The thirteenth-century double-texted, bilingual song known as ‘The Prisoner’s Lament’ (‘Eynz ne soy ke pleynte fu’/ ‘Ar ne kuthe ich sorghe non’) is one of those chance survivals that seem infinitely precious. It gives us not only a single witness of a particular song but also, potentially, a teasing glimpse of a whole musical, poetical and cultural practice associated with it. I say ‘teasing’ because, surviving as a single addition to an apparently unrelated manuscript, it is, on the other hand, confoundingly context-less, yielding few clues as to why it was written down, who sang it, how and to whom. This may well explain its relative neglect by musicologists and literary scholars alike. I would like to explore one way in which it can be made to speak to us – apart from its not inconsiderable charm as a song to perform and hear. What it offers us is a French and an English lyric that are close and nonetheless idiomatic translations (and contrafacts) of each other: a relative rarity in this time and cultural context. Both together, in turn, are a contrafact, but not strictly speaking a translation, of the well-known, internationally famous Latin lament of the Virgin under the cross, ‘Planctus Ante Nescia’ (henceforth referred to as ‘Planctus’). Given its isolated standing, we cannot hope to derive a coherent paradigm of language use and poetic translation from the ‘Prisoner's Lament’ (henceforth ‘Lament’). But close attention to the song, and the various transformations it encodes, nonetheless provides us multiple opportunities to glimpse thirteenth-century translation practice by and for multilingual speakers. By extension, it also suggests that the common medieval (and later) practice of contrafacture – the re-texting of an existing melody – might be a fruitful area of study for historians and theoreticians of translation. In this case, I would argue that the contrafacture is in fact crucial to the translation: the tune provides a necessary intermediary, a catalyst for making the linguistic transfer happen at all.

Translations, transmissions, transpositions of various sorts are of course ubiquitous in medieval culture, even foundational to it: the idea of translatio studii is, after all, one of the chief ways in which medieval intellectuals conceive of their own culture. It also stands to reason that in a polyglossic language environment like post-Conquest England, some form of inter-lingual translation must have happened routinely in most people's daily lives, including in contexts where precise equivalence was not only aimed for but absolutely crucial, such as

Heike Hoffmann is artistic director of the Schwetzingen Festival. In past decades, she was active in a similar position with the Musik-Biennale in Berlin, the Berlin Konzerthaus, and the Salzburg Biennale.

I first met Heike Hoffmann in Berlin, probably at the beginning of 1991. I had taken up my job as deputy director of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in January that year, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Haus Ungarn, as it was then called, found itself in a vacuum, its once faithful visitors having decided to take advantage of their newly won freedom and revel in the rich cultural life offered in the western half of the city, from which they had so long been cut off.

Hoffmann was an “Ossi,” as former citizens of the German Democratic Republic were referred to and, in a way, so was I, coming as I did from what had been the People's Republic of Hungary. She and I shared a similar background and an effort to establish ourselves in the new order of things.

She succeeded to a remarkable degree: born in northern Germany, she started life as an assistant in a private music shop and worked her way up to become a leading light of German musical life.

Hoffmann visited me in the spring of 1991 as representative of the Berlin Biennale, looking for a Hungarian composer from whom the festival could commission a new work. I was in my element: after all, I had been responsible for the promotion of contemporary Hungarian music until a few months before. Our contact produced Elegy for wind quintet and string quintet by András Szőllősy (1921–2007), a piece of enduring appeal, for it continues to be played at regular intervals in Hungary.

I am not sure whether our professional association in the succeeding sixteen years or so was similarly successful from my point of view. In any case, I visited Hoffmann each time I was in Berlin as promotion manager of Universal Edition, Vienna, and informed her about the activities of the publisher's composers. She was friendly, apparently interested—and adamantly impervious to suggestions.

Looking at musical life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany during its years as a communist state) from the vantage point of the Hungarian People's Republic, I gained the impression early on that its most prominent, indeed, most successful representative was Siegfried Matthus. As I write elsewhere in this book, there was of course Paul Dessau (1894–1979) with his immense authority and influence; also, Ernst Hermann Meyer (1905–88), who actually sat on the Central Committee of the communist SED (Socialist Unity Party) and was an outspoken advocate of socialist realism in music. Both of them stood out as figures of political and musical officialdom—but it was Siegfried Matthus (again, as far as I could judge from Budapest) who was actually performed with any frequency and accepted by the public, and whose jovial, easygoing manner made him a popular figure.

Unlike so many composers of the GDR who appear to have faded into oblivion since reunification, some of them during their lifetimes, Siegfried Matthus's presence has remained undiminished. One wonders what his secret might be: after all, he was permitted by the East German authorities to be elected a member of the Academy of Arts in West Berlin as early as 1976, and two years later, of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He had been elected to the East German Academy as early as 1969, at the age of thirty-five.

Matthus was showered with decorations in the GDR and, in reunited Germany, has kept up the tradition. What might be closest to his heart is the naming of a hall after him at Rheinsberg where he founded a festival of chamber operas in 1990. It is called the Siegfried-Matthus-Arena.

As for his secret—it probably lies in the fact that he writes good music.

May 22, 2015

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was considerably intrigued by the serial experiments of my colleagues in the West. It did not so much take courage to publicly acknowledge my interest, rather, my stance was meant as a protest against the official aesthetic dogmas in the GDR.

Here is the list of relevant examples I sent to composers, inviting them to contribute to the book. In doing interviews with some of them, I would start by citing some of the examples below.

The Courage of Composers

John Cage related how he had been encouraged to realize his idea for the silent piece 4ʹ33” by the empty paintings of Robert Rauschenberg:

In his autobiography Hallelujah Junction, John Adams relates: “John Cage was also instrumental in making me feel comfortable and in tune with new technology. His playful yet disciplined approach to objects of twentieth-century life like radios, loudspeakers, microphones, tape recorders, and even computers had for me the effect of empowerment. He gave me the courage to see technology as a fertile terrain for creativity.”

Goffredo Petrassi drew courage from the works of Bruno Maderna and Alberto Burri:

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's outstanding contributions to research into the Middle Ages have highlighted the importance of women and female religious institutions in sponsoring and furthering Anglo-Norman literature, geographically as well as intellectually. Many members of abbeys and priories came from aristocratic families where Anglo-Norman was cultivated as a second language, and the scattering of religious houses widely throughout the country coincidentally aided the geographical spread of the language. In this tribute to our friend and colleague I would like to show how noble and administrative circles also contributed to the diffusion of French in the north of England, and more specifically in Scotland, far from the royal centers of French usage in London and surrounding areas. The documents collected under the title Chancery Miscellanea Scotland, most of them in connection with the events of the Scottish–English wars between 1296 and 1315, constitute a precious resource for illustrating the deep-rootedness of Anglo- Norman among the Scottish nobility, who, from the perspective of language use, turn out to have been indistinguishable from their English counterparts, leading us to recognize the very significant extension of Anglo-Norman.

I will begin with a brief introduction to the troubled history of those times, known as the Scottish War of Independence. Conflict was triggered by the death of King Alexander III of Scotland in 1286, followed by that of the king's threeyear- old granddaughter and only heiress, Princess Margaret of Norway, who died on her way back to Scotland. Her death marked the beginning of a struggle between three representatives of the leading Scottish noble families who laid claim to the throne, namely, John Balliol, John Comyn and Robert de Bruce. Balliol eventually took control of the situation and was crowned king of Scotland in 1292. Edward I had been following Scottish affairs very closely, trying to influence their evolution in his favor, since, as king of England, he claimed a right of suzerainty over Scotland. In this context, Balliol's overly conciliatory policy toward the English became the cause of growing discontent among the Scots, and in 1295 the discontented Scottish barons created a tutorship council whose members were designated as guardians of Scotland. All the while, Scotland and France were tightening their alliance, which was reason enough for England to engage in war with Scotland in the spring of 1296.

Charlemagne was the great symbol of the political aspirations of the Capetians as they struggled to consolidate their hold over their far-flung and rebellious vassals. When English kings sought legendary precursors to support their territorial ambitions, they turned instead to Arthur. Benedictine monks practiced the lectio divina or, when they descended to earthly literary pursuits, composed elaborate Ovidian homoerotic Latin poetry. All three of these statements would command considerable support among medievalists. Yet the presence of what is arguably a Plantagenet celebration of Charlemagne, a carefully edited copy of La Chanson d’Aspremont, now Cologny, Bodmer 11, in an English Benedictine monastery, St Augustine’s, Canterbury, suggests an alternate literary history. In this history, English monks work hard to prepare and preserve a chanson de geste; Charlemagne serves to strengthen the resolve of thirteenth-century English rulers; and a text that might have once have been considered to belong to French literature is returned to its original Anglo-Norman milieu and assigned a significant role in the English political struggles of the day.

Long before the Conquest, the phenomenally wealthy Benedictine abbey of St Augustine’s, Canterbury had amassed one of the finest libraries in all England. At its height, the abbey housed over 1,900 books, 300 of them still extant. The bulk of the abbey's collection was composed of religious texts, but there were also a certain number of chronicles and prophecies, as well as thirty-four books in French: a copy of Brunetto Latini's encyclopaedia, Li livres dou tresor, popular religious texts such as Laurent d’Orlean's Somme le roi and Grosseteste's Chasteau d’Amour, and several chansons de geste and romances. We are singularly well informed about this collection because St Augustine's had developed a system to encourage elderly brothers to make sure that after their deaths their books, whether ones they had purchased themselves, been given or borrowed from the abbey's huge library, came back into the main collection. The books were duly noted in the library catalogue, Dublin, Trinity College, 360 with, at least in some cases, an entry ‘de acquisitione fratris defuncti’ copied into the book itself. The catalogue, in the careful and monumental edition by B. C. Barker-Benfield, offers a remarkable picture of St Augustine's and its books.

The moment that has stuck with particular vividness in my mind during our conversation in Rebecca Saunders's rather Spartan studio in a no less austere block of flats in Berlin where she lives with her family was, when in her emotionally charged way, she suddenly pointed at three short sketches in the manuscript spread out on her desk. Faster than I could really follow, she indicated in quick succession the sketches and said: “I could pick this one or this one or that one.” The choice was hers and at that moment, the loneliness of the long-distance (i.e., professional) composer was brought home to me with tremendous force, as never before. Loneliness coupled with barely suppressed excitement. I felt I was eye- and earwitness of a creative moment in Rebecca Saunders's life.

Yes, the choice was entirely hers and it was really up to her judgment, her talent, her musicality, to make a final and definitive decision. Did courage play any role there?

Of course, the story of revised versions is as endless as that of world premieres; making a decision does not mean that you hew a piece out of a block of marble and are leftwith an unchangeable result. I remember the world premiere of Berio's Alternatim for clarinet, viola and orchestra in Paris in 1997. It leftBerio rather morose and soon enough he added a beautiful highly expressive solo for the viola to redress the balance between the two instruments: the clarinet had proved too prominent. He had made a decision in his study at Radicondoli and, when faced with the sounding result, he realized he had miscalculated.

In his essay “The Anxiety of Art,” Morton Feldman admits that artists have many anxieties, “trying to make something, trying to find safeguards against failure.” There is even, he says, an “anxiety of Art.”

No wonder, then, that sitting at her desk with her manuscript spread out before her, Rebecca Saunders was torn between choosing a way to go forward in her work, fully aware of her responsibility toward her art. She was probably unaware right at that moment that she might make changes afterward. You cannot live in a permanent anxiety of art. You must have the courage to overcome it and live with the result.

William Langland wrote his masterpiece, Piers Plowman, in English, in a distinctly Germanic four-stress unrhymed alliterative metre and developed much of his ethical and political analysis out of a social model proudly conscious of its origins in Anglo-Saxon England. When his poem quotes the auctoritates around which many of its arguments circulate, most often verses from the Bible or wellknown apothegms from the Fathers, it follows a citational practice standard in vernacular texts, acknowledging its merely local claims to truth by recording them first in carefully rubricated Latin.

As a work of allegorical satire and narrative theology, however, Piers Plowman is mainly a French poem. French texts, written on both sides of the Channel, offer most of the best analogues for the poem's satirical allegories, such as the winding story of Lady Mede and her marriage told in its first vision; for its didactic allegories, such as the pilgrimage to Saint Truth that inaugurates its second vision; and for its picture allegories, such as the Castle of Caro that we encounter in its third vision. Like his most highly educated first readers, Langland may have known one or more of the difficult Latin prosimetra of the twelfth century by Alain de Lisle or Bernardus Sylvestris, and likely did know their great progenitor, Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae. But the assumptions about the resources of allegorical narrative that informed both his own craft as a poet and the horizon of expectations of his first audience were for the most part learned from a sophisticated, diverse and consistently unexpected genre of French allegories that extended from the turn of the thirteenth century down to Langland's day: from works, that is, such as Raoul de Houdenc's Songe d’enfer, Huon de Meri's Torneiment Anticrist and Voie de paradis, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose, Nicholas Bozon's Char d’orgueil and Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de l’âme.

The phrase ‘French of England’, as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has defined it, encompasses medieval England's francophony as it shaped a range of literary, social, political and commercial practices for nearly four hundred years, from the eleventh through the early fifteenth centuries. It links what seem at first to be incompatible terms – the French language, on the one hand, and England on the other. It invites scholars to embrace medieval England's plurilingualism and it beckons toward an exceptional and exceptionally well-documented instance of the flow and mix of several languages in multilingual cultures. The term implies the dynamism of linguistic movement and exchange that characterized medieval England, and in so doing it hints at the riches of a complex situation that the term ‘Anglo-Norman’ is not thought to evoke. Moreover, the conventional division between Anglo-Norman, deemed to cover the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and ‘Anglo-French’, denoting the later medieval period, implies interruption where there was in fact continuity. The French language in England effloresced and then faded in some places and among some groups, only to appear and adapt itself among other groups and at other times. In short, a revised way of framing the question called for a new title.

The arrival of the French language did not suddenly bring multilingualism to the British Isles, already the home of a mix of Celtic, Germanic and Scandinavian vernaculars as well as of Latin. The ‘French of England’ asks us to understand medieval England's multilingualism not simply as the cohabitation in one geographical area of, say, three separate and contained languages but, rather, as a process, a set of unselfconscious interactions between speech acts or writing moments that used the resources offered by at least three languages: Latin, French and English. It was a diffuse, variable, dynamic phenomenon best envisaged not in a fixed linguistic or cultural configuration or existing in a rigidly circumscribed geography but as a process, its circulation an agent of expression and communication between individuals and groups.

It surely takes tremendous daring to leave the ship you are sailing on, in good and supportive company, and change midcourse to another vessel headed in a different direction. The ship was showing no signs of sinking by any means, its passengers clearly convinced that “fair stood the wind for the future” (to misquote the title of H. E. Bates's war novel).

Lorenzo Ferrero is not the only composer to have decided that he needed to turn his back on his former musical convictions. The most notable—or notorious—example is perhaps the Slovak avant-gardist Ladislav Kupkovic (b. 1936) who went as far back as Robert Schumann to find a new point of reference. In a way, I also count Alexander von Zemlinsky among these stubborn musicians, even though he had never jumped on the dodecaphonic bandwagon but defied his brother-in-law Schoenberg in keeping to his own special brand of late Romanticism.

I think I need not add anything to the above: the first few paragraphs of Lorenzo Ferrero's recollection provide a graphic description of the situation into which he had maneuvered himself. Those paragraphs also tell you of the downright harmful role some music critics have played in their dogmatic effort to get the stray sheep to return to the flock. A clear case of the tyranny of taste! You need all your conviction and strength of character to stay away from the pen and graze on fields you can call your own.

April 30/May 13, 2015

For me, the word courage is related to a specific moment in my career. I grew up as if the avant-garde were the natural language of music. Very early on, I received admiration, recognition, commissions … Except that at some point I realized there was something wrong in that, the musical language I mean. A few hints of different directions, cautiously included as quotations in some works, immediately caused critics to suspect me of betrayal. I remember one of them, a former admirer, who went all the way down a corridor with his face to the wall in order to avoid meeting me. We were in the late seventies of course …

My go-between for composers published by Sikorski in Hamburg has been its selfless and helpful director, Hans Ulrich Duffek. He was kind enough to establish contact on my behalf with the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli as well as with Sofia Gubaidulina, gently reminding them once in a while of my request for a contribution to this book.

Kancheli was particularly hesitant about whether he was up to bringing pen to paper: he was ill and had just completed a new orchestral work that had exhausted him.

The short text he did eventually send me is moving in its simplicity and humility. At the end of one's life one realizes one knows little in comparison with the masters of the past—but one goes on writing music nevertheless, with this nagging question in one's mind: am I any good? I find something oriental in this attitude: the master, pen in hand, crouching over a sheet of paper, bowing his head in honor of his predecessors.

May 2015

I have recently completed a work and have called it Nu.Mu.Zu. In the language of the ancient Sumerians, the three words mean “I do not know.” And indeed, the longer I live (I shall turn eighty this year), the more frequently I am confronted with questions to which I do not know the answers. For instance, I do not know how a normal human being who has heard Bach's B-minor Mass, Mozart's Requiem, or Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps can muster the courage to compose music. Nu.Mu.Zu (that is, I do not know).

Paul Griffiths has been a friend for over three decades. He was chief music critic of the Times of London when we first met; subsequently, he was on the staff of the New York Times and the New Yorker, before becoming freelance.

The first of the above two sentences is a private statement of fact. The second could be taken from an official curriculum vitae. This headnote is bound to be in turn subjective and objective; a mixture of the two is probably not possible (can one be subjectively objective?)

I admire Paul's supreme mastery of the English language. His letters to me, especially since his move to Manorbier in Wales, where he begins his days with an early morning walk along the coast in the company of his dogs, are veritable gems in that they describe nature as he observes its colors, shapes, and sounds.

An impression of his poetry can be gained from the poem printed in the interview with Hans Abrahamsen: drawn from Griffiths's unique Ophelia novel, let me tell you, it inspired the Danish composer to create a song cycle for soprano and orchestra, which won the Grawemeyer Award in 2016.

Paul's critical writing is represented by a quote from the third edition of his Modern Music and After, chosen to underpin what I have to say about George Crumb. That is of course just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Paul's oeuvre is huge; a fraction of his output fills a shelf in my library. He has written on a wide range of subjects, perhaps most notably contemporary music. In any case, he is probably the only writer on music to have been honored with the rank of OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire): this occurred in the Queen's New Year's Honours in 2014, for his services to contemporary composition (as well as to literature).

Literature: yes, Paul Griffiths has written a range of novels. The first one, Myself and Marco Polo (1989), inspired Tan Dun to compose an opera. The libretto, fashioned from the novel by Paul himself, was followed by further essays in that genre, the most prestigious being What Next?

This is a sad, indeed, a tragic story.

When I first met the German composer in Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), probably in 1983, my job was to do a radio program on music in the GDR. We met in the lobby of a hotel with Georg Katzer, Friedrich Goldmann, and Friedrich Schenker also present to be interviewed.

I sensed a distance that appeared to separate Dittrich from his colleagues. Even after an interval of more than three decades, I cannot forget a head turned in another direction when Dittrich was speaking, I can hear the silence that followed before another composer broached a subject that did not seem to have anything to do with the one discussed by Dittrich.

The reason for his apparent isolation was that, of all the East German composers, Paul-Heinz Dittrich had a publisher in the West: Universal Edition (UE) had signed him on, thanks to the interest taken in his music by UE's director, Alfred Schlee. That made Dittrich's position unique: he received commissions, his works were performed beyond the East German borders— he could step across the Iron Curtain.

And suddenly, it all came to an end. By the time I joined Universal Edition in 1992, Paul-Heinz Dittrich had vanished, if not from the catalog, certainly from the list of composers actively promoted by the publisher. I do not know the reason and, faced with having to master such a huge catalog, I am ashamed to admit that I failed to make inquiries.

You can read the whole story in the following page or so, told by the composer himself, who is physically still here with us but who will leave us one day, with his music filling shelves rather than concert halls. By the way, the “political change” to which he refers was the shiftfrom communism to capitalism, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

May 19, 2015

In my long life as a composer, that motto by Theodor Fontane has proved itself time and again, in many regards.

Vienna, March 13, 2015

Revised September 2015

I know Friedrich Cerha better than most of the composers in this book. I was responsible for the promotion of his music during my time with his publisher, Universal Edition, and that has meant knowing his wife, Traude Cerha, just as closely. They are a modern reincarnation of Philemon and Baucis, very much like György and Márta Kurtág.

Friedrich Cerha is one of those rare personalities whose very presence in a society establishes a standard the rest of us regard with awe and aspire to be worthy of. That is what teachers should ideally be like—and he was for many years a professor of composition at Vienna's music academy. Friedrich Cerha is a poeta doctus. I admire his music with all its various facets—perhaps most of all its lyricism with its touch of melancholy and pain—but also his (often self-deprecating) sense of humor in private intercourse as well as in his hilariously witty pieces based on Viennese popular music.

I have often experienced Cerha as a conductor—sparing in his gestures, steering the orchestras and ensembles rather than impressing them with spectacular flourishes—and sometimes also in preconcert talks where in his quiet voice he gave us fascinating insights into his music and his private world that feeds it. Your wife has very nearly discouraged me from confronting you with my question regarding the role of courage in the creative process: she says courage is so much part of your makeup that its presence or absence simply does not arise as a problem.

Indeed, I cannot make much of the notion of “courage.” It is rather like “happiness.” You may perhaps hear people say, “I am so happy,” but they are more likely to say, “That was a happy time.” And I think no one would declare, “I am courageous”; they would rather say, “It was quite courageous of me at the time.” Courage is a quality you simply have—or you do not have.

I have never felt “courageous.” Twice I deserted the German Wehrmacht. It could have cost me my life but I never considered it an act of courage; it was the most natural thing to do, once the chance had presented itself.

I owe Michael Gielen three of my basic musical experiences: his interpretation of Mahler's Third Symphony in Vienna's Konzerthaus, a concert devoted entirely to compositions by Webern at the same venue, and a performance of Kurtág's Stele in Donaueschingen.

It is difficult to render in words what made the Mahler symphony such a unique experience. It was a journey of discovery, with an extraordinary creative and re-creative musician of analytical bent as my guide. Just how analytical becomes apparent if you read Gielen's essay on a short passage of the symphony. It makes an astounding, well-nigh frightening read: you are invited to witness the dissection of the composition's body—the joints, the sinews—with relentless objectivity.

At the concert, Gielen allowed the soul to take over and fill the dissected body with life once again; he also showed aspects of the music I had never noticed before. It was a new Mahler, richer, more “modern,” more adventurous than any of the interpretations I had heard. It was immensely exciting and, thank goodness, has been made available on CD.

Gielen had clearly also dissected Webern in the same manner, but what struck me at that concert was the rehabilitation of the music as music in the Mahlerian sense of the word. I have a vague memory of Peter Stadlen, a pupil of Webern, remembering the composer's admonition that his music was very well charged with emotion, it was anything but a cold, objective structure of tones. Gielen demonstrated what Stadlen, that is, Webern had in mind.

The story of Kurtág's Stele in Donaueschingen was an object lesson in the fundamental significance of authentic interpretation for the future destiny of a composition. Completed in 1994 for Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, Kurtág's Opus 33 proved a hard nut for the noted conductor to crack. In fact, he never managed to crack it—a failure that misrepresented the music and had a devastating effect on the composer. He told me that after a performance in Valencia, Spain, he had been ready, figuratively, to jump out of the window.

In the “plurologue” that emerges among composers in this book, each individual tells his or her story—stories that add up to an aspect of the history of music in the last decades of the twentieth and the first years of the twenty-first centuries.

Sofia Gubaidulina was five years old when the Stalinist purges began to wreak havoc in the Soviet Union and eight when they ebbed away. To what extent her birthplace, Chistopol, in the Republic of Tatarstan was affected, I do not know. Did she grow up in an atmosphere of fear?

She was twenty-two when Stalin died; the year after, she graduated from the Kazan Conservatory. During her subsequent studies in Moscow, her music was deemed irresponsible because of her experiments with alternative tunings. Roughly at the same time, György Ligeti fell afoul of the authorities in Hungary because of some unorthodox aspects of a movement of his Six Bagatelles for wind quintet; János Viski suffered a fatal heart attack after a confrontation with the Budapest Music Academy's director over a dangerously Webernian student composition by Péter Eötvös. Siegfried Matthus and Paul-Heinz Dittrich supply their own reminiscences about their experiences in communist East Germany. Their luckier colleagues in the West, such as Wolfgang Rihm or Manfred Trojahn, comment on those years from their own vantage points.

Gubaidulina was to face further difficulties over her experimentations with improvisation; she was bound to be condemned by the all-powerful general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, Tikhon Khrennikov. She found support from Dmitri Shostakovich—and several of her colleagues represented in this book confirm their need of a father—or mother—figure at some point in their lives: such as Günter Bialas was for Jörg Widmann, Marianne Stein for György Kurtág, or Elfriede Jelinek for Olga Neuwirth.

For all these aspects that Sofia Gubaidulina may have in common with some of her colleagues, she is very much a personality all her own. On the only occasion I met her for a couple of minutes in person, she struck me as extremely shy.