Vivier’s Last Masterpiece

Soundstreams presents an immersive evening culminating in Claude Vivier’s mesmeric Musik für das Ende.

In 1983, Vivier was stabbed to death by a young man he had just met in Paris. It would have been a simple tragedy, were it not for the composer’s most recent score.

In the composer’s Do you believe in the immortality of the soul, a narrator named Claude meets a young man before being fatally stabbed by him. Had Vivier staged his own departure?

This immersive, ritualistic evening celebrates the music of doomed genius Vivier, a composer who felt the urge to share the most tender, personal moments of his own life with anyone willing to listen.

In a ritual spectacle staged in the round, we hear a new monologue crafted from Vivier’s letters, and two of his own works: Do you believe in the immortality of the soul for voices and ensemble and Musik für das Ende for vocal ensemble and actor.

Vivier’s musical universe is all his own – stateless and cosmopolitan like its creator, shaped by the ritualism of his Catholic upbringing but amounting to an unflinching representation of the realities of the human experience.

While Do you believe in the immortality of the soul unsettles and provokes, Musik für das Ende carries with it the sense of peace and purity which Vivier tried so hard to find.