Des milliers de baisers (Thousands of Kisses)

“Franck Krawczyk and I wished to revisit the work we had named a Flute, a magical improvisation in a suburb of Santiago, Chile, conceived during the historical moment when students were marching daily in the streets. We returned to Mozart and The Magic Flute, listening to the music he was composing during that period and, desiring to delve deeper, immersed ourselves in two books. One is 1791: Mozart’s Last Year, while the other is simply the enormous volume of his correspondence. Reading his letters and the accounts of witnesses from that final period, we discovered that Mozart believed the Requiem he was composing was indeed his own Requiem and not a commissioned work. ‘I am dying,’ he said on the last day of his life while instructing one of his pupils on how to finish this Requiem. ‘I have the taste of death on my tongue.’ We were so moved that we wanted to experience, with the help of the renowned Kathryn Hunter and Sylvain Levitte (one of the actors from Peter Brook’s Tempest Project), reading these letters, which are at times both very humorous and prosaic, and at others filled with love for his wife Constanze.”

Marie-Hélène Estienne