Chacun sa Chimère

The text (by Charles Baudelaire) is taken from the 20 prose poems of the cycle ‘Le spleen de Paris’, published in the wake of ‘Les Fleurs du mal’ in 1867. Baudelaire describes through a narrator talking in the fi rst-person how he meets a crowd of people in a lifeless vacuum who, bending forward, wander through the country. Everyone carries a heavy burden on his back: Baudelaire metaphorically calls them ‘chimera’ […]. Asked by the narrator, it turns out that the people do not know what they are carrying nor for which purpose: they assume the burden and go on. Disheartened by their response the narrator gives up his attempt to get an explanation and sinks into indifference.

"Reimann divided the poem into six sections each of which begins with a solo intonation of the tenor voice. The orchestra gradually works its way under the text and, in the singing pauses, develops an increasing chain of variations over a four-note sequence based on the head motif from Bach‘s Musical Offering. […] What distinguishes Reimann‘s music is the basic characteristic style: In a kind of modern passacaglia, a model for the human loss of meaning is chiselled into the memory of the world. When the people march past the narrator, the four-note sequence widens into an instrumental arioso which, for a moment, promises release from this state before the leaden time sets in again." (Ulrich Schreiber, NZ 6/7 1982)