Fragments de Rilke

My preoccupation with the French poetry fragments of Rainer Maria Rilke goes back to when I began to plan my most recent opera L’Invisible, based on the work of the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck, as Rilke wrote a great deal about Maeterlinck. Prior to composing Fragments de Rilke for soprano and orchestra, I had already created a few settings with piano. The 12 orchestrated fragments are linked by interludes, which are variations on the original material, up until the tenth fragment ‘On fait à la terre une nouvelle surface’. In the final fragment ‘Profond amour qui de la terre s'élève’, the intellectual objective has been achieved. Aribert Reimann