The Woman in Gold (2026) for flute and string quartet
-Commissioned by the Dolce Suono Ensemble and the Library of Congress’ Verna and Irving Fine Endowment
-Premiered at the Library of Congress on April 18th, 2026

Program Listing

The Woman in Gold (2026)

Program Notes

When Mimi Stillman approached me about writing a new work for the Dolce Suono Ensemble’s twentieth anniversary, I was delighted and honored. But when she proposed the story of the “Woman in Gold” as the subject of the piece, I was even more excited, as it was a topic with a personal connection for me. I knew the story well: how the Nazis seized several Klimt paintings from the Bloch-Bauer family, how the Austrian government resisted returning them, and how the family ultimately succeeded in getting their beloved artwork back. In fact, I lived in Vienna while the specific Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for which the story is named was still hanging in the Belvedere Gallery. I visited the museum many times, unaware then of the provenance of its most famous work from the Bloch-Bauer collection.

The music of my "Woman in Gold” is inspired by the difficult history of that Klimt portrait and by the world of its subject, Adele Bloch-Bauer. More broadly, the piece is about loss, memory, and return. It begins with a gauzy introduction by the flute, intended to convey the creative process at work manifest in the painting. Out of that ambiguity we are brought into the energy of early twentieth-century Vienna through lilting dance lines and improvisatory rhythms. This darkens into a fist-clenched march as the flute rises to sound an alarm by the movement’s end.

The second movement returns to some of the solo flute music from the opening and is continues on into an exploration of the traditional tune “Ani Ma’amin,” sung with hope and defiance during the horrors of the Holocaust. The tune appears at the climax of the movement with each instrument displaced around it. This gives way to the third movement, which music of return, celebration, and unity as the portrait is returned to the family, a symbolic act of justice and the power community.

My own family left Austria early, at the first sign of persecution, when my grandfather Rudolf Serkin was not permitted to play in a music festival because he was Jewish. This was a red line for his mentor and father-in-law, my great-grandfather Adolf Busch, who took the entire family to the United States after they were pursued by Nazi agents around Europe. Long before this, my grandfather had studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg. In 1992, I studied composition in the same house just outside Vienna where my grandfather had studied but seventy years later, with one of Schoenberg’s last students, Richard Hoffmann. And the lawyer who recovered Klimt’s painting for the Bloch-Bauer family? Schoenberg’s grandson, Randol Schoenberg.

Woman in Gold was written for Mimi Stillman and the Dolce Suono Ensemble for their twentieth anniversary, with deep gratitude for the opportunity to tell this important history through music.