Is Leonard Cohen the New Secular Saint of Montreal?
- 6 years ago
Is Leonard Cohen the New Secular Saint of Montreal?
The audience of aging hippies and twentysomething hipsters in the sold-out Gesù concert hall, listened
rapturously to the performance, including a Motown-infused version of “Closing Time.”
In a sometimes divided city with an Anglophone minority and Francophone majority, Mr. McClelland noted
that Cohen, in death, as in life, had become a “secular patron saint who everyone can get behind.”
Cohen’s inextricable links with Montreal were further burnished in January after he posthumously won his first solo
performance Grammy for “You Want It Darker,” a darkly elegiac song he sang, backed by the Shaar Hashomayim choir.
“He lived his whole life away but he never left.”
The city helped fuel his music and poetry, including his song “Suzanne,” about the dancer Suzanne Verdal, with whom he would stroll around the
Old Port in Montreal, a romantic quarter where the sound of horse-drawn carriages clunk-clunking over cobblestones provides an urban rhythm.
The reverence for Cohen reaches a crescendo at the museum in an alluring multichannel video installation by the South African artist Candice Breitz, in which 18 older
men, are simultaneously singing — in some cases, croaking — the words of Cohen’s entire comeback album “I’m Your Man,” accompanied by the synagogue’s choir.
The audience of aging hippies and twentysomething hipsters in the sold-out Gesù concert hall, listened
rapturously to the performance, including a Motown-infused version of “Closing Time.”
In a sometimes divided city with an Anglophone minority and Francophone majority, Mr. McClelland noted
that Cohen, in death, as in life, had become a “secular patron saint who everyone can get behind.”
Cohen’s inextricable links with Montreal were further burnished in January after he posthumously won his first solo
performance Grammy for “You Want It Darker,” a darkly elegiac song he sang, backed by the Shaar Hashomayim choir.
“He lived his whole life away but he never left.”
The city helped fuel his music and poetry, including his song “Suzanne,” about the dancer Suzanne Verdal, with whom he would stroll around the
Old Port in Montreal, a romantic quarter where the sound of horse-drawn carriages clunk-clunking over cobblestones provides an urban rhythm.
The reverence for Cohen reaches a crescendo at the museum in an alluring multichannel video installation by the South African artist Candice Breitz, in which 18 older
men, are simultaneously singing — in some cases, croaking — the words of Cohen’s entire comeback album “I’m Your Man,” accompanied by the synagogue’s choir.