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

[sailorkitty]

"Another day" in French is said to be a lot more about living everyday life rather than the idea that something has to change, which I really like since the common people aren't the ones leading the revolution, it's not a thing in their minds because they have other stuff to do.

The 'final' musical version in English is a lot more dramatic since it foreshadows what's going to happen, and I suppose that works well on stage, but I really think not focusing on the 'something has to change' part gets through the sense of the period better, if that makes sense.

(Disclaimer that I might be misremembering, it's been a while since I read about it)

[regshoe]

Huh, that's interesting—I'll have to give that one a listen too!