PORTRAITS

Henri Dutilleux          Sylviane Falcinelli          Marc Blanchet          Côme Jocteur-Monrozier          Radios – Interviews – Seminars – Documentaries

Henri Dutilleux

« I have always liked the ease with which Patrick Burgan manages to mould his style by adapting it to the kind of works he decides to undertake. The recent production of Peter Pan or the real story of Wendy Moira Angela Darling reveals a new aspect of his talents in the field of opera inspired by the world of childhood ».
(2006, regarding the opera Peter Pan)

« The full-length version seduced me by the fit of light, the liveliness of the instrumental language »
(2004, regarding Spheres for large orchestra)

« I was indeed very moved by your intention to dedicate this work to me. And now, I’m glad to tell you that I love the construction, the spirit, the musical material, and particularly this ease (in the best sense of the word, it would be better to say this freedom) with whom you realize your subject, as in others of your works actually.
The link with Baudelaire, by the evocation of the poem « A une passante », who always fascinated me, also moves me a lot »
(1997, regarding Un éclair…puis la nuit ! for 15 instruments)

« I have always liked the ease with which Patrick Burgan manages to mould his style by adapting it to the kind of works he decides to undertake »

Henri Dutilleux

Sylviane Falcinelli

“Composing is for Patrick Burgan akin to a biological process. Just as the dividing of the cell liberates energy, so does his chosen means of expression reveal the human soul. There can be no more ontological or artificial divide between the raw sound material to be refined by the composer’s ideal (during the work in progress phase) than between the soul and its parent body. Consequently, any artistic distinction between sacred and secular becomes irrelevant. As human life is but a time period between a before and an after, so does a piece of music represent the setting in motion of a preexisting fundamental force, refracted through the prism of the composer’s personality and expertise and later passed on to its listeners. Yet Patrick Burgan never forgets that the artist who strives to express beauty borders upon the absolute, which is itself not far from the sacred.”

« He works on the supple embrace between poetry and music permitting all kinds of instrumental and orchestral diversity. He projects the narrative reflection through the repeated musical prisms but always lovingly yielding to the underlying poetic beauty »

The text written by Marc Blanchet has not been yet translate.

Patrick Burgan, Composer by Côme Jocteur-Monrozier

 

“At heart, I am a romantic.”

What first strikes one when encountering Patrick Burgan is a sense of wonder that time has never managed to dull. His music resembles him: dreamlike yet shadowed with unease, sincere to the point of disarming, sweeping audiences and performers alike beyond aesthetic disputes through the sheer power of its imagination. With a catalogue of nearly a hundred works—ranging from chamber pieces to expansive symphonic frescos and opera—Patrick Burgan cultivates a deeply lyrical sonic universe, enamored of timbres, colors, and contrasts.

 

“As a child needs to draw, I needed to write music.”

From his youth in a small town at the foot of the Pyrenees, Burgan has retained something of the autodidact. Even today, the inner world he built during long solitary hours spent reading or dreaming at the piano lies at the core of his musical identity. But when, at seventeen, he entered the Conservatory of Toulouse—with the sketch of a first symphony already completed—he discovered the vast terrain he still needed to explore to truly shape his imagination.

Thus began years of intense study: first rewarded with a music agrégation, then carried further at the Paris Conservatory, where he studied with Ivo Malec, Gérard Grisey, and Betsy Jolas.

“I deliberately chose Ivo Malec, the most experimental of them, a pioneer of electroacoustic music, because I needed to discover everything before finding my own language.”

 

A dialogue between madness and architecture

“Each work is born from an initial cell—a tiny sonic impulse that divides, reproduces, and eventually becomes a complete structure, almost biologically.”

From this germ emerges a score built on the tension between two forces: a raw, almost instinctive energy, and an architectural sense that shapes a narrative, developing form and meaning together. This confrontation passes through the composer’s body itself: “I end up shouting, yelling, because this explosive force needs to break out.”

The resulting music does not reject tonality; instead, it bends it to the demands of a singular, deeply lyrical expression. “The music I write is romantic in the sense of the dreamlike—of unrestrained exaltation and a taste for the extreme.”

 

“If Peter Pan never grows old, it is because he is dead.”

As early as La puerta de la Luz (1994), composed upon his return from the Casa de Velázquez, one finds the child imagined by Federico García Lorca—unborn, demanding answers from the living. This childlike presence, with its unguarded joy and anxious melancholy, has never left Patrick Burgan; it resonates through his entire oeuvre. “I have a kind of obsession with purity: childhood is what has not yet been tarnished by misery.”

It is hardly surprising, then, that the story of Peter Pan inspired him to compose a highly acclaimed opera, premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 2006. Returning to J. M. Barrie’s original tale, Burgan creates a text and score of striking density, where perspectives and timelines intertwine. “Three worlds intersect: the world of memory and nostalgia, the present of the story, and the dream realm of the lost children.”

 

A sensuality of sound

The coexistence of childhood and sensuality is only paradoxical in appearance. An undercurrent of eroticism—more mischievous than perverse—runs through Burgan’s works. It is what led him to set to music the erotic poems of Verlaine, Edmond Haraucourt, or the Song of Songs.

“For me, music is first and foremost the sensual pleasure of sound, the vibration that makes your eardrum quiver like an erotic shiver.”

This taste for voluptuousness also appears in his love of the musical line: his devotion to instrumental and vocal writing—demanding yet never violent—explains his appeal among both performers and audiences. His long-standing collaborations with Les Éléments, Musicatreize, Mikrokosmos, the Méliades vocal quartet, or trombonist Fabrice Millischer (who commissioned from him the monumental Fall of Lucifer) bear witness to this.

 

Words, music, and the invisible

Though he has approached nearly every musical genre, words often serve as the spark for Burgan’s imagination. “For me, the aim is to retrieve the generative idea within a text—the energy that binds its words together—and transmute it into music.”

His oeuvre draws equally upon Romantic poets (such as Lamartine, whose Le Lac he transformed into a kind of hallucinatory vision), liturgical texts (whose literary fervor he knows how to exalt), and writers like Michel Tournier (whose Vendredi he dreams of setting to music).

For Burgan, a text must above all remain audible and comprehensible—a conviction illustrated by Enigma, his most recent opera, based on a play by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Premiered in Metz and recently reprised at the Opéra de Montréal, the work stages a psychological duel between two tenor voices, exploring the very friction of words—what they reveal and what they conceal.

“Music is pure energy; through it, we sense realities that elude us—hidden truths. Perhaps music is the only form of expression capable of approaching the essence of what is real.”