Ravel & Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke’s nine letters to aspiring poet Franz Kappus are a clarion call to artists everywhere. Maurice Ravel’s single, masterful string quartet combines with Rilke’s letters in a unique union of music and text.

The production features for the very first time the lost letters of Franz Kappus, ‘the young poet,’ completing this famous correspondence in a new concert-theatre work.

Now touring with The Parker String Quartet and The Brodsky String Quartet.

World premiere was at the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, UK at Snape Maltings with The Brodsky Quartet, celebrating their 50th anniversary as one of the most distinguished ensembles alive. This production will tour from 2025 in celebration of the 150th anniversaries of both Rilke and Ravel.

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.

Amazingly, ‘the young poet’s’ letters have only just been found. The full correspondence has been translated for the first time by Damion Searls, and reimagined as a dramatic dialogue by Bill Barclay.

RAVEL String Quartet in F major, Op. 35 (1903)

DEBUSSY String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 (1893)

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.

Forces

String Quartet

Two Actors
Furniture
Projections

Translated by Damion Searls

Edited and Directed
by Bill Barclay

80 minutes

Letters to a Young Poet