Artist Diploma - Emmanuel Coppey

This program offers a journey through dance and music as a metaphor for the movement of our lives – their cycles, their contrasts, their intimate upheavals. Three dances of deep expressive weight engage in dialogue with two lighter, more joyful polonaises, in a balance between gravity and lightness, darkness and light.

Bach’s Chaconne, Bartók’s Chaconne, and the minuet from Mozart’s E minor sonata were all composed in funerary contexts. Each dance transforms into a language of farewell, of memory, but also of transfiguration. Bach composed his Chaconne in response to the death of his beloved wife: the work becomes a monument of sublimated grief, an intimate, universal, and timeless funeral rite. Two centuries later, Bartók, suffering from leukemia, also turned to this ancient form for his final composition, entrusting his voice one last time to the violin. Yet his Chaconne takes on a different face: by emphasizing the downbeat, integrating Hungarian rhythms, and using a resolutely modern, pyrotechnic, almost convulsive writing style, he transforms it into a song of resistance against the inevitable. Whereas Bach structures his sorrow around a single theme developed through variations, Bartók introduces a second theme – chromatic, lyrical, and plaintive – that opposes the power of the first one.

Between these two extremes, Mozart’s minuet holds a fragile balance. The E minor sonata, composed upon hearing of his mother’s death, is one of the few works by the composer in this key, often associated with melancholy. The minuet, in particular, condenses a restrained, modest, yet profound sorrow, which finds an echo in the central trio in E major – a suspended moment, luminous and almost unreal in its gentleness. Once again, dance becomes the path of fate: both elegy, remembrance, and an opening toward something beyond – a dance hesitating between shadow and clarity, between loss and the possibility of peace.

To counterbalance this triptych marked by finitude, two polonaises bring a lighter breath, a festive spirit, vitality, and virtuosity. The first, from Beethoven’s Serenade in D major for string trio, still breathes the carefree joy of youth – that of a man not yet struck by deafness. It is a sunlit, elegant, and finely structured dance, showing how music can also reflect happiness. The second, by Wieniawski, belongs to a brilliant tradition: a flamboyant Polish violinist-composer, he left behind pieces that celebrate the violin’s virtuosity and charm. His Polonaise is a firework display, an invitation to flair and freedom in playing – far from the darker meditations that precede it.

Finally, the program concludes with Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht, a pivotal and foundational work in which late Viennese Romanticism stretches to its final breath before the arrival of atonality. Inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel, it tells the story of a woman who confesses to her lover that she bears another man’s child, and the lover’s response, forgiving her out of love. This music, full of tension and resolution, of shadows and sudden bursts of light, embodies the essence of transfiguration: not the forgetting of darkness, but its passage and transcendence. One hears the grace of Vienna, its decadent waltzes, but above all an inner strength that transforms pain into light through the very act of loving.

For me, this work is also an opportunity to be surrounded by dear musicians who have accompanied, inspired, and supported me throughout my time at the Music Chapel. It perfectly embodies the spirit of the place: a demanding quest for excellence, carried by friendship, transmission, and companionship. It is also a way to say thank you to this exceptional place, animated by a team of rare human quality, who have guided me with sensitivity and kindness throughout these three decisive years – three years under the exacting yet benevolent gaze of Augustin Dumay, which have, I hope, brought me closer to a horizon of light.