Wanderer

Yes, I do think so. I can feel that more clearly than anyone else because the world has not heard much of the music I have written over the last years and months for obvious reasons. Starting tonight, I’ve got six world premieres in over a month. It’s extraordinary, but all the cancelled concerts are arriving now. As for my way of composing, it does not work in a straight line, in the sense that sometimes I go back to see if I left something valuable which I could use now. You can always pick up the threads and create something completely different.

Stravinsky is a very obvious name, and Sibelius is also one of my favourite composers. I reckon my enthusiasms are surprisingly constant, as many of them have stayed absolutely where they were. Some people are very lucky, they immediately find their own way, but that’s actually pretty rare. So much progress can be made by imitating something and getting it wrong. It is a process of discovering that this other thing is not who you are. I did not try to imitate the « gods », because it is useless and you are going to be like Prometheus if you steal their fire, you will be lashed to a rock. A more positive way of thinking is ton consider, for instance, that Beethoven had the same a problem, he also wondered what to do with this idea: how did he deal with it? I should not imitate someone else’s music, but see how somebody much better than me could solve a problem, and perhaps I can solve this problem in a similar way.

Janáček’s piano sound is unique, not simply because of the way he thought of the piano; it partly comes from the fact that his music in general is so alive, like little animals which are speech patterns. He made the piano do what it had never done before, he almost accidentally gave it those extraordinary colours. The same is true of his orchestration, it never ever sounds like anything that was written before. What strikes me in Janáček’s music is its sincerity. When some people speak, you instantly know by their voice that it is coming from the heart. Take the Sinfonietta we are doing in Paris, and which sounds so simple: there was just nothing like it before, there has been nothing like it since.

It is my first piece which is actually called Piano Concerto, but in some way it’s my third. When I was about about 25, I wrote a piece for piano and ten musicians, called Concerto Conciso, then I did In Seven Days, a piece for piano and orchestra, which is a piano concerto all but in name. But this time, the piano concerto is the subject matter itself, the classic form gives its structure to the piece.

I try to use what I need. I like to use analog instruments, in other words not to invent them on a computer, because I fear that would be unleashing another world which I basically don’t understand the rules of. The Ondes Martenot is the nearest I came to the electronic, but it’s a voice really. It’s what I hear, what I feel in my body when I write, something which is very extreme. When I use a very low bass clarinet, for instance, it is because I feel almost emotionally that I need that sound.

You could say I’ve written as many as three! A lot of people only wrote one, Alban Berg only managed to write two. For me, an opera is once a decade. Writing an opera involves all your creative physical energy. Really, it’s like a black hole, it pulls everything into it, it just sucks everything in. For the spectator, the experience of an opera should be the discovery of a whole universe. So I must say, I feel like three is plenty.

Writing an opera is a bit like pregnancy. It is exhausting. Another metaphor would be one of those plants that flowers once every ten years, it has a pace, it can’t be rushed.

I’ve just written three ballets. The thing I’ve neglected is chamber music. I’ve just written my first piece of chamber music in ten years, largely because of the operas and larger works. I am very happy to turn back to chamber music.

In both cases, the opera was already there as an idea. In the case of The Tempest I had been looking for a subject that might work at some level, Shakespeare’s play came to my mind and I thought « Actually I think I could do it », I realized the subject matter would allow me to do things which I had not already done. Same thing with The Exterminating Angel, I saw in Bunuel’s film something which might chime with my music, with my muse, if you like, and the Salzburg festival popped the question on just the right time. I am not working any new opera at the moment. However, The Exterminating Angel will have a new production, in Paris, actually; we are talking about casting, it’s in about three years time, I think. I am very excited and I want to give that some time of my own.

I will be working with Audrey again, and also the wonderful Frédéric Antoun, he sang Caliban in Quebec. And he is coming back to sing in The Tempest at La Scala in November 2022. We shall also have Toby Spence at La Scala, who is somewhat unique in having sung three different parts in The Tempest over some twenty years : in 2004, he was part of the premiere in London as Ferdinand, then he was Antonio at the Met, and he will be doing King Alonso in La Scala.

It happens sometimes that I write for some singers and I have their voices in my head. I very much want to write a song cycle. Of course it is not enough to like a poem, the words also have to offer all the right ingredients to be set to music. For several years, I have been looking at some great poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, and I keep thinking: Yes, now I can do it.

I already did it, actually. In 2013, I wrote a long piece in German for two solo voices and orchestra called Totentanz. I’ve written a song in Hungarian, Gyöker on a poem by Miklós Radnóti. Apollinaire obviously I would set in French. I find it easier to use foreign langages, or if not easier, at least quite enjoyable in a different way. I would not say that for all langages, I would not be comfortable with some, but in German and French, certainly, I would love to do that.

I am so sorry I could not attend those performances in Paris, because it was incredible to me that this show was going ahead, when everything else was not going ahead. Now I would love to write an operetta! You will laugh because when I decided on the EA, I absolutely thought it would turn to be a light operetta, because of the subject. But my operetta remains to be written.

As I said before, I just come to the end of a big cycle of new pieces, many of them are still to be premiered. I am Very excited to play a brand new piece in Paris on Monday. I just heard it for the first time a few days ago. And I will also conduct Tower, a fanfare which was written for the opening of LUMA in Arles. And I am now writing a piece for violin and orchestra, for Anne-Sophie Mutter.