A Pessoan “coterie”
On Xavier Dayer’s ‘Homage to Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’
Antoine Bonnet
In his new work Xavier Dayer, who teaches at the Bern University of the Arts, pays tribute to the German composer and poetess Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848), still little known in the Francophone sphere. Through the texts and melodies of this artist, Dayer‘s music weaves links between Droste and her contemporaries: Schumann, Lenau and Goethe. Antoine Bonnet analyses this heterophonic fabric of poems and sounds, this music of contrasts that makes identities proliferate.