Letters to Mother, cantata for baritone and small orchestra, 1984–1987

In the final period of his life Palester was mainly involved in the reviewing of his compositional legacy. He wrote very few works at the time. These include the cantata Letters to Mother composed to fragments of four letters written by Juliusz Słowacki to his mother. This is what the composer wrote about his newly finished work in a letter to Zofia Helman: "Letters to Mother is fixed und fertig, but the draft still has to be copied. It’s not particularly successful, it’s something false, I don’t know what. Well, fate…"

The twenty-minute Letters to Mother is a single-part work in which we can distinguish four fragments corresponding to four fragments from Słowacki’s letters. The mood is that of quiet melancholy, which matches the words, but also the mood of the composer himself. As in the earlier Laments and theEsspressioni piano cycle, we find here the characteristic three-note motif (G sharp-B-G natural) interpreted by the composer himself as the motif of death.

Letters to Mother was performed for the first time on 23 May 1994 in Cracow by Piotr Kusiewicz and the Capella Cracoviensis ensemble.