Every time I listen to the soundtrack of the Les Misérables musical I am reminded why I don’t listen to it more often: it’s emotionally devastating. For every “Master of the House” or “Little People,” there are three other songs ready to grab the organs in your chest and twist.
The story, both novel and musical, is full of loss, heroism, nobility, viciousness, love, sacrifice—over and over, willing sacrifice.
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When I listen to songs from Les Misérables, I find the music overlaid with words and images from the original book: a hand outlined in a muzzle flash; a chair moved farther and farther away; a branding iron picked up willingly; a doll as big as a child; a nun who has never told a lie; the fate of a town after its major employer flees; climbing over a garden wall and finding someone you once helped; a foot immovable on a child’s coin; Friends of the A-B-C; a life wrecked because a manager was certain of what a moral man like the mayor would want; the fortune of “Madamoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevant”; the Thénardiess; calling out “Father!”; émeute.
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I love the lyrics “For the wretched of the earth / There is a flame that never dies,” a statement with two meanings that are entirely opposite yet wholly compatible.
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It’s a hard thing to hear in a time when terrible things are happening that feel out of our control, and we desperately want to do something to stop them, but a core idea in the Les Misérables musical is that you won’t solve social evils behind the barricades with rifles and revolution but will make more difference by helping the people in front of you.
The way to save the world, says Les Miz, is by doing good for other people around us; it is as simple, and horrendously difficult, as that.
That is not permission to give up trying to change unjust laws and replace unjust structures, but such things are usually determined at levels we can’t directly affect, democracy or not. There’s only so much we can do.
It is just as important to carry out mercy and compassion and forgiveness within the space we occupy every day.
