In den Flüssen - Mit erdwärst gesungenen Masten - Blume - (Ich kenne dich - Erratisch

Premiered during the 1993 Radio France Festival Présence by Françoise Kubler and the Quatuor Consonance.

Duration: ca 15' - Lemoine Editions

"For Paul Celan (1920-1970), a Jew from Bukovina, who grew up in a Romanian environment, German was until the war both the language of culture and the language of affirmation of Jewish identity against the Romanian. That this same language subsequently became the language of destruction and death situates the tragic paradox that he had to experience while writing" .

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A paradox reinforced by the extreme brevity of many of his poems, a sort of summary of meaning that only the lexical and morphological resources of German can allow. This virtuosity of the poet to compose and juxtapose the words to make crystalline creations is at the origin of the musical writing whose motives engender each other throughout the work. The constellations thus created always say something new at the same time as each of the elements retains its own affect. This results in overlapping meanings that make the task of understanding the text particularly difficult and the music particularly rich in small details that call out to each other throughout the five poems linked together without interruptions as if they were only one. .

The principle of five short pieces has not been retained here: the music is in the place of the one who, from reading to reading, lets the meaning appear by itself. Sometimes, from this voluntarily expressive music, emerge " sotto voce " the voices of the three instrumentalists like the distant echo of a pain closed deep within oneself.

Paul Celan :

“ the poem may be a bottle thrown into the sea, abandoned in the hope that it could one day be collected on some beach, on the beach of the heart perhaps”.