In different ways the music of György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann can be described as an individual, productive dialogue with musical stimulations of the past. This is evidenced in Kurtág’s works by the great breadth of musical forms that he references, extending from the traditional triad by way of highly diverse canonic techniques onto the use of noise – mostly articulated in fragment-like miniatures or in cyclical compositions consisting of such miniatures. In contrast, Widmann is gravitated to the musical expressions of Romanticism and tends to connect their possibilities to his personal ways of sound exploration.

Kurtág’s cycle Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and chamber orchestra, op. 17 (1976–1980), which centres on the failure of human relations, is based on the poems by the Russian poet Rimma Dalos. In language as grotesque as it is drastic and at the limits of self-respect, it lays out one woman’s ideas about loneliness, exhibitionism, and deprivation.

Widmann focuses on the sculpting of sounds: individual instrumental textures of variable density alternate and thereby initiate a process of slipping in and out of different tonal qualities that grows ever thinner toward the end until it finally dissolves into quiet fragments. The word “umdüstert” occurred frequently in Romantic literature, and this fading out of the composition can certainly be read as an indication of an existential point of reference of the music.