Serge Fiori couldn’t hold back a flood of tears after the ceremony he had just received.
Beautiful to behold behind his mic was the lead singer of the ephemeral but famous group Harmonium, trying in vain to tame the “goldfish that sailed in his head.” Even irresistible. A little more and he was tearing up the few hundred people who turned up last night at the invitation of Quebecor to celebrate his career at the Chalet du Mont-Royal.
It’s common for an artist to wipe away tears after a tribute as vivid as the one we just paid Fiori. But it is extraordinary that tears have this nobility and dignity. The tears spoke volumes for the man whose career veered from glamor to darkness, this man of words and music whose winding journey took him from his father’s ballroom orchestra to the harmonium heptade to the mega-spectacle Riopelle symphonique I saw at the Salle Wilfrid last winter have seen. Pelletier on the Place des Arts. And that’s what we can see on September 8th and 9th at the Grand Théâtre de Québec.
A little earlier in that impressive evening, it was Monique Miller who we lavished with tributes on. Honors that the actress accepted with wisdom and prudence, as if to protect herself from any hint of vanity. Monique saw how it was snowing, as they say. She is literally the age of our theater. And to tell the truth, also that of our cinema and our television, because at the beginning of the 1950s the authors and composers of Quebec stopped copying France and the Americans to forge their own identity. And at the same time our identity for everyone.
OUR STAR SYSTEM
At this time, Pierre Péladeau also bought neighborhood newspapers and founded so-called “gossip newspapers”. Did the lawyer-turned-builder (and who would have liked to become an artist like Luc Plamondon’s businessman!) know that his gossip newspapers would be the origin of a star system without which Quebec would be a province like the others? Whether he was aware of it or not, his intuition was correct and it has been instrumental in reviving our artist community.
Pierre Karl Péladeau quickly understood the importance of this star system, which is the envy of English Canada but which we cannot build in a few years. To maintain this, Quebecor, of which he is the boss today, regularly pays tribute to artists who were or still are the headliners. The Quebecor honor comes with a substantial stipend (US$50,000) that often comes at just the right time in the recipient’s life.
THERE ARE A FEW PRIVILEGED
The entertainment world seems to be a universe of glitz and luxury, but there are far less privileged people out there than it seems. Of the thousands of performers, composers and authors who compose it, only a small proportion manage to live honorably from its art. Neither the cinema nor the theater nor the television that we see in Quebec would survive without subsidies, without tax credits, and without the patronage of corporations and the wealthiest Quebecers. Quebecor is a model company in this respect.
She’s not the only one. On the bus that took me back to my car from the cabin on the mountain, I couldn’t help but think I needed a few more.
