Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg’s drama Ugolino is perhaps best remembered today as a forerunner of “Sturm und Drang”, the short-lived literary movement, which arose in Germany two years after the play’s publication in 1768. Drawing on a passage in cantos 32 and 33 of Dante’s Inferno, Ugolino dramatises the last hours in the lives of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his three sons, Anselmo, Francesco and Gaddo, who have been imprisoned in a tower by Ruggieri, archbishop of Pisa, and left to starve to death. Gerstenberg’s play has fascinated me ever since I first discovered it in my mid-teens: the Ugolino Symphony (which was written between November 2021 and December 2024) is a response to it. The piece is in one continuous movement, divided into 43 short sections and lasts for approximately 33 minutes. The woodwind and brass (who are joined at various points by different combinations of piano, harpsichord and untuned percussion) play music that is in constant flux, reflecting the interaction of the play’s four characters, who, imprisoned and thrown back on their own resources, "…circle in autistic communication. They remain isolated in the group: only in death can they break out of this isolation.” (Martin Luserke, Sturm und Drang). The music for the strings stands for the space in which this interaction plays out, a “dimly-lit room in the tower”. It consists of a series of nine “motets”, each made up of a group of four or five sections. The start of each motet signals a change in the music’s ground rules, creating a slow-moving and uni-directional backdrop to the more dynamic, kaleidoscopic woodwind and brass music. Approximately half-way through the piece, a new type of music appears, suggested by the “soft, sad music” heard towards the end of the play: Francesco and Gaddo are dead, Anselmo, Ugolino’s eldest son, is on the point of death and Ugolino himself is aware that his end is also near. Scored for three tuned percussion instruments and three keyboard instruments (the piano and harpsichord featured elsewhere in the piece are joined by a celesta), it is slower and more intimate than the music that precedes it. It is related to the six sections entitled “Shard” which appear throughout Die Zwillinge (2021) for piano, which shares a "Sturm und Drang" connection with the Symphony. This music is heard three more times. Its final appearance forms the last section of the piece, framing a setting for unaccompanied soprano of the text sung by Anselmo in the drama’s last minutes. When starting work on the Symphony, I had intended to include settings of all four of the songs which appear during the play, but I eventually decided to use only this final one, which is based on lines from the epic poem Der Messias (1748) by F. G. Klopstock. At the end of the Symphony, the music has moved onto a new level, out of the closed world it inhabits for most of the work. In its final bars, the three keyboard instruments reappear, without the tuned percussion but with the addition of by three trombones and a solo string quintet, forming a funereal coda. Ugolino and his sons have, in death, finally broken out of their isolation.