Volume 23 Issue 2 - October 2017

FEATURE
TREVOR HALDENBY
UNVANISHING:
THE MUSICAL LIFE OF
Claude Vivier
continued from page 9
was president of the Canadian League of Composers at a time when
Canadian orchestral music wasn’t being heard on Canadian stages,
Louie explains. That was a big part of why he started Esprit. In those
first years, without an administrative team or the resources one might
expect from an orchestral leader, Esprit was based out of the living
room of Pauk and Louie’s home.
In Esprit’s concert on October 15, titled “Eternal Light,” Vivier’s
Siddartha is slotted between the music of two other composers.
Compositionally, they seem to embody Vivier’s own past and future.
Colin McPhee’s Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936), a work that combines
elements of orchestral composition with Balinese gamelan, seems a
predecessor to the fervour for Asian (particularly Indonesian) music
prevalent during Vivier’s time. The other piece is a 2016 work titled
Spacious Euphony by Christopher Goddard – a doctoral student at
McGill studying under a colleague of Vivier’s, John Rea.
Esprit gave its first public concert in August of 1983, just months
after Vivier’s death. In the years that followed, Esprit played plenty of
Vivier’s music, but never Siddartha – for which now, Louie says, the
timing is right.
“Alex knew he wanted to do this piece for a long time,” Louie says.
“And it just never happened. But because it’s the 35th anniversary of
Esprit, he said, ‘This is the time to actually do it.’”
“Because Alex found Claude’s music compelling, and worthy,” she
adds. “And it just felt right.”
Lawrence Cherney
L
awrence Cherney, artistic director of
Soundstreams, never knew Vivier personally
– but from the moment he first saw
his music years ago, he knew that it was
something special. “Somehow, I had been
given a copy of the manuscript of [Music für
das Ende],” he says. “It was literally written
in his hand. And every once in a while for a
year or two, I’d pull this thing out and think,
‘What have we got here?’
“We began to think about producing it
then,” he adds. “But quite honestly, in those
early days, I think we had no idea what this was. For me, it was just an
intuition that there was something.”
The production this month, created by Soundstreams around
Vivier’s music, is in three parts. The first, featuring Québécois actor
Alex Ivanovici, is an original monologue inspired by Vivier’s letters.
The final section is the title piece: Ivanovici alongside ten singers in
a staged version of Music für das Ende. And in the centre will be a
performance of the uncanny, eight-minute work Glaubst du an die
Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Do you believe in the immortality of the
soul?) – the last piece of music Vivier ever wrote.
“There’s this very eerie connection between what he wrote [and
his life],” says Cherney. “Always this flirtation with life and death
and beyond.”
This particular Soundstreams production has been a long time in
the making – seven or eight years of planning, with rehearsals that
have been going since August. “It’s immersive theatre, in a way that
Rehearsal of Musik für das Ende
we’ve never really done before,” Cherney says. “I’m very proud of
the things that we’ve done over the years and it isn’t about better or
worse, but this is definitely different.”
Cherney describes how Musik für das Ende is structured: highly
precisely, but with a lot that depends on interpretation. It was crafting
that interpretation and developing it with the cast that proved to be
one of the company’s biggest challenges. “It takes place in this twilight
between theatre and music and opera...and it’s not any one of those,
and yet it’s every one of them,” he says. “In terms of what a vocal
ensemble can do, there’s a tremendous freedom in that.
“All that I can say about this is that I feel a little bit like what biographers
must feel,” says Cherney. “The more I found out about this
work, and about Claude, the more mysterious and the more intriguing
it got. It’s not that I got close to him personally, but in a sense that
mystery around the piece, and the depth of interpretation that we had,
amplified as time went on.
“In a way, [Vivier’s music] keeps receding,” he says. “Every time we
think we’re getting closer, there’s another horizon there. I think that’s
a good sign.”
T
he title page of Vivier’s manuscript for Musik für das Ende bears
a dedication, written in German, to “die Leute die heute sterben
werden” (the people who will die today). “Living in the midst
of beings destined for death I have often reflected upon this,” Vivier
writes. “Instinctively I see these beings no longer in life but in death.
In my dreams I was living more and more the strange ceremony of
beings who vanish for ever, who become an ‘infinite moment’ in the
eternal silence.”
If you trace the coming performances of Vivier’s music throughout
the year, what you seem to get is a series of moments that are
suspended in time. This fall at the Soundstreams season opener on
October 16, the Lapland Chamber Orchestra will collaborate with
Indigenous choreographer Michael Greyeyes on a new interpretation
of Vivier’s Zipangu. Later this season, Zipangu will be reprised
by New Music Concerts, the group that first commissioned it in 1980,
alongside a new work by Brian Harman that was inspired by it. For
Alexina Louie and Alex Pauk, Esprit Orchestra’s performance of
Siddartha on October 15 feels like a bridge between the past and the
future, and a way of treasuring the memory of a friend. And for the
second Soundstreams production of the season, Musik für das Ende
from October 28 to November 4, Lawrence Cherney and his team have
been forced to confront these ideas of legacy and immortality onstage,
dredging up the past in ways they hadn’t expected.
In the days before his unexpected death, Vivier’s work Do you
believe in the immortality of the soul? was concerned with asking
about life, and about the permanence of the loss he saw all around
him. In his music, he seemed to be searching for a way to not vanish
after death, and to move from silence towards a new type of sound. It
would seem like he’s found it.
Sara Constant is a Toronto-based flutist and music writer, and is
digital media editor at The WholeNote. She can be contacted at
editorial@thewholenote.com.
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