TARANIS

I revisited Séféris’s poem Sterna, which I had transmuted into music in an earlier orchestral work, La peau du silence. And I transformed his metaphor of a cistern in which the flow of poetry accumulates drop by drop, into a darker vision of temporal paradox. Neither origin nor repetition are really thinkable by man. Pluto, the “rich” who never gives anything back, has no use for the dead he collects. Nor do we understand how Taranis, the Celtic god whose attributes are lightning and the wheel, can govern both the eternal return and the definitive destruction of all things. Perhaps only music can take on the paradox it embodies: killing time by unfolding it, or making it implode?

At a time when five centuries of post-Christian humanism are coming to an end, it is the irreplaceable institution of Radio-France that has enabled me to use the exceptional resources of a large orchestra and chorus for the second time, 25 years after Andromède. Let’s hope that such resources will continue to be available under the global cultural empire that is currently being established.

Comment

Living in two opposing dimensions: that of myth and that of history, and waging a losing battle against time, such is the context of this vast secular oratorio. More than any other art form, music sometimes suggests a new dimension of time, where everything is immediately present. I’ve tried to make this paradox tangible through a text, a five-level form, in which the impossible abolition of past and future takes shape. A few images taken from the magnificent poem by Séféris were used to make this metaphysical utopia of the absorption of linear time into cyclical time as physical as possible. Taranis is a mysterious figure who seems to have embodied this paradox of motionless time, since his two attributes – the wheel and the thunderbolt – designate him as both master of repetition and master of catastrophe.