The Assassination of the Duke of Guise

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and a Happy Birthday to you Camille

The easy stuff here is that Saint-Saens (Camille) was a French composer with a long life (1835-1921). This is his birthday.  The lifespan puts him alive and flourishing from the Franco-Prussian War through WWI. He was a gifted and prolific composer of a lot of our orchestra favorites as well as a math whiz, an historian and traveler. A

The Assassination of the
Duke of Guise
pretty interesting person by all accounts. He also wrote the first motion picture "soundtrack" in 1908-09 for the movie "The Assassination of the Duke of Guise". (What a title)

When I lived in Santa Monica some years back, Philip Glass came to town with his tour of music to accompany La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast) .. his newly composed music for the Cocteau silent film. It was fun, complicated and hypnotic.  The colorized silent movie glistened.

I've always thought that film music, due to its timing and underscoring the scenes, was a pretty nifty art form and obviously extremely complicated. Silent movie scores must be doubly hard to do. I might be wrong but to me the task is impossible.

Anyway, through the power of YouTube, "The Assassination" lives on. Be the first kid on your block to see the first.

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