In July 1996, Gérard Grisey was at work on the first movement of what would be his final composition, the “Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil” (“Four songs for crossing the threshold”) when he made a note to himself in his journal. “If I ever compose an opera,” he wrote, “make the stakes and the tragedy come not from the external situation of the voices among themselves, but from the relationship between the voices and the sound of the cosmos.” This opera never materialized—shortly after completing the “Quatre chants,” in November 1998, Grisey died of a brain aneurysm. He was 52 years old.
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