The Porazzi Fragment

The origins of this work lie in a 13 bar, unpublished fragment of music by Richard Wagner, said to be the music he was playing on the piano on the night he died. It was music that seems to have preoccupied Wagner for many years, composing it shortly after the completion of Parsifal in Palermo, Piazza dei Porazzi. Gavin Bryars took this fragment as the starting point for his work, Wagner’s original music emerging at the works conclusion, in the same way the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony emerges at the end of Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, also for solo strings.