Angelo Silente is a sister work of Ange Silencieux.
The title, silent angel, might cause false expectations regarding the content of the piece. I.e. if, at all, there is an angel in the piece, it hardly belongs to the idyllic and scrap-like sphere. More likeable, it could be a violent, horrible and shirling revelation, a tremendum, in Rilke’s meaning:
Hvem ville høre mig, hvis jeg skreg i engelenes vrimmel?
og om en af dem pludseligt tog mig til hjerte:
da ville jeg tilintetgøres blot ved dens stærkere tilstedeværelse.
Thi det skønne er intet andet end det forfærdendes begyndelse,
som det kun knapt er os muligt at bære,
og som vi må beundre, fordi det så sindigt forsmår at knuse os
Frygtelig er hver eneste engel …
(Rilke: 1. Elegi)
The work was written in San Cataldo. And was furthermore written in the portable computer’s childhood. During a hard thunderstorm, the music file disappeared totally from the harddisc of the computer. Real men always take a back-up – on the other side, they sometimes cry. The work which, at the time, had no name, had to be recreated from scratch. In one of the other rooms of the old monastery, there was comfort to be obtained: professor of literature Erik Nielsen informed me of a poem by Rilke, where an angel appeared, who remembered all the things which human beings tend to forget. That solved the problem of the title: The silent angel – Angelo Silente …