Hans Werner Henze was born in Germany in 1926. He began taking piano lessons at the age of five, and his first attempts at composing date from 1938. A member of the Hitler Youth, in which he was enrolled in 1938 at the age of twelve, he was mobilized in 1944, then taken prisoner. He then worked as a pianist in a casino and an accompanist at the Bielefeld City Theatre. He returned to his music studies at Heidelberg University in 1946, studying composition with Wolfgang Fortner at the Institute for Religious Music. He took part at the Darmstadt Courses from the beginning (1946-1952), briefly exploring serialism with René Leibowitz. After two first jobs at the Constance Theater and the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, and with a love life marred by the difficulties of living as a homosexual (he attempted suicide in 1950), Henze was offered a publishing contract with Schott, received his first prize (the Kunstpreis Robert Schuman in 1951) and met the poet Ingeborg Bachmann. In 1953, he moved to Italy, where he would settle permanently. His first operas (including Boulevard Solitude) and ballets (including Undine, choreographed by Frederick Ashton) rapidly became part of the contemporary repertoire. Henze was awarded the Grosser Kunstpreis von Berlin in 1959 and elected to the Akademie der Künste of West Berlin in 1960 (he stepped down in 1968), and was made a permanent guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1960s (with a cycle of his five first symphonies performed in 1964 and recorded on the DGG label). The publication of a first series of essays in 1964 marked the beginning of a prolific writing career, often in the form of a journalled chronicle of the genesis of a given work. The many volumes of Henze’s detailed diaries are now located in the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation. In the 1960s, Henze began to support the student protest movement (he was friends with Rudi Dutschke), campaigned for Willy Brandt’s SPD party, and joined the German and Italian Communist Parties. He traveled to Cuba twice in 1969-1970, and his Sixth Symphony premiered in Havana, but Henze became a persona non grata there after he expressed solidarity with artists opposed to Castro’s government. Henze began psychoanalysis in 1973 and returned to opera with Les Bassarides in 1974. By the late 1970s, he had become one of the world’s most widely-performed contemporary composers, particularly in Germany and in England. In 1976, he founded the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte Montepulciano, and the Munich Biennale in 1988. He taught at the Music Hochschule in Cologne (1980-1996) and was a guest composer at Tanglewood in 1983 and 1988. He was a composer in residence with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1991 and, among many awards and honors, won the Ernst-von-Siemens prize that same year (1991) and the Tokyo Praemium Imperiale in 2001. His many compositions were premiered and performed in London, Paris, Berlin, and the Lucerne and Salzburg Festivals. In 2008, his Elogium Musicum (amatissimi amici nunc remoti), written in memory of his lifelong companion Fausto Moroni, who had died the previous year, premiered in Leipzig. Although his health began to decline in the early 2000s and he began having trouble speaking in 2005, Henze nevertheless completed two new operas during that time, including Gisela, which premiered at the Ruhrtriennale in 2010. Henze died in Dresden on 27 October 2012.