Music rec for the French Revolution

[regshoe]

Reading Ninety-Three inspired me to go and listen to some of the songs from the Les Misérables musical in the original French, to get an appropriate sense of revolutionary fervour for the mood and setting of the book. I've been listening to this one again today to distract myself from some of the more upsetting aspects of my current book, and it really is a good thing.

Watch on YouTube

I think the original lyrics are better than the English version (I don't actually speak French beyond osmosis of common words and spotting things that look similar to English equivalents, so I'm going by the translations on the internet), and more appropriately Hugo-ish (Moi je veux être le premier/Le premier nom gravé/Au marbre du monument d'espoir... that's the spirit!) This is the original concept album version, and they seem to have changed some of the lyrics later on—the later version is more similar to the English one, but I know the French musical went through several versions and I don't know which came first—anyway, this is my favourite version of this song I've heard so far.

Comments

[garonne]

I'm not at all familiar with the musical of Les Misérables (in any language) but the music is certainly pretty rousing!

Actually after you posted about Ninety-three the other day I tried to think of or find other thematically similar books, but was not really successful. There's Les Dieux ont soif by Anatole France which looks interesting but pretty grim. After lots of googling I also found Les Chouans by Balzac which seems to be more on the Royalist side of things (as the title also seems to suggest). There must surely be others but I cannot find them...

(Obviously I am excluding books like The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I would not exactly consider to be thematically similar to Ninety-three *g*)

[regshoe]

The Les Misérables musical is really good. It does a lot of condensing of the book, inevitably, but the songs really bring the story to life, and it does some really interesting things with musical motifs and repetition. And, yeah, rousing is right for this song :D

Ooh, Les dieux ont soif sounds very interesting, although yes, grim. I may give it a go at some point!