Commissioner : Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne
Dedicated to : Les Percussions de Strasbourg
Creation : 04/10/2000, Festival Musica, Strasbourg
Musicians : flûte (small), hautbois, clarinets, bass clarinets (cl. en sib), basson, cor, trompette (picc), trombone ténor-bass, 2 violons, alto, violoncellos, contrebasse (5 cordes), piano, percussion
Duration: 27′
Pine Dock, Manitoba (Canada)
7 August 1982
My friend, my brother!
I am going to die and I have suffered so much that I am not complaining. Death delivers me from my ordeal. But I never told you about it. I feel that I owe you this last look at my fifty years of life, then… I’m leaving!
Happiness: my mother. Her beauty, her beloved face: my world. Our deep love. Until Baden-Baden, 1947: I am fourteen years old. Troubled times, a country ravaged by the recent war. We return home one evening. Drunken English soldiers, looking for culprits, taking my uniform for that of the former Hitler Youth, want to execute me. My mother stands between the rifle and me. I see the bullet going through her head. My world explodes.
I go mad. Wanting to die, but living in spite of everything. Then to become other. But is that living? Gathered by distant relatives, I survive. Clinging to science. To become the road engineer you knew. Drawing paths for others; but in me, darkness.
1960 is the miracle: meeting Thérèse, my light and my love. Happiness, life, work side by side. Then five years ago, the accident on the building site. Her face crushed under the unstable rock that no one could have foreseen. To live again years of hell full time. Then recently diagnosed with a brain tumour.
My friend, my memory is fading. All that remains are the pains: my two loves torn away, and this violence done to their heads as well as mine. What meaning? I don’t know, and I am no longer struggling to understand. I slide towards my end, which is perhaps a new beginning, who knows. But before I leave, I want to tell you: I think of you and in my last breath, I take your extra shadows with me! Live, my brother! Be happy!
Forever your friend,
Conrad Schleker M.L.