Elliott Carter (1908-2012)

On Conversing with Paradise (2008)

pour baryton et ensemble

  • Informations générales
    • Date de composition : 2008
    • Durée : 20 mn
    • Éditeur : Boosey & Hawkes
    • Livret (détail, auteur) :

      Ezra Pound

Effectif détaillé
  • soliste : baryton solo
  • flûte, clarinette (aussi clarinette basse), clarinette basse (aussi clarinette contrebasse), cor, 5 percussionnistes, piano, 2 violons, 2 violons II, 2 altos, 2 violoncelles, 2 contrebasses

Information sur la création

  • Date : 20 juin 2009
    Lieu :

    Royaume-Uni, Aldeburgh, Snape Maltings


    Interprètes :

    Leigh Melrose : baryton, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, direction : Oliver Knussen.

Note de programme

Ezra Pound, one of America’s leading poets and influences in the early twentieth century, lived in Italy during the Second World War. During that time he was occasionally allowed by the Fascist controlled radio to broadcast in English his rather fanatical ideas that the American bankers and banking system was destroying the US, a country he loved. When the American Army liberated Italy he was arrested as a traitor and imprisoned in a camp hear Pisa where he continued to write Cantos that he had worked on for most of his life. Later, at his trial in Washington, D.C. he was declared insane and interned at St. Elizabeth’s Asylum, during which time he was visited by many of the most respected American poets.

I have set parts of Canto 81 and 120, where he despairs of not having written the perfect poem, which to him was paradise.

My title is a quote from William Blake that Pound considered as a title for an early book of his own poems.

Elliott Carter.