| Correspondances | |
| Type: | Song cycle |
| Image Upright: | 1.3 |
| Text: | poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Prithwindra Mukherjee, and excerpts from the letters of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vincent van Gogh |
| Language: | French |
| Movements: | five |
| Composed: | –03 |
Correspondances is a song-cycle for soprano and orchestra written by the French composer Henri Dutilleux in 2002–2003.
It consists of five episodes and an interlude. The work was premiered by Simon Rattle and Dawn Upshaw with the Berlin Philharmonic on 5 September 2003 and has since been performed all over the world. It lasts 22 minutes.
Correspondances consists of five movements based on various letters and poems as well as an interlude. The movements are
The title refers both to letter writing and to synaesthesia in the Baudelairian sense i.e. symbolic "correspondences" between the senses and the world.[1] [2] It is based on texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Prithwindra Mukherjee, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vincent van Gogh. Although they come from disparate sources, they are unified by their mystical inspiration and especially their concern about the place of humanity in the Cosmos.
Each episode highlights a particular family of instruments. For instance, woodwinds and brass are prominent in De Vincent à Théo..., echoing the painter's use of colour[3] while an accordion and strings, in particular a cello quartet, dominate in À Slava et Galina (that letter was addressed to legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya). Danse cosmique, opens with timpani and pizzicato strings before the whole orchestra surrounds the singer.
The work contains quotations from Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov as well as Dutilleux's own Timbres, espace, mouvement in Solzhenitsyn's letter and van Gogh's respectively.
It was recorded by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Barbara Hannigan (for whom the composer wrote a new finale) with the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France in 2013.
(1999 Les Éditions Verdier, French translation by Jean-Yves Masson)
Des flammes, des flammes qui envahissent la terre,Des flammes de déluge pénétrant tous les cœurs,Effleurant les ondes de l'océan des nuitsDes foudres se font entendre au rythme des éclairs.
Des flammes, des flammes dans les gouffres souterrains,Des bourgeons de tournesol ouvrent leurs pétales,Des squelettes du passé dans la caresse du feuEngendrent les âmes d'une création nouvelle.
Des flammes, des flammes dans le cœur de l'homme,Qui es-tu, ô barde céleste, qui chantes l'avenir ?
Flames, the flames that invade the earth,Flames in a deluge penetrating all our hearts,Teasing the waves in the ocean of nights,Thunder pealing to the rhythm of lightning.
Flames, the flames in the depths below,The sunflower buds open their petals,The skeletons of the past in the caresse of fireBeget the souls of a new creation.
Flames, the flames in the heart of man,Who are you, o celestial bard, who sings of the future?
(Prithwindra Mukherjee, Éditions, "Le Décaèdre")
Se rappeler tout cela avec gratitude, c'est bien peu dire. Vous l'avez payé bien cruellement, surtout Galia qui a perdu à jamais son théâtre. Toute ma gratitude ne suffira jamais àcompenser de telles pertes. Tout au plus peut-on retirer une certaine force de la convictionqu'en ce siècle, nous autres Russes sommes tous voués au même terrible destin de d'espérerque le Seigneur ne nous punira pas jusqu'au bout.
Merci mes chers amis. Bien à vous pour toujours.
To remember all this graciously is to say little. You paid a cruel price for it, above all Galya who lost her theater forever. All my gratitude will never make up for such losses. We can only take a little strength from the conviction that in this century, we Russians are dedicated to the same terrible destiny of hoping that the Lord will not punish us until the end.
Thank you, my dear friends. Wishing you the best, always.
(1985 Librairie Arthème Fayard, for the French translation)
...J'ai un besoin terrible de religion. Alors, je vais la nuit, dehors, pour peindre les étoiles.Sentir les étoiles et l'infini, en faut, clairement, alors, la vie est tout de même presque enchantée.
...Tout et partout, la coupole du ciel est d'un bleu admirable, le soleil a un rayonnement desoufre pâle et c'est doux et charmant comme la combinaison des bleus célestes et desjaunes dans les Vermeer de Delft. Malheureusement, à côté du soleil du Bon Dieu il y a,trois quarts du temps, le Diable Mistral.
...Dans mon tableau « café de nuit », j'ai cherché à exprimer que le café est un endroit oùl'on peut se ruiner, devenir fou, commettre des crimes. Enfin, j'ai cherché par descontrastes de rose tendre et de rouge sang et lie de vin, avec les verts-jaunes et les vertsbleus durs, tout cela dans une atmosphère de fournaise infernale, de soufre pâle, à exprimercomme la puissance des ténèbres d'un assommoir.
...I have a terrible need of religion. So, I go into the night, outside, to paint the stars. Feeling the stars and infinity, clearly, life is then all the same almost enchanted.
...In everything everywhere, the dome of the sky is an admirable blue, and the sun radiates a pale sulfur, sweet and charming like a combination of celestial blues and the yellows in the Vermeers of Delft. Sadly, next to the sun of the Good Lord there is, three quarters of the time, the Mistral Devil.
...In my painting Night Café, I sought to express that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes. And finally I sought the contrasts of tender pink and blood red and wine red, with yellow-greens and harsh blue-greens, and all this in the atmosphere of an infernal furnace, of pale sulfur, to be expressed as the power of darkness in an assommoir.
(1960 Éditions Bernard Grasset, French translation by Maurice Beerblock and Loui Roëlandt)