
" 7th quartet "
Ciels traversés
SÉLECTION 2015
- Nominated for : The Young Audience Prize 2016
- Nominated for : The Musical Composition Prize 2015
CREATION
11/24/2014: Radio France - Quartet Tana: Antoine Maisonhaute, Chikako Hosoda, violins, Maxim Desert, viola, Jeanne Maisonhaute, violoncello.
NOTE
SEVEN QUARTETS
I composed my seven quartets with ropes between 1998 and 2013.
Four first were created with more or less of happiness by professional groups or not - the second was recorded for Intrada by the Quartet Rosamonde - but it is the feeling of dissatisfaction or of frustration which guided the writing of both following.
The meeting with the Quartet Tana started during a concert to the Theatre Adyar in Paris, on October 8th, 2012, while both violins interpreted rooms of my chamber music.
I immediately had the idea of entrusting them the recording of the integral written this day by adding a seventh - much larger, more complex and ambitious - composed especially in their intention according to forty-two last letters extracted from the correspondence of the Swiss writer Robert Walzer, then had committed for more than twenty years …
This recording was accomplished during eleven days ceaselessly at the beginning of November, 2013 in the chapel of the castle of Chabenet, in the Indre, thanks to the sound recording and to the artistic direction of Vincent Mons and of Antoine Maisonhaute, in my presence.
THE 7th QUARTET
It is just before Christmas 2012 that I obtained the Correspondence of Robert Walser, published in French by the editor Zoé of Geneva.
This writer was known to me very since the beginning of 1980s: the reading of The Institute Benjamenta and of the Children to Tan had particularly grabbed me. His description of the unreal and marvellous world, appears as separating of daily existence by an opaque curtain.
They receive a schism between what likes Walser and what it is, a rocking between the fact that he describes and what he saw.
April 19th, 1928, in the 221th letter of 263 listing, Robert Walser recalls his fifty years and mentions the vertigo which attacks him every so often. In the course of time, these signs increase and fluster its behaviour, to the point where its family, probably embarrassed by an illness which it does not understand, makes it commit in the asylum of Herisau, in the canton of Bienne. (Personal parenthesis: my paternal grandmother Laura Lenot-Biétry was born in this canton in 1890).
Walser says nothing, he continues writing letters to his editors and to his friends during twenty-six years, without complaining. He is thought is almost happy. Was he autiste or schizophrenic? Every word is a dumb indication of an extreme virtuousness. To his friend of always, Frieda Mermet, he entrusts serenely the repetition of the daily, with a disconcerting simplicity. (Let us remember Friedrich Hölderlin locked up in his tower of Hushing up? bingen, at mister Zimmer around whom I also wrote some writings).
Its letters translate however a dreadful and clear loneliness. In epigraph in the partition of the quartet, I name these words written to his doctor and friend, Carl Seelig, on April 28th, 1939: «He is absurd and rude, knowing me in a home, to ask me to continue writing books. The only one earths up on whom the poet can create is that of freedom.»
He becomes established at the end of his life (1956) in a kind of happy fate, without resistance. I feel close to this feature of character: I have from time to time an unshakeable certainty as a multitude of permanent doubts. By writing the quartet, I realised that I drew an unique line from the solos of every instrument. Then they meet as through inadvertence, coagulate and part. Solos, duets, trios, quartets: I envisaged 42 shapes for four musicians. This twice 21 independent instants can be in order, overlap, complement each other as a game of cubes. They split on two movements to let the interpreters breathe in the caesura, as well as the listeners I wrote this work with clarity while conceiving the world of microscopic, different details, as the myriad of memories forming a complex and unstable unit.
I know the death of Robert Walser only from the photographs of his last instants, catches by the police by arriving on the places where children had discovered its body. It is lengthened in the snow, the hat behind him. Two black stains in white immensity.
Jacques Lenot