This poem is the seed of the complete project.
This project is a musical cycle, including "esquisses", "strophes" and various pieces all using the same material, as well as a larger scenic piece that belongs to the operatic genre.

This poem is exceptional for many reasons.
The first reason is the density, the quality of the images and the tension between the grace and the destruction of love expressed by the metaphors. Strangely enough, these metaphors and the way they are put togother makes this poem sound like a much more modern one.
The second reason is the general theme : instead of the overall celebration of spring and love, the poet uses an inversion of the typical subjects of the trobar (the art of the troubadour): the flower does not charm, but rather cuts and torments; it does not grow, but instead goes inside the earth, between cliffs and hills : it is the inverse flower, the flower of destructive love. Instead of birds singings, itis their whistles, cries and shouts.
Thirdly the form of the poem is constructed in a way that dwells on these obessions: each strophe has the same rhyme pattern, which is made of 8 rhyming words : inverse, hills, ice, cut, whistle, branches, joy, crow...These rhyme words then become keywords, because of their formal importance, their reiteration, and their semantic significance.

The musical web
This complex web of formal ambition and dense expressiveness is for me an aesthetic model of which i make use in each piece of the cycle La Fleur Inverse.
The goal of each piece of this cycle is to use the same musical material, consisting of eight musical categories, each of which was choosen to "illustrate" the keywords :

• inverse : inversion, parody, mockery, contrast
• hill : variations on rhythmic patterns, melodic developments,
  etc.
• joy : "lamento style", based on descending chromatic scales, in canon form (of a special kind, called Morse-Hedlund canon)

Each of these categories has very specific technical features, such as tempi, harmonies, ways of development (or not),etc. that i do no present in detail here.
These features form what Aby Warburg calls "formeln Pathos" : an inextricable mix between describable/undescribable features, which have a strong emotional content. For Warburg, the nymph, for instance, is a formelnpathos in the painting, because it's at the same time a theme, a myth, a symbol, a code, and many technical features. The nymph appears in many different works, under various aspects, and is never the same. It works like a rhetorical formula applied to painting. But it's very easy to apply this concept to music. That's what i've done with the keywords.
Based on this formal data, i have written nearly 20 pieces belonging to the cycle La Fleur Inverse. The last one will be the only one to have the title "la fleur inverse", and will be a summation of the entire work.

The Esquisses
From this cycle, a important group is the series of "Esquisses" (Sketches):
it's a sub-cycle of eight pieces, for eight different instrumentations, with eight different durations. Of course, the occurence of the number eight comes from the number of verses and keywords of the poem. The first one is for solo piano, the second for string trio and flute, the third for six musiciens, the fourth for 26 players, the 5th for orchestra, the 6th for 16 players, the seventh for trio (harpsichord, percussion and double bass), and the eighth for solo harp. As we can easily see, the instrumentations increase from the first to the 5th, then decrease. The durations of the pieces follow the same curve: the first Esquisse lasts 6 mn, and the fith one 25 minutes.
Each one of them uses five of the keywords, always in the order given by the poem. However, since each one begins with a different word, they eight Esquisses can be performed together, linked in order to make a complete circle of the keywords.