Dedicated to my long-standing and closest friend, Raymonde Sassoon, La Douceur is simply a love-poem. There are no words, no narrative, simply expressions of very deep feelings. The piece is in one continuous movement, in two 'stanzas', one might say. The first, twice as long as the second, has long, overlapping melodic lines, often forming canons. The lines contain recurrent, evolving motifs, creating a sense of gentle contemplative development, and the structure is supported by warm harmonic pillars created from the way the melodies come together at certain points. The second 'stanza', with the subtitle . . . et la Tendresse, has a similar structure, but shorter phrases and a sense of deep relaxation - though never of conclusion.