Nuage Vermeil

About

“Nuage Vermeil is a piece composed for the Quatuor Sedna. I chose to work around the poem "Abîme – La Voie Lactée" by Victor Hugo. This text is inspiring for its ambivalence: while contemplating the splendor of the stars, it also observes a vertigo of solitude and silence. If the sky is a forest and a cluster of rays, it is also a desert where sound dies. In this night, a fragile trace remains, a “scattered red ash.”
In my musical writing, I echo this oscillation between light and darkness by making compact vocal masses heard, like a constellation, but also sudden bursts and brief moments of suspension, like a dissolution. I treated the quartet as a polyphony that tightens and then loses itself again.
Finally, only a few lines from the poem appear in the piece, selected to evoke the cosmic immensity. The title is also borrowed from this same poem.”

– Clara Olivares, August 2025



Millions, millions, and millions of stars!
I am, in the dreadful shadow and under the sacred veils,
The splendid forest of constellations.
It is I who am the cluster of eyes and rays,
The unheard-of and gloomy thickness of lights,
Still overflowing with the first effluvia,
My dazzling abyss is your source, all of you.
O stars below, I am so far from you
That my vast archipelago of motionless splendors,
That my heap of suns is, for your weak eyes,
At the bottom of the sky, a lugubrious desert where sound dies,
Only a little scattered red ash in the night!
But, oh crawling and heavy globes, what dread
For whoever would penetrate my living glow,
For whoever would see up close my nuage vermeil! (...)

Victor Hugo, Abîme – La Voie Lactée (1877)