Intended as a requiem, “Four Songs” turns out to be an autorequiem. This is a troubling occurrence, made all the more so by the frequent references to death in Grisey’s writings. “He was fascinated by death, as a symbol and as a reality,” said Gérard Zinsstag, a composer and close friend. In June 1998, after finishing “Four Songs,” Grisey wrote in his diary: “Why are the last decisions the most painful? Saying goodbye? Attachment? To what, from where?”
Such scary consonants have a history in classical music. Mozart left his Requiem unfinished when he died in 1791. In 1983, the composer Claude Viviera friend of Grisey’s, was murdered, leaving the beginning of a piece called “Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul?”
Did these composers know – consciously or unconsciously – what was coming?
In Grisey’s case, the evidence suggests he did not. After completing “Four Songs,” he began sketching a piece based on lines from Samuel Beckett’s collection of French-language poetry. “Mirlitonnades.” Grisey had not settled on an instrumentation before his death, but he planned to use a mezzo-soprano voice in Deguy’s set. The couple talked about leaving Paris for the country and adopting a child.
Many of Grisey’s friends recalled that after completing “Four Songs,” he was excited about the new aesthetic possibilities he had discovered. He told a friend, the astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet, that he found “a new language beginning with this composition.” A letter to the then artistic director of Donaueschingen Music Festival in Germany, Armin Köhler, shows that Grisey was planning commissions past the year 2000.
Rather than a premonition, “Four Songs” is the remnant of a tragedy: the first piece in a late style that was never to come. Grisey’s life ended as “Lullaby” of “Four Songs”. One moment, he was there; the next, he’s gone.
In February 1999, “Four Songs” premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, performed by the London Sinfonietta and soprano Valdine Anderson under the direction of George Benjamin. A group of those close to Grisey — including his son Raphaël, his ex-wife Jocelyne, and many friends and colleagues — traveled from Paris to London for the concert. “That a man in the prime of life feels the need to write his own elegy unconsciously,” Fiona Maddocks wrote in The Guardian, “raised questions more disturbing than the powerful work itself.”
The impact of the music is certainly surprising: After two decades, most of Grisey’s circle still cannot discuss the performance.
