Saturday, November 24, 2012

Pavane

I'm sure I'm not alone in getting most of my exposure to music from the movies. Pop music, I got from the radio and from peers, but any of the classics that mean anything to me came from films I've watched.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oDNHoo7ABQ

I'd like to share Pavane, a piece by Gabriel Fauré written about 130 years ago. The movie is Il Divo, a biopic from Italy made in 2008 about the notoriously corrupt prime minister Giulio Andreotti. I suspect watching this sequence of the film was the first time I'd heard it, and it immediately embedded itself inside me. In the 'popular culture' section of the wikipedia entry on the music, Il Divo is the first and foremost reference. There are a couple of other references, but nothing familiar to me. How can such a beautiful piece of music go ignored by film makers for so long? Perhaps Pavane is only now gaining popular recognition. Anyhow, it's hard to believe that I've never heard Pavane before watching Il Divo; it's possible that only the vision of the film maker, Paolo Sorrentino, managed to capture the music's mood and the un-despairing, stoic loneliness of Andreotti's character. Rather odd in music that originated in a dance.

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