Great composer who comes with a parental advisory


Enfant terrible Claude Vivier's transcendent but overlooked Siddhartha for orchestra in eight groups is probably the outstanding achievement  - listen here - of his too short life, and was inspired by Herman Hesse's eponymous novel. In 1983 Claude Vivier, who is seen above, was murdered in Paris by a male prostitute he had met in a bar; he died aged 34. Musicologist and performer Bob Gilmore wrote the definitive biography of Vivier. Here, unedited, without apology but with a parental advisory, is Bob Gilmore on Vivier's life in Paris.

Indeed, he was more sexually active now than ever. "Claude would boast about fucking nine guys in a sauna, but you never knew where his deep feelings were," says [Walter] Boudreau. "He drew a line that none of us managed to cross, and we can only cross it now listening to his music". 

A quote from Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf provides an appropriate epitaph for Claude Vivier:

The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back to the wolf or the child, but even further into sin, even deeper into human life.  

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