SAFOUS MÉLÈ

Commentary

I first thought of a tympanon or cymbalum, then a harpsichord, for the second movement. Xenakis, also a great admirer of Sappho, made a few comments when I showed him the score. At first he very much approved of the chromatic clusters, which I ventured to write for the choir. But he criticised the use of the harpsichord, which he thought would stand out too much. I had written some rapid arpeggios, which he rightly judged to be rather insignificant. I replaced it with a harp, which was more appropriate in terms of colour, and completely rewrote his part. Messiaen, for his part, paid me very general compliments, and showed himself to be sensitive to the process used in the instrumental accompaniment of the 4th movement, where each Greek phoneme was associated with a specific instrumental sound. This translation of language into music was a first step along a path where he would occasionally join me with his ‘communicable language’. He also noticed the clusters in the choir.

The work, which Jacques Longchampt hailed in Le Monde in 1963 as that of a “true musician”, was not revived until 2022 by Roland Hayrabedian and his ensemble Musicatreize, who recorded it on a CD entitled “Pluie d’or”.