6 Poèmes de Rainer Maria Rilke

6 Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
It can always seem iconoclastic, even inappropriate, to set certain authors and poems to music. Indeed, many writings are self-sufficient, like landscapes that it would be pointless to paint, so much harmony is there, just waiting to be admired. But the temptation was too strong for me to write music to some of Rilke’s poems from his collection Vergers, following a commission from the excellent women’s vocal ensemble Les Heures Vokalensemble and my friend and former student Ève-Marie Daoulas-Mamy.
Towards the end of his life, Rainer Maria Rilke began writing poems in French, a language he mastered perfectly, abandoning his native German. Vergers, a word he was particularly fond of, is an ode to nature, to the luminous Valais in which he lived the last five years of his life, an ode to the small details of everyday life. All the poems in this collection touch me. Infinitely. But for the sake of the occasion, I’ve confined myself to setting 6 poems to music. As if with regret.
May this modest work draw listeners’ attention to the work of Rilke, an author of extreme and contagious sensitivity…

Philippe Mazé