duration: ca. 7'30

waiting for creation

Schade – too bad in German – is the last word spoken by the painter Paula Becker, who died in childbirth at the age of 31, ending a very promising artistic life. This friend of Rainer-Maria Rilke, for whom he wrote Requiem , was an "inhabited" woman 1 , whole, with a singular painting precociously impressionist, sensitive and innovative, as much in the choice of her subjects as in the choice of colors and textures used.

By choosing a short excerpt from Virgil's Bucolics , in my own way, I also wrote a kind of requiem, highlighting the reason for his death and the difficulty for a woman to combine a life as a free artist with motherhood and social constraints.

This work, a sort of sound sheet with singular harmonies, is intended to echo the strangeness of the paintings of this artist, as perceived by her contemporaries, including her husband Otto Modersohn, a completely conventional painter.

Schade is part of what I call my "Spiritual Testament", a grouping of all my vocal works, whose choice of texts reflects a deep humanism beyond all beliefs, even if certain texts set to music come from religious corpus.

Incipe, appeared puer, risu cognoscere matrem

(matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses);

incipe, appeared to stink: cui non risere relatives,

nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignita cubil est.

Start, little child, to recognize your mother by her smile

(to your mother, ten months have brought long disgust);

begins, little child: he who has not seen his parents smile at him,

a god did not judge him worthy of his table, nor a goddess of his bed.

Virgil, IVth Bucolics c. 60-63 (Les Belles Lettres edition, 1983)

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Schade was neither ordered nor requested. Written in less than a week (March 10 to 18, 2020), it is my "spontaneous" reaction to the Covid 19 pandemic. The shock of the enormity of the situation produced in me the "rush" of several ideas in germ:

• This excerpt from Virgil's Bucolics - which I've wanted to put to music since I was 20 - which shows in a few words the fate of Rome, the absurdity of life and inequality of opportunity

• Nostalgia for passing time (tenderness and melancholy)

• The consolation that music such as Les Psalmi Davidis Pœnitentiales or Lagrime de San Pietro d'Orlando de Lassus can bring, or Johannes Ockeghem's Lamentation over the death of Binchois

• The desire to deepen a singular choral harmonic writing that I discovered while writing my lyric poem Kim Van Kieu

• Reading Marie Darrieussecq's book Being here is a splendor - Life of Paula M. Becker, extending my discovery of this painter during the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris

• The discovery of Lydie Salvayre's book 7 women, whose rhythm of writing, style and personality of the women described are great

• The memory of the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke whose subtlety, tenderness and precision which characterize his writings marked me and gave rise to a previous work: Your Rilke for wind quintet

• And finally, an idea deep in my head to have written my own requiem, you never know with the terrible evolution of things!

Bernard of Vienna

March 20, 2020

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1 Paula Becker could have appeared in Lydie Salvayre's book 7 femmes , in which she talks about the lives of seven talented writers (©Perrin, 2013).

“Seven crazy women who affirm their presumptuous desire to write in a literary milieu essentially governed by men. Seven women for whom living is not enough. Who blindly follow a call. For whom writing is all of life. For whom the work is not a supplement of existence but is existence”.