Hommage à Rilke - Vol. II, Les Quatrains Valaisans - Jean-Philippe Dartois

Why set Rilke’s poems to music?

I “met” Rilke when I was 20 years old. His *Letters to a Young Poet* touched me deeply and have shaped my entire life as a man and as a musician.

When I read his poems in French, the resonance was so rich and so clear that the choice became obvious when I later set out to write melodies for voice and piano!

The beauty, simplicity, and precision of RILKE’s poetry sparked in me a creative impulse and drive.

A poet of intuition, connected to nature, nostalgic for purity, a poet of desire, and a friend of silence, RILKE’s gaze is turned toward eternity, toward the invisible.

Carried by the resonance of this poetry, all I had to do was make myself available and receptive to let the words sing, the harmonies intertwine, and the rhythms come alive...

One could analyze each melody, but I prefer to let the words and the music speak for themselves...

As the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva so aptly puts it:

“Rainer Maria Rilke is significant for our time; this poet—the most distant in his remoteness, the most exalted in his sublimity, the most solitary in his solitude—is the counterweight to our age.”