La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier

When Bruno Ory-Lavollée, to whom this work is dedicated, asked me to write a piece adapted to a reading of Flaubert’s La Légende de saint-Julien l’Hospitalier, I tried to think of the place music could occupy in relation to this masterpiece. Over time, the idea of incidental music played by the Hélios ensemble (flute, violin, viola and cello) surfaced, followed by the idea of a monodrama form.
I see this music as a way of illuminating the text. Alternately in the foreground (the introduction and the two interludes), in the same foreground (the two “chasses”), punctuated and receding or simply absent, the music is not a character but, in my ideal, a potential for images and symbols. Without going into the details of the score, I wanted to interweave arches of memory, associate small leitmotifs with characters and situations, and use a few small percussion instruments (Tambourine, Claves, Triangle, Chimes) to enrich the palette of timbres.
The piece follows Flaubert’s three-part structure to the letter. The “pure” chamber passages (of which there are also three) balance the perceptual relationships and give the text a central and final place. I also wanted to use certain types of writing to enable the musicians to follow the reader, who becomes almost a solo musician, giving his rhythm and punctuation to the musicians.
In the third part, I quote two Psalms that I ornament and interweave. To my mind, they represent Julian’s struggle and aspiration. They were written by Théodore de Bèze and Clément Marot.