Like my oratorio “Novae de infinito laudes”, this work, too, has been influenced by the human world and the scenery of Rome, indeed, perhaps even by the greater hardness of the Roman language compared to that of Naples. The first four notes of the subsidiary theme of the second movement which appears for the first time in bar 36 are borrowed from the song “My own, my own” from the second act of my opera “Elegy for Young Lovers”; they appear again and again in various forms, even in the second and third movements.

Hans Werner Henze