Farewell

The end is not limited to inescapable and final death. There are other kinds of endings that entail a burst of life, as painful as they may be. We say “goodbye” or “farewell”, when we leave each other, or we depart. Separations and breakups however are the result of a more active and thought-out decision. I chose to list various types of farewell, from the successive stage exit of musicians in Haydn’s eponymous symphony, to love breakups – Le Mépris original soundtrack, Gainsbourg, Jeanne Moreau, Björk, Pelleas’ departure, Orfeo’s turnaround and the definitive loss of Eurydice... Isolde’s passionate and radiant farewell to Tristan; the meeting set up in heaven in Theodora's duet; or Nino Rota’s symphony; the poignant a posteriori farewells Aretha Franklin expressed to her sister, or Mahler’s goodbye to his daughter in the Abschied, and Berg’s to Alma Mahler’s daughter, “in the memory of an angel”...

Waed Bouhassoun’s heartbreaking cry towards his destroyed native Syria, Falvetti’s universal deluge, the child kidnapping by the Erl-King, Violetta’s renunciation (in La Traviata) or Dido’s abjuration, to then being abandoned – a stunning lament from Purcell. Between life and death, between the beginning and the end, we sometimes live half-way: Hallelujah Junction; No Man's Land wandering; Air (Virgin Suicides); the voice of a homeless London man, musically dressed by Gavin Bryars; or Desdemona’s prayer in Othello. Critical condition is reached with a “deranged” Bowie and The Doors’ “end”, “in a desperate land”. I wanted to compose this playlist as a kind of intimate and cathartic soundtrack. To keep me from sinking, I turned the lights back on with Eddy Mitchell’s last screening (“La Dernière Séance”).