Sieben Fragmente für Orchester

‘At present, I am writing a piece for orchestra which I think I am going to call
“Fragmente”…’ said Aribert Reimann in October 1987. His idea to incorporate three fragments of Schumann’s Geistervariationen (‘Ghost Variations’) theme in Eb major into the work only came later. Often described as Schumann’s ‘last thought’, the variations were written shortly before his attempted suicide. Inspired by his simultaneous work on the orchestration of Gedichte der Maria Stuart, Reimann wanted to refer to the circumstances of Schumann’s life in Endenich. It was then that he discovered the relationship of this theme to the motifs already composed by him. It is very similar to the chant of the solo violin in the slow movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto.

In Reimann‘s work, the lyrical character of Schumann‘s original remains untouched. The breaking up of the theme into the third, fifth and seventh fragments, however, makes the transition from dreamlike imagination to suicidal depression quite clear.