Pierre Boulez – Le Visage nuptial (1947-1989)
Le Visage nuptial, 3ème version
pour soprano, mezzo-soprano, chœur et orchestre – Textes de René Char
I Conduite
II Gravité (L’emmuré)
III Le visage nuptial
IV Evadné
V Post-Scriptum
Phyllis Bryn-Julson, soprano – Elizabeth Laurence, contralto
BBC Singers – BBC Symphony Orchestra : Pierre Boulez
(Avec l’aimable autorisation de Warner Music)
P 1990
Le Visage nuptial Chronologically speaking, the first version of LeVisage nuptial (1946-47) comes between the 1st and 2nd Piano Sonatas. It followed close on the heels of the Sonatine pour flûte and was written just before the first version of Livre pour quatuor . The young Boulez had left Messiaen’s class; he had become estranged from René Leibowitz and had recently been appointed musical director of the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. Even before meeting the author the following year, he read the poems of René Char and chose the five sections of L e Vis a g e n u p tial to set them to music. This had been published in Cahiers d’art in 1944, reprinted by Editions Gallimard in
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1945 in the collection ‘ Seuls demeurent ’, then, three years later, in Fureur et mystère . Next would come Le Soleil des eaux
and Le Marteau sans maître .
A Char/Boulez conjunction? ‘Conjunctions between musicians and poets can sometimes exist,’ notes Célestin Deliège, ‘but when one is really confronted with one, one realizes fairly quickly their relative character. In the case of Char, there cannot be the slightest doubt as to the existence of a very profound affinity; it suffices to penetrate the poet’s vocabulary and feel the density of the verse to grasp the sense of this affinity that brought the feeling of a revelation of his identity to Boulez, upon encountering this poetry.’
Unlike the work he would carry out in the domain of Mallarmé, here Boulez opts for a narrative unfolding and does not shrink from the abundance of the text, in particular in the central piece, that bears precisely the title of the cycle. Moreover, he noted ( Le Monde , 12 July 1990): ‘ Le Visage nuptial clarifies the narration of poem, models itself entirely on the form, and is literally organized according to it. The music invents itself in parallel with the text, following it in its twists and turns, from encounter to renunciation.’
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