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Uri Brener

  /  Works 1991-2001   /  “Au début et à la fin” (1996) for piano solo
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“Au début et à la fin” (1996) for piano solo

Au début et à la fin” (“At the beginning and at the end“) was composed in Dusseldorf in 1996.
The work is built as a series of short movements, related both through the musical material and
through the atmosphere that can be defined as pessimism, disappointment in the ideals
of the materialistic world and the search for a transcendent revelation.

An appearance of a semi-quote from the “Quator pour la fin du temps” (“A Quartet for the End
of Time”) by A. Messiaen is surely not a coincidence in this context.
It appears at the beginning and at the end of the cycle and it is this particular structural feature
that gave the work its name.

As an epigraph, work features words from the book “Ecclesiast” (1: 3-4, 1: 9-10):

“What profit has man in all his toil that he toils under the sun?
A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever…
What has been is what will be, what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
There is a thing of which [someone] will say, “See this, it is new.”
It has already been for ages which were before us..”

Transcription for two pianos was made and performed in 1999 in Israel.

Publications: IMC (Manuscript)

Music sheets samples:

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