Sonatine d’Amboise

My Sonatine d’Amboise, edited by dedicatee Matteo Osmieri, is a work for guitar in three movements.

This music was conceived as a homage to the figure and work of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, a French philosopher active in the second half of the 18th century, whose work represents an unprecedented, and in some ways irreproducible, union between the rationalist impulses of the Age of Enlightenment and the great metaphysical and gnostic tradition, which he drew upon for a few years while affiliating himself with a very peculiar organisation known as the ‘Elect Cohens’. The titles of the movements explicitly recall those of some of Saint-Martin’s significant works:

I. L’Homme de Désir: a very particular work, articulated in 301 short Canticles, which seem to be modelled on the biblical antecedent of the Psalm, this text captures in several passages the astonished gaze on creation from a scientific and at the same time spiritual perspective

II. Le Cimetière d’Amboise: a poem on the certainty of an individual’s persistence at earthly transit, this is a work to which I am very attached, having had the good fortune to visit the philosopher’s house and the cemetery in Amboise to which it refers. In the first verses, Saint-Martin writes ‘I love to frequent the dead and their thoughts, for they do not have the foolish idea that everything is extinguished in man. In them everything is alive, Silence is silent.’

III. L’Homme-Esprit: The title refers to the last book Saint-Martin printed: ‘Le Ministère de l’Homme-Esprit’. In a vision that combines a profound knowledge of the Bible and the thought of Jakob Böhme with a curiosity for the latest scientific debates (the cosmologist Buffon is mentioned in the text, among other things), Saint-Martin traces one of the last credible profiles of Christian existentialism, on the threshold of the post-modern’s loss of meaning.

As a side note, Osmieri plays in a state of absolute grace, with impeccable technical mastery and intellectual understanding of the musical text as I could not have hoped for better.

 

Lausanne, 07.11.2024

Cover, Cesare Breveglieri “San Martino” © Common License