It is the title of an old popular French song. The complete sentence: “Awake sleeping hearts, the God of love is ringing you. »1
In two weeks, it will be Valentine’s Day, and you sigh at the idea that you should perhaps consider a meal at the restaurant? You’re right: to think that a generic menu, with puns like “Cupi-thon”, will take your relationship out of the routine is more awkward than romantic.
And you know it like me, the box of chocolates, the agreed card, that won’t do either.
Let’s talk about it in advance, it gives you time to shake your heart with music.
Obviously, it traces very different paths in each person.
If my musical proposals do not make your heart beat, there is certainly a revelation waiting for you elsewhere: it is worth looking for.
We often encapsulate a loving memory in a four-minute ballad. From the first notes, click! the emotion arises like a reflex.
For songs, the link is often made with the beginning or the end of a love story: the first emotions, the unbearable weight of loss.
As a ballad, here is a famous air by Handel, Eternal source of light divine. Originally, the voice dialogues with a trumpet line of mineral beauty. But in this recent version, the Jupiter ensemble replaces the trumpet with a soprano voice. From the mineral, we pass to the sensual: the brushing of two human voices which discover and marry each other with infinite sensitivity. Love is born, embodied by music.
For large inventories, updating a love relationship that lasts (or drags its feet), I suggest you dive into a longer format, take the time to be crossed by a story told without words .
Let’s go with a known scenario: Romeo and Juliet, from which Tchaikovsky drew a fantasy overture for orchestra.
If you have played sims since their beginnings, you have known their great theme of love.
But the complete work is worth the detour. Your couple is in love but often conflicting? Treat yourself to much bigger drama than your own. Enemy families, sword fights, passion. Each time one thinks that love is triumphing, there comes a new charge, and the heart gallops, panics.
Love and drama collide. Just before the end, we think we have found the balance, we hear a kind of quiet canticle, sung by the winds: unfortunately, in Tchaikovsky, as in Shakespeare, it is death chosen (by mistake!) which ends the story. But you won’t go there: “the lover who commits suicide after finding his falsely dead lover who in turn commits suicide upon waking up from his artificial coma”, even Marc Labrèche did not go that far in The heart has its reasons.
To evoke the diary of a less dramatic relationship, I suggest a very simple form, “theme and variations”. The subject remains the same, but the color of the day marks each page: serene, feverish, passionate, worried, reassured, a whole cycle of life with which one can identify in countless works in the form of varied themes.
A love relationship is a fabric made up of different fibers – me and the other – woven irregularly; more or less extensible, more or less flexible or rough in periods.
Music has the power to unfold this fabric over time, to evoke the cycles and metamorphoses of a long-term love, its fragility, its rebounds.
If you need an inner balance sheet of the effect of passing time, surrender to this Fantasy for stringsby Ralph Vaughan Williams.
With more than thirty string instruments divided into three groups that respond to each other or unite their voices, the work forms an organic and rich fabric. But its material thins out at times, stretches, borders on rupture, disappearance, then it regains density, softness, moments of ecstasy. It is the love that lasts, passing from light to darkness, finding the light, finding the thread of its origins and weaving it even further, with care.
But the play ends, and even that ending carries meaning.
1. From this popular song, Clément Janequin drew, in the XVIe century, Birdsong. Not really a love song; it’s more of a virtuoso piece where the voices imitate a whole catalog of birds. Amazing for the time.