It was a great challenge for me to compose a fifth symphony. The fifth symphony of a composer had always been something special since the Romantic period: music with great symbolic power. And only to name a few important composers: Beethoven’s Fifth, Schubert’s Fifth, Bruckner’s Fifth (with the gigantic double fugue in the final, a contrasting masterpiece), Mahler’s Fifth (with the trumpet fanfare at the beginning), Sibelius Fifth (transformation of the symphonic form, culminating in the seventh). All this knowledge of such great masters gave me respect, and gave me the idea of writing a fifth symphony myself. A feeling within me drove me to try and write my own fifth symphony, in the heavy-handed key in E minor, it is an elegiac symphony.

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