@GUEST Grishka...

1. What we need, then, is a few more enthroned kings envying shepherdesses or shepherds or similar, to have a proper "motif" (I hate the post-structuralist use of "trope" for this phenomenon, though doubless they have their reasons for it).

2. When a fictive simple swain/maiden describes their lover in the terms of love poetry, the interesting thing is, how conscious are they that they are doing so, i.e. how overtly self-conscious is the text? Pastoral is inherently stylised and about cardboard figures doing cardboard things in a cardboard countryside. Their simplicity is of a piece with their diction and doings (both deliberately "faux", if you see what I mean), so they and theseare only semi-comic if you see them outside the terms of the genre.   

3. I do not know Charlie, Rich "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World", but do you think that Country Music is always and everywhere as deliberately, flauntingly "self-conscious" as pastoral work. Don't we NOT suspend disbelief with pastoral, while we DO suspend it with Country Music?

4. I hope the elves do alter the thread title, thus attracting Monique... I wonder whether the French and the Occitan words mirror each other...

5. I wonder if anyone else sang the Tauber words and who wrote them. I prefer them to the "real" translation/s of the real text, but then I would, having heard them first.

6. I really cannot see how I did not recognise the tune of "Florian's Song" when I sang it, as being the same as the "Oh happy life" of my childhood... No, there *was* indeed magic (though perhaps more innocent and less languishingly erotic) in my mother singing it in my infancy, either from hers early 1930s) or from my sister's nursery school (late 1950s). Neither admit to remembering it now, or of mother singing it. But as you saw, I do. Either way, whoever's childhood/school inheriting it was (Tauber was not mentioned, though well known to us), it is an interesting example of colonial-period cultural transmission of a sort that ended with my own post-colonial generation (and even then, one had to belong to a certain sort of Anglophone social sphere, always considered dubious by the mainstream). We were told NOTHING about the songs we imbibed, bar what we could find in the fat wooden covered vol. _The World of Music_, but the magic either in the songs themselves (C#-folk, art-, "coon-", musical-comedy, the lot...), or in the childhood itself, or a combination, have led me to "never let them go". I hope it is not just naive nostalgia operating, but a modicum of taste with it... More information always adds to magic, I think..., for even an illusion-destroying magic is (or can be) itself magic..

7. I too thought the songs were badly integrated into the television rendition, though they might indeed have the thematic and "characterological" (sic) functions you ascribe to them. I was just glad they were there, because my no-Italian and less-French notwithstanding, they sounded good.   

Thank you for taking the trouble to re-watch, and to educate thereafter.

Sanjay Sircar