Pictures and Quotes
"I have a very particular faith. I can’t break off with that either. When I
was very young- well, 17 or 18 - I studied intensively all the psalms on the love
of god. And perhaps that’s the faith I have. The faith in the love of God. That’s
the faith I have deep inside me. Belief in another life, of course. A faith that I am
and always will be, immortally or eternally, a child. With a profound confidence.
It’s a faith of confidence that I have. It’s not at all a fearful faith. I’m afraid
sometimes, I’m a little afraid of death...a little afraid..."
"This music tends towards a new sensitivity, a sensitivity that I have always perceived, all my life, in the people neglected and left behind by society. This beauty and purity that I find in the elderly and the very young, or the nearness of death, an idea my mother and father always imposed on me, inspired a vision of an inaccessible world in a life where money and power are everything. A life of solitude. So it is above all of these solitary humans that I think when I write music, I no longer think of the "future" or the "past" but of a kind of lost present, an impalpable joy mixed with the sadness of a child who has lost its mother."
"What I have to say, I must say with music. I can't say it with words. That's the problem. I can talk and talk around music, but it's more difficult to talk about music as such, the music itself. Music is time passing, at whatever speed, but the time we perceive musically has nothing to do with that of the clock. It's completely different .... My music is slow in any case, but it has to hold, there has to be a kind of... or so it seems to me sometimes... a kind of door on Eternity. What expresses this transcendency? It is the interval between time and the need for Eternity."
"It’s not I who write my music. Perhaps it’s the flowers I have smelled, the gestures
I made, the people I have seen, or the stars... One never knows. Music is Love, as everything is Love."
"I don’t think that in the coming years I will be composing as much as in the past.
I must refine everything and discover that voice of the lonely child who wants to
embrace the world with his candid love - the voice that everyone bears and wants
to inhabit eternally. How strange it is. Despite everything I’ve told you about my
becoming an adult, the only voice that comes through in me is that of the child
speaking softly to the angels in the evening. All around me is perfect silence."
Biography
Claude Vivier as a Person
Claude Vivier as a Composer
The Musical Works of Claude Vivier
Claude Vivier's Musical Style
Claude Vivier's Method of Composition
Lonely Child
List of Works
Other Sources
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