“The passionate love for music that sometimes stops me from composing” (1981–82)

The Le Droit review of Vivier’s Carleton University talk in February 1981 provides the earliest mention we have of the new opera he was now planning. If the musical portrait he had produced some months before of Marco Polo’s Zipangu was the first musical manifestation of this, he was at work now on an even more ambitious part of the edifice: the Prologue pour un Marco Polo , a twenty-five-minute cantata for five singing voices, speaking voice, six clarinets, two percussion, thirteen strings, and tape, which he completed in Montreal on March 1, 1981. The work was commissioned by Radio-Canada as an entry for the 1981 Paul Gilson Prize of the Communauté des radios publiques de langue française. For this reason the premiere performance, conducted by Lorraine Vaillancourt, was for a radio recording, as had been the case with Lonely Child . He dedicated the score to Thérèse Desjardins. Vivier departs in this work from his usual practice of writing both words and music himself. He told an interviewer later in the year: “I gave myself the goal of working at least once in my life with a writer to make an acceptable text.” The Prologue was a collaboration with Quebec poet Paul Chamberland, who had come to attention in the mid-1960s for his strongly nationalistic collections Terre Québec and L’Afficheur hurle , as well as for his cofounding of Quebec’s political and cultural magazine Parti Pris , a radical publication that, during the five years of its existence, advocated an independent, socialist Quebec that would reject the implications and the rhetoric of “French Canada.” In Vivier’s Prologue , however, the theme of Quebec nationalism is not in evidence, unless somehow one is to take Marco Polo and his voyages symbolically. Vivier wrote that the piece was “A melancholy look at the drama of Marco Polo—and above all a meditation on a state of being—that of the misunderstood searcher.” (Is an obscure kinship perhaps being hinted at between Polo and Jacques Cartier, the French explorer who first described and mapped the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, claiming Canada for the French? In any case, there is nothing in the work itself, either text or music, to support this hypothesis.) Years later Chamberland told the musicologist Paul Griffiths that he had enjoyed the collaboration with Vivier on the Prologue .

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