Is Leonard Cohen the New Secular Saint of Montreal?<br />The audience of aging hippies and twentysomething hipsters in the sold-out Gesù concert hall, listened<br />rapturously to the performance, including a Motown-infused version of “Closing Time.”<br />In a sometimes divided city with an Anglophone minority and Francophone majority, Mr. McClelland noted<br />that Cohen, in death, as in life, had become a “secular patron saint who everyone can get behind.”<br />Cohen’s inextricable links with Montreal were further burnished in January after he posthumously won his first solo<br />performance Grammy for “You Want It Darker,” a darkly elegiac song he sang, backed by the Shaar Hashomayim choir.<br />“He lived his whole life away but he never left.”<br />The city helped fuel his music and poetry, including his song “Suzanne,” about the dancer Suzanne Verdal, with whom he would stroll around the<br />Old Port in Montreal, a romantic quarter where the sound of horse-drawn carriages clunk-clunking over cobblestones provides an urban rhythm.<br />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<br />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.
