My second String Quartet (dream) was inspired by one of Franz Kafka’s dreams which he described in a letter to his friend Milena Jesenka in September 1920. The letter begins as follows,
“Yesterday I dreamt of you. I no longer know what happened, I only know that we continuously turned into each other, I was you, you were I. Eventually, you caught fire, I remember that we tried to extinguish the fire with a cloth and took an old jacket with which we tried to put out the flames. Yet, the transformations started again and went so far that you were no longer there, but I was the one who was burning and at the same time I was also trying to extinguish the fire [...]. At the end you were rescued and fell into my arms [...]. But still the uncertainty of the transformations increased, perhaps it was I, who fell in somebody else’s arms.”
