Commissioned by Dorian Lamotte

Created on April 14, 2012 in Paris - Reformed Church of Luxembourg

Duration: ca. 6'. Editions Francois Dhalmann

This work could have been called Rückblick in reference to the cycle Winterreise by Schubert, a composer mentioned furtively in this work by a short echo of Trockne Blumem , one of the lieder of his other cycle Die Schöne Mullerin.

I preferred a title borrowed from the poet Philippe Jaccottet. His prose text Landscapes with Absent Figures (in the eponymous work) is an interior look closer to my sensibility than the despair of Schubert/Müller.

This deeply intimate work is a response to the request of the excellent violinist Dorian Lamotte, second violinist of the Debussy quartet for a long time, whose human and artistic sensitivity and talent touched me. As part of a solo recital, he asked several composers to write a work related to a different genre of music for each. It fell to me to write a work related to Gregorian chant. Without his knowing why, after having participated in the creation of my 2nd string quartet (subtitled 3 etchings in the mezzotint way), Dorian associated my music with plainchant. For the atheist that I am, this request made me smile, not out of mockery, but in view of the fact that I have often made this association, out of all belief, through poets such as Celan, Rilke and Jaccottet between others. The inner gaze, that is to say apperception, the famous sixth sense according to scholasticism (and so well illustrated in the tapestry of the Lady with the Unicorn that can be seen in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Cluny in Paris), runs through all my work. The motif of double chords "as if declaimed" is not unrelated to the characteristic scansion of these beautiful plainsongs intended to elevate the soul into communion with God. But by reversal, this motif becomes in my music, not an affirmation intended to elevate the soul towards a transcendence that is foreign to me, but the affirmation of the inner gaze, of the questioning of the human condition.