The starting point was a single image: sunlight through stained glass in an empty cathedral — not the cathedral full of people, not the ceremony, not the performance — the cathedral when no one is watching. That particular quality of broken, colored light falling across stone floors when the room belongs only to itself. Something both sacred and abandoned. Beautiful and aching at the same time.
From that image came the title. Lumière brisée — broken light — is a French term used in painting and optics for light that has been refracted, scattered, split into its component colors by passing through something transparent. A prism does it. A raindrop does it. Stained glass does it. The piece asks: what does a piano do to grief? Does it break it into colors too? Can something painful, passed through the right medium, become something luminous?
The key of D♭ major was not chosen — it was required. D♭ major is the key of Chopin's Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2, of Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte, of some of the warmest, most velvet piano writing in the repertoire. Five flats force the hands into a particular geography on the keyboard — the thumb and fingers fall naturally into positions that feel intimate, close, like speaking quietly in a dark room. It is the tonality of candlelight. There was no other choice.
The structure came from watching how grief actually moves — not in straight lines, not in dramatic gestures, but in the way Chopin understood it: intimate whisper first, then warmth building slowly, then a moment of almost unbearable openness, then return, then quiet. The arc of a nocturne is the arc of remembering something you loved.