Mar 25, 2015

696/917 Petra Frey: Für den Frieden der Welt (Austria 1994)

From an established schlager queen to a newcomer who almost ruined her young career with a shaky Eurovision performance. Fortunately Petra Frey and her career recovered from the experience, which even now 21 years after the contest is almost impossible to watch and even more so to listen.



To be fair to Petra Frey, she wasn't really given a good song to go with. The composer Alfons Weindorf had already tried the "song about peace" formula in 1991, when his Dieser Traum darf niemals sterben drowned Germany to the 18th place. Fearlessly he wrote poor Petra Frey equally naive and one dimensional song that was to go nowhere near the success of the more sophisticated songs about peace and unity like the Ein bisschen Frieden (1982) and L'oiseau end l'enfant (1978).

To make matter worse, the performance of young Petra Frey (just about to celebrate her 16th birthday) is not far from disasterous. She starts the song with fearful look and almost unheardable voice and then blasts the refrain with brave face and strained voice that has big difficulties to carry the tune. The song that sounded acceptable in the previews became three minutes of agony that I believed was shared between the audience and the artist herself. Poor Petra, to whom the 17th (among 25  participants) position in the final results must have felt like a relief.

To end this negative post with a more positive way, the career of Petra Frey did not seem to suffer from these three unfortunate minutes on Millstreet stage. With 12 albums and further two attempts to represent Austria in the Eurovision Song Contest she has shown what a persevering trooper she is and how quick the record buying audience in Austria was willing to go on from the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. Not many artists get that chance. To hear and see how well Petra Frey is doing check this performance from 2014.

My points 1/5.

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