126. The Scent of Love

From Michael Nyman's The Piano score, this track is probably one of the most moving pieces of music ever written. Utterly and devastatingly heart-rending, but ultimately beautiful. For it is through the song's passages of sorrow that its beauty chiefly arises.

This has none of the calm and reflective majesty of another favourite piece, the second movement, Adagio un poco mosso of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, but it is nonetheless a remarkable composition. You could almost feel the pain and anguish of the composer's heart as if they were your own, deep and dark emotions boiling and simmering underneath, always threatening to spill over. And as it reaches towards it's climax, those feelings are finally unleashed, amidst an explosion of thunder and fury, of blissful release and wrathful reckoning. The heart is truly an organ of fire.