Hersch writes:

Completed in 2012, On the Threshold of Winter is my first work for the stage. The search for a text, however, began in earnest much earlier. For various reasons the novels, short stories, plays, biographies, etc., which I had contemplated over the past two decades all in the end proved unworkable to me, primarily due to my own shortcomings. I felt incapable of bringing a musical dimension to each of the works in question. It wasn’t until 2010, when I encountered Adam Sorkin’s and Lydia Vianu’s translation of Marin Sorescu’s devastating last work, The Bridge – which chronicles the final weeks of Sorescu’s unsuccessful battle with cancer – that I knew I had finally found the material I wanted to work with. I did not know of Sorescu before reading this text. I knew nothing of his other work or his history. I simply knew that this slim volume struck and remained with me in unexpected ways.