Fenêtres (Windows)

 for solo soprano voice, chamber ensemble, and interactive electronics

after poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

 by Joseph Butch Rovan

Rilke wrote the fifteen poems that make up his late cycle “Windows” around 1925, following the famous avalanche of creativity that yielded his two greatest works, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Conceived in Valais, Switzerland, for and about his lover Baladine Klossowska, the new poems were written not in German but in French, a language that allowed for an unusual degree of linguistic and formal freedom as Rilke reflects on windows from many different aspects. Addressing his subject in the familiar “you,” he considers both the window’s formal capacity to focus our perception and its instrumental power to transmit light. The two poems in this setting display each of these tendencies. The first contemplates the window’s productive geometry, making everything that appears within its frame more beautiful. The second sees the window as an instrument of the heavens, like the constellation Lyra, mythical resting place of Orpheus’s harp.

This musical setting draws out the connection between the poems by treating them as one continuous movement. The electronic landscape amplifies the poetic imagery with sounds derived not only from the singer’s voice and the instruments within the ensemble but also from windowpanes and the astronomical data of Vega, Lyra’s brightest star.