Tàmâr Metushelah

Tàmâr Mĕtūshelāh, composed by Olivia Belli for Cello and Piano. Score available to download and print at home in digital sheet music format.

This piece was commissioned by Gautier Capuçon. In this piece, I chose not to focus on humanity’s disasters or gloomy scenarios. Instead, I turned to the resilience of nature—its irrepressible vitality. It is in this enduring force that I see a foundation for hope in the future. The coming generations will face immense challenges and will need to draw upon the full range of their remarkable resources—both material and spiritual. To mobilize those resources, I believe we need hope, not fear.

 The inspiration behind the piece was the astonishing story of Methuselah, a date palm that sprouted from a 2,000-year-old seed and was named after the oldest person in the Bible: a tree that stands as a living symbol of the past, of resilience and renewal.