In 1912, at Duino Castle, on the rugged shores of the Adriatic, Rainer Maria Rilke began writing ten elegies. As if he had heard a calling, he set about deploying the themes of the angel, solitude, salvation, love and the Open. In 1981, Luigi Nono extracted from it the title and poetic fragments of a work for choir, bass flute and live electronics: the “breathing clarity”, after a late storm, gives its sounds a sumptuous and ethereal transparency. Though he created his first work at the Freiburg studio, with the most advanced technology of his time, the composer also turned to another literary source, that of ancient Greece and the Orphic lamellae. From goddess Mnemosyne's swamp near a white cypress, once flowed the cool water of a memory of origin, and which soothed burning thirst. Opposite it, chromatic motets by Roland de Lassus, taken from the Prophetiae Sibyllarum, recall Luigi Nono's close link with Franco-Flemish polyphonies and the Renaissance. In relation to the latter, the composer studied a number of treatises and musical manuscripts at the Marciana Library in Venice.