Louis Andriessen’s composition De Tijd premiered in 1981 at the Hollans Festival. It was inspired by the theologian and philosopher St. Augustine and his ideas about time.
De Tijd is set to a fragment of St. Augustine's Confessions and forms the third in a series of instrumental-vocal works. The first was De Staat (The Republic, 1976), to Plato, and for the second, Mausoleum (1979), Andriessen drew on the Russian revolutionary anarchist Bakunin. The first bars of De Tijd were composed in March 1980, shortly after the completion of George Sand (a text by Mia Meijer), the third of Andriessen's operas for the theatre group Baal.
[Source: The Art of Stealing Time, Louis Andriessen; ed. by Mirjam Zegers, transl. (from Dutch) by Clare Yates, 2002, Arc Music]
