Two Sad Poems

Like Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, 'Two Sad Poems' are dedicated to 'the memory of an angel': in this case to the highly gifted violist Helena Maria Maas who died in 1980 at a very early age. To express these deeply felt emotions, both pieces were conceived in a dissonant and tonally unstable musical language. On closer consideration, these memories and emotions have been expressed in the compositional features of the pieces.