Leonard Cohen - Dance Me to the End of Love (Official Video) via @YouTube #OTD #AnDiesemTag #ΣανΣημερα 
«This is a song that arose from a photograph that I saw when I was a child of some people in striped pajamas prison uniforms with violins playing beside a smoke stack and the smoke was made out of gypsies and children…»
The photo above, post of prisoner musicians at Camp Mauthausen is only one of several such images and is unlikely to be the specific photo that inspired Leonard Cohen’s „Dance Me To The End Of Love“
„But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing, that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror…“
„And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So,that music,‘Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,’ meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate Element“
„But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song — it’s not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity“
From Leonard Cohen, CBC Radio Interview (August 26, 1995).
The song follows a typical Greek "Hasapiko" dance path, most probably inspired by Cohen's long lasting affiliation to the Greek island of Hydra.
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