[ANPPOM-Lista] hans werner henze, 1926-2012

[Carlos Palombini]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9637856/Hans-Werner-Henze.html
Hans Werner Henze Hans Werner Henze, who has died aged 86, was a major
figure in the music of the past half-century and the leading German
composer of the post-1945 era; but he was often at odds with his native
country politically and aesthetically.
  [image: Hans Werner Henze]
 Hans Werner Henze Photo: STEFFAN HILL

2:16PM BST 27 Oct 2012

In his personal life and his music, Henze was a natural outsider but not
perhaps a natural rebel. He embraced Communism, especially Fidel Castro’s
Cuban variety, campaigned for homosexual causes and still accepted
patronage from capitalist and subsidised institutions, including those in
Germany. He made synthesis in music into an art form. At one time a strict
adherent to the serial technique of composition, he later abandoned it.
Declaring his belief in melody, he was regarded by the avant-garde as a
traitor to the cause. But he experimented with electronic instrumentation.

During the 1960s it seemed that Henze was stranded between the new and the
old wave of musical fashion. To the conservative general public his music
(although often what is called accessible) still presented enough
challenges and difficulties for him to be regarded as dangerously “modern”.
But the middle ground of musical opinion welcomed him as one of its own.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Pears, Elisabeth Søderstrøm, Irmgard
Seefried, Benjamin Britten and Julian Bream were among those who admired
and performed his works.

One of Henze’s most spectacular clashes with the establishment occurred in
Hamburg in December 1968, when what he called his “vulgar and military”
oratorio The Raft of the Medusa was to have its first performance. Composed
as a requiem for the revolutionary Che Guevara, it was based on the event
depicted in Géricault’s painting.

Before a note of Henze’s music was played, Left-wing students provoked a
riot which led to police intervention and arrests. Henze wisely abandoned
the concert; and although the oratorio had a radio performance shortly
afterwards, it was not performed in public until January 1971, in Vienna.

Henze composed 20 operas, including reconstructions of works by other
composers such as Monteverdi, nine symphonies, 12 ballets and many
orchestral, chamber and choral works. After 1975 he was closely involved
with a festival in the small Tuscan town of Montepulciano. Not only
celebrated performers but also students and the townspeople took part. Even
there, politics caused dissension, but hostility to the festival gradually
lessened as its economic advantages to the town grew.

Hans Werner Henze was born at Guterslöh, Westphalia, on July 1 1926, the
eldest of six children of a schoolmaster, Franz Gebhardt Henze. In 1929 the
family moved to Bielefeld, but in 1934 the school where Franz was teaching
was closed because the Nazis disapproved of its progressive curriculum.

The Henzes moved to Dünne, where Franz taught at the village school and a
year later was unwillingly coerced by colleagues into joining the Nazi
Party. Unfortunately, he became an enthusiastic convert. Henze retained
memories of his father, in his Nazi uniform, “roaming drunkenly through the
woods with his party cronies, bawling out repulsive songs”. Franz Henze was
killed in action during the war.

Hans had to join the Hitler Youth, which he hated. Although he wanted to
study music, he was discouraged by his father. But his mother took him to
the opera, after which he began to compose. In the early years of the war,
he neglected his school work for musical activities. His compositions were
shown to Wilhelm Maler, a professor in Cologne, who encouraged him. He was
also lent forbidden scores of Mahler and Hindemith and books on
contemporary composers including Berg, Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

In 1941 Henze entered a music school at Braunschweig. Three years later he
was conscripted and sent to an armoured division near Magdeburg, where he
trained as a signaller. Later he was transferred to Denmark. From May to
August 1945 he was a prisoner-of-war of the British but was released and
resumed his musical studies under the composer Wolfgang Fortner in
Heidelberg. He stayed there until 1948, earning a living as tutor to the
children of a law professor, Dr Adolf Schüle.

In the autumn of 1946 he travelled to Darmstadt for the “new music” summer
school run by René Leibowitz. There he conducted Hindemith’s Lehrstück. His
own Chamber Concerto for piano, flute and strings earned him a publishing
contract with Schott. He attended Darmstadt each year for several years,
becoming a private pupil of Leibowitz in 1948. He adopted serialism in his
First Violin Concerto in 1947, but his early works reflect a combination of
the strict craftsmanship learned from Fortner, jazz and the music of
Stravinsky, Bartók and Hindemith.

Henze’s First Symphony was also written in 1947. The next year he saw
Sadler’s Wells Ballet in Hamburg and was thrilled (“I didn’t know that kind
of dancing existed”). After working as music director of a theatre company
in Constance, he moved in 1950 to Wiesbaden as ballet director of the Hesse
State Theatre. His ballets Jack Pudding and Rosa Silber were written at
this time; he also became attracted by Marxism.

His Second Symphony was performed in Stuttgart in 1949 and his Third at
Donaueschingen in 1951, conducted by Hans Rosbaud. A one-act opera, A
Country Doctor, based on Kafka, was broadcast in the same year and his
first full-length opera, Boulevard Solitude, was a big success in Hanover
in February 1952. It brought his music to a wider audience while at the
same time earning him reproofs from Stockhausen and Boulez, who had
followed Theodor Adorno’s injunction to write for themselves, not for
success with audiences. Henze’s response was: “I realised I could get
people to listen to me — to make them laugh or cry or be happy or angry.
This was a decisive experience — music as a means of communication.”

By now Henze was feeling increasingly isolated in Germany. He was at risk
as a homosexual, and his radical politics and shame over the Holocaust
alienated him from a West Germany in which former Nazi officials held posts
of authority. A holiday in Italy in 1951 had overwhelmed him: “I had no
idea that buildings, towns, landscape could be so movingly beautiful.” He
decided to emigrate, and in 1953 he left Germany for the island of Ischia
in the Bay of Naples, where he found Sir William and Lady Walton as
permanent residents and WH Auden and Chester Kallman as summer visitors.

Settled in a cottage on Ischia, Henze worked on his opera König Hirsch
(King Stag), which in its luxuriance was to widen the gap between him and
his avant-garde contemporaries. Based on a Gozzi tale, it is about a king
who finds his soul through metamorphosis into a stag. Completed in 1955, it
had its premiere in Berlin in 1956 in a savagely cut version by the
conductor Hermann Scherchen (Henze never forgave him).

Listeners were impressed by its richness and exoticism. It was still
unusual, in 1956, for a modern composer to include piano, guitar,
harpsichord and accordion in an operatic score. Uncut, the opera lasts five
hours. In 1962 Henze shortened it and retitled it Il Re Cervo. The full
original version was not performed until 1985, in Stuttgart.

Henze spent three years on Ischia, forming a strong friendship with Walton,
and moved to Naples in January 1956. One of the first products of this new
period was the enchanting Five Neapolitan Songs, written for
Fischer-Dieskau.

At Walton’s suggestion, during 1956-57 Henze composed a full-length ballet
for Covent Garden. Undine was first performed in October 1958, with Margot
Fonteyn dancing the water nymph to Frederick Ashton’s choreography. This
work provided further ammunition for those who regarded Henze as a renegade
from the cause of contemporary music. He was by now totally alienated from
the aesthetic of Stockhausen and Boulez, who had ostentatiously walked out
of the first performance of his Nocturnes and Arias at Donaueschingen in
1957.

Henze’s next opera, composed in Naples in 1958, was The Prince of Homburg,
from a novel by Heinrich von Kleist. The inspiration was again Italianate.
He soaked himself in Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi. It had its
premiere in Hamburg in 1960 and was staged in many other German opera
houses. Henze revised it in 1991, and this version was performed in London
by English National Opera at the Coliseum in 1996.

While on Ischia, Henze had been rather awed by Auden and Kallman, but in
1959 he asked them for an opera libretto. The result was Elegy For Young
Lovers. He had requested a story that would require “tender and beautiful
sounds”, and was rewarded with a splendid scenario set at an inn in the
Austrian Alps where the six snowbound characters include a monstrously
egotistical poet and a demented woman who awaits the return of her husband
who had been killed climbing on the first day of their honeymoon 40 years
earlier. It was first staged in May 1961 at Schwetzingen in a German
translation. The English text was sung a few weeks later at Glyndebourne
(where booing was heard from a first-night audience for the first time in
the opera house’s history).

Most of Henze’s instrumental works at this period were in some way related
to, or were studies for, his operas. The Fourth Symphony, for example, was
built from the finale to Act Two of König Hirsch. A satellite of The Prince
of Homburg was Kammermusik 1958, a song-cycle for tenor, guitar and eight
other performers which was dedicated to Benjamin Britten, whose music Henze
deeply admired and with whom he became friends.

In 1961 Henze moved to Rome, where he wrote his Fifth Symphony to a
commission from the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein, who
conducted the first performance. Later, he built a villa in Marino. Vocal
works continued to preoccupy him. The large-scale cantata Novae de infinito
laudes, to 16th-century Italian texts, was commissioned by the Royal
Philharmonic Society but was too expensive to rehearse and waited for its
premiere until the 1963 Venice Biennale. Perhaps the most evocative of
these Mediterranean compositions was the Choral Fantasy for chamber chorus
and ensemble on a text by Ingeborg Bachmann.

She was the librettist of his first comic opera, The Young Lord. Henze
regarded it as the best libretto he ever received, but he had to resort to
“rather unconventional ways” to prise it from her. These involved locking
her in her room in his villa and not letting her out, even for meals, until
she had completed her daily stint. The models for this opera were Mozart
and Rossini. It was a huge success at its Berlin premiere in April 1965.
The young lord is an ape who dictates bourgeois fashion in a provincial
town.

Henze then concentrated on his second Auden-Kallman libretto, a version of
The Bacchae of Euripides called The Bassarids. This was composed very
rapidly in one act in the shape of the four movements of a symphony, the
third of which encloses a comic intermezzo in the style of an 18th-century
French pastoral. Again, the work had a worldwide success. Henze conducted
and produced the first London staging by ENO in 1974.

Henze, at 40, was now at the peak of his fame and was in demand also as
conductor and sometimes producer. But he had composed The Bassarids in a
pessimistic mood and believed he had gone as far as he could in this vein.
He had been professor of composition at the Salzburg Mozarteum since 1961
and lectured on music’s relationship to politics at Berlin University in
1963. In 1965 he publicly campaigned for Willi Brandt in the 1965
presidential election “with a feeling of impotence and uselessness”. He
returned in the late 1960s to instrumental compositions, including the vast
Second Piano Concerto.

Henze first visited the United States in 1963. On his second visit in 1967
he was stirred by the anti-Vietnam protests. Returning to Germany, he
encountered student protests on civil rights and racial equality. “For the
first time since I was born there was disobedience in Germany, protest, a
demand for independence and freedom, more democracy and all that.” Henze
met the students’ leader Rudi Dutschke and offered to help his cause. Later
he sheltered Dutschke at his villa in Marino. In 1968 he resigned from the
West Berlin Academy and joined its East German counterpart.

The Medusa affair followed, and this led to Henze’s ostracism by the German
musical establishment. He received no commissions and many of his friends
dropped him. He vented his feelings in his Essay on Pigs for baritone and
orchestra, first performed at a London Sinfonietta concert in February
1969. His popularity dipped further because of two well-publicised visits
to Cuba in 1969-70. Among the works which sprang from these sojourns was
the Sixth Symphony (“an expression of belief in man’s greatest work of art,
the World Revolution”), a viola concerto and the theatre-piece El Cimarrón,
based on the life of a runaway slave, which became one of his best-known
pieces.

Back in Europe, Henze composed a Second Violin Concerto, involving not only
a solo violinist but recitation of a poem and his first use of pre-recorded
tape, and a symphonic poem, Heliogabalus Imperator, which Sir Georg Solti
conducted in Chicago in 1972. A major achievement was Voices (1973), a
song-cycle for two singers and instrumental groups on a variety of
revolutionary texts. Henze’s experiments with tape led to Tristan, for
piano, tape and orchestra, his first major work for several years which was
primarily musical in conception, and it led to a general broadening of his
style.

Henze returned to the opera house in 1976 with a Covent Garden commission.
We Come to the River had a libretto by the Left-wing English playwright
Edward Bond and was produced by Henze, assisted by David Pountney. It was
about a victorious general who goes blind and realises the dastardliness of
his wartime actions; he is committed to an asylum and killed by the
inmates. The opera required three stages, three orchestras, a military band
and had 127 named parts shared among more than 70 singers. It was a
resounding flop and generally disliked, although the 19-year-old Simon
Rattle wept “because of the sheer beauty of the music”. Afterwards Henze
returned to instrumental music, including his third, fourth and fifth
string quartets, the last being dedicated to the memory of Britten.

Bond provided the text for a ballet, Orpheus, staged in Stuttgart in 1979
and which Henze also converted into a concert work for speaker and
orchestra and revised in 1986 with choreography by Ruth Berghaus. They then
collaborated on a second opera , the satirical English Cat, another piece
of time-travelling by Henze into archaic musical forms. This was premiered
in 1983 and was followed by the Seventh Symphony, commissioned by the
Berlin Philharmonic, one of his most powerful works in which he expressed a
desire to return to his German roots. The work depicts a revitalised,
thriving Germany.

His reconciliation with German culture was symbolised also by his
involvement with an annual summer school bearing his name held in his
birthplace, Guterslöh. In 1988 he became artistic director of the Munich
Biennial Festival for which he commissioned an opera, Greek, from the young
British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage.

With his next opera, Das verratene Meer (The Betrayed Sea), produced in
Berlin in 1990, he seemed to have put the extra-musical considerations of
politics behind him. It was hardly to be expected that the anti-Fascist
Henze would be interested in setting an adaptation of the novel by the
extreme Right-wing Japanese militarist Yukio Mishima. But both had had
similar youthful experiences, and in the book Henze perceived “a layout for
a Greek tragedy told today”. The opera’s premiere came six months after the
Berlin Wall was pulled down. For Henze the opera meant the pulling-down of
a wall that had separated him spiritually from the city where “my music is
best played, heard and understood”.

In the 1990s Henze composed an instrumental Requiem in the form of nine
“spiritual concertos” for piano, trumpet and chamber orchestra. This was a
memorial to Michael Vyner and was hailed as a masterpiece at its first
complete performance in 1993. His Eighth Symphony (1992-93) was inspired by
episodes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he went to Shakespeare again
for his last opera, Venus and Adonis, written to mark his 70th birthday. A
Ninth Symphony was completed in 1996 and had its first performance in
Berlin to great acclaim.

Henze’s autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, was published in an English
translation by Stewart Spencer in November 1998. In the same month,
although suffering from phlebitis, he spent five days at the Royal Northern
College of Music in Manchester, where a festival of his music was mounted.
During the week the Duchess of Kent bestowed an honorary Fellowship of the
college on him.

For some, Henze changed musical skins too often to have a convincing and
recognisable musical personality. Others felt that in an age when
stereotypes were all too common in the arts, his prodigality of invention,
willingness to take risks and loyalty to an ideal of beauty which could be
discerned at the heart of each of his works were qualities for which to be
thankful.

At least four of his operas seem likely to hold the stage, and the sheer
variety of his instrumental works leaves much for posterity to explore. In
his duality, he personified the enigma of post-Hitler Germany and of the
music of the 20th century in its latter half.

Henze was a generous colleague where his heart was engaged and a friendly
personality. His partner for more than 30 years was Fausto Moroni, a
Calabrian.

*Hans Werner Henze, born July 1 1926, died October 27 2012*
-- 
carlos palombini
www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011
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