Just read ‘Such Times’ by Christopher Coe, chiefly because Paul Griffiths identified the the satyr/composer Claude in the story as French-Canadian Claude Vivier. Since the author of the novel died in 1994, one year after the novel was published, we cannot ask him, but the story is so unusual and unique that it’s hard to read it any other way. For those of us who have been members in the International Monastic Society of Avant-Garde Composition for any length of time, Vivier’s biography is quite unlike most all of our fellows. Libertine, openly gay, murdered in Paris by rough trade – his like does not sound like the usual safe ground inhabited by fellows in our trade. Vivier went to the edge in his life and finally, over the edge, but not before he composed an unusual body of work. The portrait of him in ‘Such Times’ is of a man who’s astonished by affection, hapless in the ways of society and as unvarnished in the ways of a cultured man as could be thought possible as a gay man in his 30s living in Paris on government arts grant money.

It’s doubtful he would have been able to keep it up for long – by the year of his murder in 1983, AIDS was gaining ground in the big cities and fellows like Vivier were just massively exposed. Hence my fascination with him – it was only by living close to personal catastrophe that he was able to  produce works that have the timelessness that practically none of his IRCAM-vetted contemporaries could muster.  It’s more usual for a composer of this genre of music to be the epitome of bourgeois safe living. In America, most pass through a very brief period of bohemianism into a stolid academic life. Vivier would have had none of that. His story is part and parcel to the Dionysian Mysteries: ‘His cult is also a “cult of the souls”; his maenads feed the dead through blood-offerings, and he acts as a divine communicant between the living and the dead.’ (Xavier Riu, Dionysism and Comedy).

In a letter written in Paris near the end, Vivier wrote, “I don’t know why, it seems to me I want to conquer death on its own ground, make it the liberator of beings open to eternity, give humans such a music that their consciousness spills directly into eternity without passing through death, without paying tribute to the old Ferryman of Acheron!”