Lemoine Murail - La Vallée Close Po+Pies - Mezzo-Soprano Clarinette Violon Alto Et Violoncelle

Summary of This Score

This score takes as its starting point an intimate spatio-temporal triangulation: Petrarch, Liszt, Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. Tristan Murail connects these three poles with the sensitivity of an author and sound architect, relying on the emotional power of the poems from the Canzoniere and on the musical lineage that unites, at a distance, Liszt's inventiveness and Petrarch's romantic intensity.

The textual material comes from three sonnets chosen by Liszt for his famous pieces in the "Years of Pilgrimage": no. 47 Benedetto sia 'l giorno..., no. 104 Pace non trovo..., and no. 123 I' vidi in terra.... Here, the excerpts are not simply juxtaposed: they respond to and intersect with each other, even blending together, to build a continuous expressive journey. Some stanzas are deliberately omitted, and the original texts are provided in the appendix to clarify the editorial choices.

The text is in Old Tuscan, slightly different from modern Italian, and is based on hendecasyllabic verses whose balance depends on tonic accents. This particularity has direct consequences on prosody and rhythm, especially when two vowels follow each other between two words, forming a single unit of diction. Murail indicates that he endeavored to take these mechanisms into account in the vocal writing, in order to achieve a line that serves both the verb and the intrinsic musicality of the language.

The score does not seek quotation: there is no explicit musical reference to Liszt's pages, except for a rhythmic gesture entrusted to the strings in the sections related to Pace non trovo, which may evoke the introductory impulse of the 104th sonnet in Liszt. The result fits within an aesthetic where timbre, harmonic tension, and the dramaturgy of the text build a work that is both demanding and deeply evocative.

Technical specifications

Musical Genre

Classical

Composer

Tristan Murail

Language

Italian (Old Tuscan)