Claude Vivier (Hmv11) Poem by johannes lewinsky

"Knowing that I had neither father nor mother gave me a wonderful dream world, I shape my origins as I wanted, pretended to speak strange languages. The fact that I hung around with each day was unfortunately a trade very hard and muscular. "

(a trade very hard and muscular
Is a bad translation but somehow
Appropriate)

However many people
He was in his head
Tchaikovsky Marco Polo
Copernicushe became
At the end defined
by his death
and by his sex

an orphan is a one
and only a one
a one that cannot be held
by a name or a history
just a one alone
in his head

the world considers it a misfortune
yet don't we all wish we could say
with him I shaped
the day that I started

but there was nothing same
About him this was
A man obsessed
With ways of saying
Things that nobody else could
About in quite the same way
He could and would

Looking for a language
In which to say
His thing say
That nobody else could
Say in quite the same way
He did

A reckless maverick
Who fashioned
His life if not his death
According to his work
(like Mussorgsky
Langaard Brian)
Who refused
To be breached
or assimilated

the loners of mankind
who consistently
reached out beyond
their being and aloneness

beyond
self pity

he searched for a

Beauty,
pure Beauty,
sad Beauty,
cosmetic beauty,
lacquered or wild
beauty,
monstrous and sexual.

A man not ashamed
Or if he was
Refused to allow
The shame to stop him

who yet did
repeatedly
stop himself in order
To start over

A man who could say
In a programme note
I was just about to speak of my mother.

‘Eternal homecoming, as in history with a capital H, which always waits impatiently for the return of its redemptive saints and its dictators. I have the impression that I'm standing around in a plane; I remain in the same place and yet I go from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur.
Go and find out for yourself! ' (Claude Vivier ‘s programme note for ‘Orion')


2
I am fascinated by brain work
Work of the brain work
Teems a mind like Vivier's
Never stops cogitating
Ideas circulating
coagulating

And all
Fuelled by an idea
A passion

It doesn't matter for what

So long as it is for an idea
Has nothing to do
With the ego's longing
To be warm and safe

Is all the ego seeks
Because it thinks thereby
To be liberated to seek

New dreams horizons
Continents
Of the intellect wherein
No intruder
May enter in

Is the greatest illusion of all
Warm and safe being the polar opposite to
the condition that i seek

Which is always
Hardmuscular

He attained it in his scores
Hard muscular and impenetrable to all
But in his life remained
Soft nebulous

Amusical equivalent
To Dali's clocks
Waiting to be taken
Which on
8th March 1983
He was

On the night of March 8 1983, the 35-year-old French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier was stabbed to death in his Paris apartment. His killer was a male prostitute Vivier had met in a bar earlier that evening. On the worktable was the manuscript of Vivier's final, uncompleted work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? (Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul?) , a dramatised monologue in which Vivier describes a journey on the metro during which he becomes attracted to a young man. The music breaks off abruptly following the line: "Then he removed a dagger from his jacket and stabbed me through the heart."