Piano music for a wedding
- Nigel Edmund-Jones
- Oct 1
- 4 min read
Hymne à l'amour
Le ciel bleu sur nous peut s'effondrer
Et la Terre peut bien s'écrouler
Peu m'importe si tu m'aimes
Je me fous du monde entier
The blue sky above us can collapse
And earth may crumble
I don't care, as long as you love me
I couldn’t care less about the rest of the world
Tant qu'l'amour innondera mes matins
Tant qu'mon corps frémira sous tes mains
Peu m'importe les problèmes
Mon amour, puisque tu m'aimes
As long as love fills my mornings
As long as my body trembles under your touch
I don’t care about troubles
My love, as long as you love me
I have been kindly invited to tickle the ivories before a family church wedding. So, as is my usual method for collating a music set, I created a playlist of possible tunes for the decision-making process. [See the Spotify playlist link at the end. All links in this blog are to YouTube, opening in a new window.]
Neither too sacred, nor too poppy was my aim. Obviously, setting the scene was paramount, but I like to sprinkle a little humour into everyday life. So, before I even added Bach/Gounod's Ave Maria and Michel Legrand's What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?, I jumped into the Married Life tune from Pixar/Disney's 2009 movie, Up. This delightful movie has as its central theme the adventure of life, found not in faraway places but right wherever you may be, in human relationships and connections. It seemed appropriate - a short, jaunty little waltz, written by Academy Award-winner (Best Music, Original Score for Up) Michael Giacchino. In the film, Married Life is the soundtrack to a life captured in just a few moments: all the ups and downs, including not just the joyful times but also the tragic ones. Sounded just like a marriage to me...
Michel Legrand's tune What Are You Doing..., written for the movie The Happy Ending in 1969, was already a jazz standard when I played it to my wife on our own wedding day many years ago. It will give me great pleasure to play it at our son's wedding. Another small circle of life completed. Can't help falling love (based on a popular 1784 French love song, Plaisir d'amour, by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini) came a close second.
Next on the list had to be English composer William Walton's Touch Her Soft Lips and Part (also from a soundtrack, to Henry V). It was played at the Service of Prayer and Dedication for The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall (now King Charles and Queen Camilla) in 2005. It is obviously a royal wedding favourite, as it was also played at the current Prince and Princess of Wales's (then Prince William and Catherine Middleton) wedding at Westminster Abbey in London, in 2011. Another sure-fire favourite for this wedding playlist.
I had a request from the groom to include Gabriel Fauré's exquisite Après un rêve. An arrangement for solo piano of the original song was sourced from the online IMSLP.org Petrucci sheet music library - an extraordinary resource of over 8000,000 free scores. You can find it hidden within Trois Mélodies (3 Songs) (1877, No. 1 from Op. 7).
Inspired by the bride's time at the Sorbonne Université in Paris, Hymne à l'amour seemed appropriate. A beautiful, emotional tune, even without Edith Piaf's unique singing tones. It was sung by Céline Dion (standing on the Eiffel Tower, wearing Dior, in the rain - as you do) at the closing of the Paris Olympics in 2024. You couldn't hear a pin drop then, nor will you on wedding day, as the bride and groom say 'I do'.
During my research for the new Fullscore Publishing Series, Songs without Words, I came across a popular little wedding piece, Romance sans paroles (Bois solitaire - Lonely Woods), often played on harp. It's short, sweet and should set exactly the right, expectational setting before the church service.
That's at least 20 minutes of piano playing in my estimation, so the rest of the lovely, lyrical piano tunes that I discovered will have to wait for another day.
Top of the rest of the short list was inspired by the wonderful pianist Vikingur Ólaffson: Ave Maria is an exquisite tune by Icelandic composer Sigvaldi Kaldalóns. However, the classic Bach/Gounod version won out in the end. Next on the short list were: Karl Jenkins (Hymn, Laudamus te), Ludovico Einaudi (Nuvole Bianche, I Giorni), and Ennio Morricone (La Califfa, Le vent, le cri).
From the classical repertoire I also considered The Arts and the Hours (Rameau) - listen to Vikingur Ólaffson's beautifully romantic recording - Pastorale (J S Bach, BWV 590), Prelude in E minor (Bach, BWV 855/I arr Siloti), Ich stand in dunklen Träumen (Clara Schumann), Passacaglia (Handel), Au bord de l'eau (Gabriel Fauré), Salut d'amour (Edward Elgar), Intermezzo (Manuel Ponce), Feuillet d'album (Ludovic Lamothe), Ground in C minor (Purcell), Les Baricades Mistérieuses (Couperin), and several more...
Trying to avoid any AI-created new pieces on Spotify was a challenge, as each composer had to be cross-checked. Some delightful, lyrical new tunes emerged, including: A Tarde (Daniel Crisman), Eyes on Me (Nobuo Uematsu), mock-baroque Poesía (Sofiane Pamart), Love Story (Indila), Idea 25 (Gibran Alcocer), and Comptine d'un autre été (Yann Tiersen, from the soundtrack of the film Amélie).
From all these neo-classical tunes, I decided to include River Flows In You by South Korean composer Yiruma (2001), because I love the tune and its embellishment with his pianistic twiddles. I urge you to give them a listen, as there is so much new talent out there in music-streaming land.
You can enjoy the elimination process, with all the above-mentioned tunes (2hr 45m of eclectic piano music), on this Spotify playlist:
My piano-playing mantra for the day of the wedding, as jazz legend Thelonious Monk put it, is: 'The piano ain't got no wrong notes'.
May all the dreams of the betrothed come true. (And I might even create a new Fullscore Piano sheet music collection in the Piano Praxis series to celebrate their nuptials...)
Nigel Edmund-Jones
Fullscore Publishing Founder, Editor & Engraver
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