Description
This piece was written in the months after the death of my mother Ada Bayliss on May 11th 2007 [aged 100 years and 5 months]. During the last few days of her life, which had been previously untroubled by illness, the only music that I could listen to was the Mozart string quintet in C, K515, and it is an inversion of the opening melody of the last movement of that piece that is the basis of the thematic material of the first movement of this quintet. The second movement is a funeral march based on the letters ADA BA[yli]SS and uses the opening viola theme from the second movement of the Mozart quintet. The third movement relieves the tension with "The Year 1906" - also the birth year of Shostakovich, and so DSCH introduces a set of pastiches of popular music hall songs. The last movement weaves elements of Ada's aria Wie lang muss ich doch beklagen from Wagner's early opera Die Feen into an elegiac farewell.