Love and pain

Today’s pandemic-elections earworm is removed from “these challenging times” and harkens back to the eternal pain of…love. 

“Plaisir d’amour” is an 18^th-Century song by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. I’ve loved it since I first heard Nana Mouskouri sing it back in the last century. The refrain is often translated as “the pleasure of love lasts but a night; the pain of love lasts a lifetime.” But “chagrin” is not exactly pain—it’s regret, it’s humiliation, it’s wish-you-were-dead.

One of the weirdest instances I’ve ever seen for its performance was a scene in the “The Breaking Point” episode of Band of Brothers. Easy Company of the 101^st Airborne is taking respite during the Battle of the Bulge in a convent orphanage in Foy, Belgium, and one of the nuns is leading the girls’ choir in singing it. The likelihood that a convent choir of young girls would sing about the humiliation of romantic love to a few score female-starved GIs is as close to zero as dammit, but they made a nice background sound.

Anyway, here I’m giving you Cecelia Bartoli singing it.