MEÏMOUN FRANÇOIS – Dein Gesang – Portrait de Paul Celan

Creation : 27 June 2017, Festival Manifeste / IRCAM, CentQuatre, salle 400, Paris, France
Effectif : two women’s voices, three percussions and solo viola
Duration : 30′
Commissioner : assistance in writing an original new musical work from the Ministry of Culture and Communication
Dedicated to Géraldine Aïdan, to his being and his words
Éditions : Durand-Salabert-Eschig, Universal Music Publishing
Booklet : Renverse du souffle, Paul Celan.

Composition notebooks (extracts) Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen. [1] Paul Celan

There is no art of the Shoah. In fact, any testimony on the Shoah transcends art. The Survivor of Warsaw, If it’s a man, The Fugue of Death: by saying the Shoah, they sublimate the quality of a work of art. Dig up the syllables. There is no art in the camps either. Terezin’s music is no longer music. Primo Levi writes that music was heard in Auschwitz as one of the sounds of the dead. This is probably the reason why the music of the camps could not be heard by the survivors. The refusal of the survivors to listen to Wagner’s music is less a matter of the antisemitism of the author than of his interference with the sounds of Horror and Evil. What gives rise to one of these paradoxes, therefore history is customary: Jewish musicians have set themselves the task of rehabilitating Wagner’s music, of separating it from the sounds of Evil and of making it heard in the territories where the survivors had found refuge. The poetry of Celan is a poetry of otherness. There is not a page or almost a page that does not contain calls to be on first-name terms. This address unites Celan’s poems and letters: a tireless search for the other. In this otherness lies one of the possibilities of setting Celan’s verse to music: to set a poem to music is not only to dig out its syllables and alliterations, it is to dig out its calls. Digging into otherness. The two voices of Dein Gesang are also the “I” and the “you” of Martin Buber and Paul Celan. The philosopher and translator Stéphane Moses identifies and defines a “form of dialogical writing” in Celan’s poetry from the collection of poems written in Vienna (1947). Heidegger’s Silence Celan’s Music Celan’s Voice, when he reads The Fugue of Death. The presence of this voice. No one testifies for the witness. But the text. But the memory of the voice of the text, the voice of its author. Stéphane Mosès notes Celan’s “extreme musicality of language”. He writes: “Celan’s translation is remarkable in that it remains as faithful as possible to the sounds of the original, while constituting a new poem that seems independent of its source. The sound of Celan’s poetry is also the background of the syllables Celan digs out: “The buried snow”. Complementary device: a large imaginary keyboard, at first, in front of a curtain of sounds with wide resonance and indeterminate pitch. Two female voices encircle a viola which catalyzes the ensemble. The two voices embody the otherness omnipresent in Celan’s poetry. These two voices are also those of the indeterminacy of language. In what language does Celan write? Translator and poet? Celan abolishes the boundaries of poetic categories and professions. Two voices become one. They are two parts of the same body. Kaddish Celan’s trajectory is not only suicide camps, that “traumatic horizon” of which Stéphane Mosès speaks. The question of Judaism gives another meaning to the pain of this trajectory. Celan rediscovered Israel, thanks to Ilana Shmueli. To say that Jerusalem is. To say the link to Israel, which is becoming stronger. Saying openness. To say the meaning Celan attributes to the imperishable memory of Horror.

François Meïmoun ( J.S.)

[1] No one is testifying for the witness.