Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande (Op. 80) was written as an incidental music (aka BGM). In 1898 the actress Patrick Campbell staged Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama in London and asked Fauré to write for it. He was short on time, so he handed the orchestration of the small theatre band to his student Charles Koechlin, and only later sat down to orchestrate the concert suite himself. (Debussy, Schoenberg and Sibelius all wrote music for the same play. The play was popular.)
The suite has four movements — Prélude, Fileuse, Sicilienne, La mort de Mélisande — and everyone remembers the third one.
Here’s the funny part: the Sicilienne wasn’t written for Pelléas at all. Fauré sketched it back in 1893 for a production of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme that got cancelled before opening. So he had this lilting little thing in G minor sitting in a drawer, and when the London commission came he pulled it out and re-dressed it. He also spun off a version for cello and piano (Op. 78) that’s now a staple of the cello repertoire. One tune, three lives.
You know why it survived: the 6/8 sway of the siciliana — a slow baroque pastoral dance — under a flute melody that curls and drops, harp underneath. It sounds like nostalgia for something that never happened.
And it kept getting reused after Fauré. The melody floats through films whenever a director wants smth public domain and floats — Pagnol’s Le Château de ma mère, or when Chuck sits down and plays on the piano in Better Call Saul. Etc etc. Not bad for a tune Fauré almost threw away.