oswald's parents were
Jewish immigrants, exiles from Poland. Both parents died young and she
became an orphan in 1917 at the age of 16. Initially she was sent to a
boarding school in Munich, but by 1920 she found her way to Berlin
where she began singing in the thriving cabarets of the period. During
this time, an operation to remove a goiterâ€"she called it "having my
throat cut"â€"left her with a permanent hoarse voice which would have
a major, and not entirely negative, effect on her singing career.In
1931, with the rise of the Nazi party, and the threat it
posedâ€"Oswald was after all Jewishâ€"she was forced to emigrate to
Paris where she forged a unique new style of French singing
incorporating the techniques of German expressionism. She sang at the
cabaret Le Boeuf sur le Toit (the ox on the roof), a tavern which had
long welcomed the songs of the French avant-garde. She was one of the
first to interpret The Threepenny Opera by Berthold Brecht and Kurt
Weill, with lyrics adapted into French by André Mauprey, for instance
singing La complainte de Mackie (a song English speakers know as Mack
the Knife) and Pirate Jenny. Marianne Oswald Biography, NetWorth, Height, Age, Weight, Family, Married, Son, Daughter