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Mirage Opera – اوپرای سراب

(Migrant Cloud-Track 1 & 5)

7:54 | Tenor | Cello-driven waves, sparse saxophone, ambient piano | C major

Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1874) stands as a defining work in impressionist art, capturing fleeting light and illusory images on the misty waters of Le Havre at dawn. The painting’s luminous ambiguity and evocative power inspired Mirage, an ekphrastic meditation written in 2021 to emulate the emotional journey depicted in Monet’s canvas. Mirage follows the imagery of Monet’s masterpiece: shifting horizons, mysterious waters, an eternal quest for direction, and soulfulness of sunrise.

Mirage Opera is a composition of sustained longing, approaching but never arriving, the musical embodiment of pursuing what perpetually recedes.

Mirage navigates the territory where presence and absence exchange masks, where identity blurs and existence wavers. The central refrain, (In every direction I look, you are absent), appears six times, each iteration carrying a different emotional weight: the first questioning, the second resigned, the third hopeful, the fourth anguished, the fifth cosmic, the sixth definitive. Mirage

The composition employs wave-form architecture, multiple cycles of building and releasing, each crest slightly higher than the last. This structure mirrors the mirage experience: repeated hope, repeated disappointment, the horizon perpetually receding. Mirage undulates, approaching climax, falling away, longing and failing, again and again.

The final twenty-four seconds enact the mirage’s dissolution. After nearly eight minutes of searching, the orchestration drops from full density to near-silence. The mirage dissolves, the emptiness remains.

Mirage Operatic Ballad: A poetic interpretation of the ‘Impressions- Sunrise (Claude Monet 1874)

Where are you,
Oh, the mirror of my yearning?
In this boundless mirage
I journey towards those shores 
(I already know) 'you'd be absent (Tôô Nisstee)' .

Wherever I cast my gaze,
'you are absent (Tôô Nisstee)'

Adrift, I sit in a vessel of dreams,
Chasing the flicker of your trembling shadow,
Setting out—always— towards you,
But 'you are not there (Tôô Nisstee)'

With every turn of fate,
An enchanting siren
Whispers tidings of my arrival, yet
Wherever I look, wherever I gaze,
'you are not there (Tôô Nisstee)'
'you are absent (Tôô Nisstee)'


(Beware) That burning circle in the sky,
Is not the sun!
It is the last of the stars
lingering in my memory, 
of your eyes...
- for which I'm in this pursuit, but
To every place I wander,
To every horizon I search,
'you are absent (Tôô Nisstee)

(Beware) Don’t close your eyes,
for, Here in this endless mirage,
Every other light
Is the deception of the starless nights,
'It is not you (Tôô Nisstee)'

Where are you,
Oh the mirror of yearning?
Longing to find you, but
To every place I wander,
To every direction I look,
'you are not there (Tôô Nisstee)

Where are you?
Whatever direction I go,
Wherever I look,
'you are absent (Tôô Nisstee)

Wherever I look,
Every direction i gaze, 
'you are absent (Tôô Nisstee)