One February evening in Amsterdam, some ten years ago, my partner, Elisabeth, dug out a videotape of Cherry Duyns’s 1997 documentary film on Claude Vivier and we sat down to watch it together. Elisabeth, the daughter of a Quebecoise mother, appears briefly in the film as a viola player (or, more accurately, her right arm does, vigorously bowing a passage from Zipangu). I had heard some of Vivier’s music as a student and liked it very much, but had paid it little attention in the years since. Still then in the early months of our relationship, we were pleased to discover this shared enthusiasm. The documentary, with its dark lamplit scenes of the Paris metro in the rain, the terrible story of Vivier’s murder and its uncanny prediction in his last, unfinished composition Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Do you believe in the immortality of the soul), left me disturbed and spellbound. After the film Elisabeth said that a biography of Vivier would make a wonderful story and that I should write it. Still reeling from the video and from the heart-stopping last moments of Vivier’s final work, I told her it would be beyond me, my French was (then) not good enough—and it would be impossible to trace all the events surrounding his death.

The fact of Vivier’s murder has, you might say, haunted the posthumous reputation of his music. It seems impossible to discuss his work without mentioning the cruel and sordid circumstances of his death. That death occurred not in the Paris metro, as people tend to assume—conflating the narrative of his last composition with the actual truth of the matter—but in his rented apartment on the rue du Général-Guilhem, at the hands of a young man he had invited home for the night. For some, Vivier’s murder is the key to an understanding of his life and—more controversially—of his art.

That night I slept very little. I was deeply touched by the story of this death-obsessed creative artist. The biographer in me wanted to understand Vivier’s apparent thirst for oblivion, for eternity, or—if such turned out to be a misinterpretation—to lay the myth to rest, to tell the true story, to hear the music without the webs of accumulated cod-psychoanalysis that clung to it.