“Something different is coming, something more precise, more clear” (1974–76)

Vivier’s return to Montreal in August 1974 was the result of economic necessity and not of any conscious wish to reintegrate himself in the Canadian scene, no matter how positive a spin he tried to put on the matter in his recent correspondence with Serge Garant. Had his grant application for a further year’s study (including the proposed trip to South Africa) been successful, he would certainly have remained in Europe, perhaps indefinitely. It is tantalizing to imagine how differently his music would have developed had he stayed. The years immediately following his departure saw the beginnings of what in retrospect may be seen as two of the most important European new music tendencies of the 1970s, la musique spectrale in Paris and die neue Einfachheit in Cologne, both of which—especially the former—would mark Vivier’s own work profoundly when he encountered them a few years later. Now twenty-six, he had no option but to move back temporarily to his parents’ house in Pont-Viau while looking for a place of his own in Montreal and some source of income. The immediate anxieties connected with his homecoming were offset by the excitement of the premiere of Lettura di Dante by the SMCQ, the performance arranged for the Salle Claude-Champagne at the University of Montreal on September 26. The work, completed in Cologne in July, was equal in ambition to anything he had produced to that point. It is scored for solo soprano with a Varèse-like ensemble of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, viola, and percussion. Garant had agreed to conduct, and the singer was the young soprano Pauline Vaillancourt, then making her debut with the SMCQ. She found the piece “very very hard, really at the limit of possibility”—not least because so much of the part is in the very highest register of the voice—but she was determined to sing what he had written rather than ask him to make changes. She worked with Vivier both on the music and on the theatrical conception of the work, and remembers finding him “quite sure of himself, and of the work, yet he was still nervous about the performance.” In an interview at the time of the premiere, Vivier explained the origins of the piece. During his time in Cologne, he recalled, I studied the Italian language—its musicality had always fascinated me.

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