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Letters to a Young Poet
“No better testament to
Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous letters to aspiring poet Franz Kappus are a clarion call to artists everywhere.
Maurice Ravel’s single, masterful string quartet was written in the same year, in the same city, and at the same moment in his life.
As if that weren’t enough, the lost letters of ‘the young poet,’ Franz Kappus, were discovered in a groundbreaking literary discovery in 2020, allowing us to read this famous correspondence for the first time.
Rounding out these mirrored mentors is Debussy’s single string quartet, mirroring Ravel’s in the way that Rilke mirrors the young poet.
In a new groundbreaking work of concert-theatre, Bill Barclay has dramatically presented this friendship for the very first time, fully staged with string quartet and projections, and showcasing what life requires of us to be truly alive.
Now touring with the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet.
Trailer
RAVEL & DEBUSSY
Created & Directed by
Bill Barclay
Forces
String Quartet
Two Actors
Furniture
Projections
2 hours
World premiere with The Brodsky Quartet at the Aldeburgh Festival, UK
Reprised at Lincoln Center with The Diderot Quartet, and at Tanglewood with The Parker Quartet.
Translated by Damion Searls
Photo courtesy of Britten Pears Arts
Both born in 1875, Ravel and Rilke wrote their iconic works at the age of 28 in Paris in the same months and just a few streets away. These twinned masterpieces reflect each other in time and space, forecasting the future of romanticism as modernist thought took over Paris.
Debussy composed his only string quartet just ten years earlier, also at the same stage of life (30 years old). His influence on Ravel, who structured his quartet in identical ways, is obvious hearing the works back to back. Their musical conversation naturally mirrors the mentorship between the poets. Debussy is 10 years older than Ravel, while Kappus is 10 years younger than Rilke. The meditation between these four minds is a pocket kaleidoscope of belle epoch Paris – the white-hot fulcrum between romanticism and modernism.
