The sweet release
Fauré saw death as a joyful deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness beyond the grave, rather than a painful experience. As such, he relied on the music and texts of an ancient Parisian rite, one that does not depict the frightening and apocalyptic vision of the Last Judgment.
Gounod started work on Saint Francis of Assisi during his student days and finished it two years before his death. The manuscript was only discovered in 2011 in a nun's cupboard, nearly 200 years after Gounod's death, and Equilbey, with Insula orchestra and accentus, produced the premiere recording in 2016. For Equilbey it is an exceptional preamble to the religious lamentation of Fauré's Requiem, "a monastic drama in a Romanesque style". Two scenes recount St Francis receiving the stigmata of the cross, and the announcement of his impending death. St Francis embodied the spirit of simplicity and poverty, and he had a deep love of nature; concepts and relationships that are also located at the core of Collishaw's film. Both Fauré's and Gounod's music reveal a serene and weightless attitude towards death, and their spiritual reflections, juxtaposed by Collishaw's disturbing imagery, combine to call into question our uneasy relationship with life and death.
Both Fauré's and Gounod's music reveal a serene and weightless attitude towards death, and their spiritual reflections, juxtaposed by Collishaw's perturbed imagery, combine to call into question our uneasy relationship with life and death.
