Two Dialogues with Postscript

Richard Wagner’s famous so-called Theme in A flat major (WWV 93) is fraught with romantic allusions. Valen tin Silvestrov’s versions of 8 bars from the ’Tristan’ period (1858) and 13 bars from the time of ‘Parsifal’ (1882) are fragmentary, being no more than ‘fleeting’ moments, Wagnerian ‘flashes of lightning’ so to say, that have been captured by a snapshot.

As an answer to these ‚momentary’ intonations, calls and motives that flash past and grip his aural imagination the composer weaves his melodies. He does not consider such versions to be arrangements, for him they are simply attempts to continue the story, to enter into a dialogue with the past. The Wagner-Theme, for example, is expanded by a series of seemingly never-ending cadenzas.