REVEILLE RETRAITE for solo trumpetA joint commission between Håkan Hardenberger and Danmarks RadioDedicated to Håkan HardenbergerProgramme note:Everybody knows or has at least heard of the time honoured military bugle calls: Reveille Retraite, the awakening at sunrise the turning in at sunset. In a way it's the UR concept of the nature of the trumpet, an instrument capable of glorious panache as well as sublime, inward looking finesse. My piece is, as indicated in the title, a two fold composition in the form of two contrasting tone poems, each mirroring a fragment of original text, what one could call spiritual appetizers. At the end of chapter 8 of his high spirited Memoirs Hector Berlioz laments the murder of a man he admired, Prince Lichnowsky, who was stabbed to death in Frankfurt in September 1848 by German peasants: Oh, I must get out, walk, run, shout under the open sky! " Now, there's a juicy bit of high strung romantic Sturm und Drang for you and the perfect motto for any awakening... Then night fall, Retraite, in which I've drawn upon the early, melancholy poem ALONE by Edgar Allan Poe and taken out one single line as 'subtitle' for this very hushed and withdrawn movement: "And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone. " I guess it won't hurt to quote the poem in its entirety:"From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were I have not seenAs others saw I could not bringMy passions from a common spring.From the same source I have not takenMy sorrow: I could not awakenMy heart to joy at the same tone:And all1 lov’d, I lov’d alone.THEN in my childhood in the dawnOf a most stormy life was drawnFrom ev’ry depth of good and illThe mystery which binds me still:From the torrent, or the fountain,From the red cliff of the mountain,From the sun that 'round me roll`dIn its autumn tint of gold From the lightning in the skyAs it pass’d me flying by From the thunder and the storm,And the cloud that took the form(When the rest of Beaven was blue)Of a demon in my view."Edgar Allan PoeProgramme note by Poul Ruders, January 2004"
