On our blog, our contemporary composers present their favorite works from our catalogs. This time: Samy Moussa about Pascal Dusapin's La Melancholia.

"It was a November evening in Paris, two years ago. My time in the French capital was nearing its end. I had been seized a while before by the urgent need to leave this city where I had begun to feel a little too much at home; the feeling of taking root was damaging my work. It was with this vague sadness, born of the perspective of saying goodbye to Paris and to my master, Pascal Dusapin, that I went to the Cité de la Musique to hear his ‘operatorio’ La Melancholia, which was being performed in the context of the festival Autumn in Paris.

It is a work for orchestra, 4-part choir, tape, horn, trumpet and trombone, written 20 years earlier (1991), using magnificent texts more or less closely allied to this feeling. The very presence of numerous classical and medieval authors in itself lends to the piece a mythical dimension, and attracted my curiosity. I expected to be surprised: I was overwhelmed.

Transported into a vast territory, at times arid, at times burgeoning with life, across gently moving landscapes in which all sorts of creatures evolved, apparently in rhythms independent of each other, I had the impression of being lifted out of my own time. The diffuse humming of the choir accompanied only by brass in the first Interlude sank into me like the intolerable heat of a desert valley. This melancholy had nothing to do with the ennui of the Romantics and their excesses: no, it was the sadness that I felt myself, painfully slow and interior.

When Helena Rasker started singing, I could no longer contain my tears. It was the first time that a contemporary musical language had spoken to me so directly. I did not admire the proportions, I did not analyse the instrumental effects – I was simply moved."