12 - “In Quebec people die easily” (1983–)

Summary

The tragic news first became public in Quebec in a notice in the Journal de Montréal on Sunday, March 13, 1983. Under the title “Claude Vivier Strangled,” the paper reported:

The composer of music Claude Vivier, 35 years old [correctly, 34], originally from Montreal, was discovered strangled, yesterday afternoon in his Paris apartment where he had been living for less than a year….

Alerted by friends who had not heard from the victim for several days, the police gained entry to the apartment after breaking through the door. They discovered the dead body of the composer in his room, strangled under a mattress. The apartment had been ransacked.

An obituary, by Claude Gingras, followed in La Presse the next day: “I didn’t much like his music. However it was with infinite sadness that I took out his dossier to add the last information concerning him. CLAUDE VIVIER (1948–). Now it should read: CLAUDE VIVIER (1948–1983). It’s never nice to add, in this way, the date of death to someone’s name.” A more extended and thoughtful obituary followed in Le Droit a few days later. “The inner journey can lead to precipices,” wrote the journalist J. J. Van Vlasselaer. “This XXIst century Romantic, like all true Romantics, took risks in order to find himself. So the absurd hands of a vicious strangler have stifled one of the musical glories of our country.”

To his friends, almost as upsetting as the news of his murder was the thought that Vivier’s body had lain undiscovered in his apartment for more than four days before the Paris police had forced entry. As the full picture slowly began to emerge, the real tragedy of his death became all the more apparent. And while the events of the night of March 7–8, 1983, are straightforward to describe, aspects of their interpretation have unleashed a controversy that has raged ever since, and will perhaps never be satisfactorily resolved.

On the night of Monday, March 7, Vivier was drinking in a bar—which has never been reliably identified—in the Belleville neighborhood, not far from his apartment on rue du Général-Guilhem. He found himself attracted to a young man there and invited him home for the night.