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Hans Werner Henze’s exceptional musical talent prompted him to leave school early, at the age of sixteen, to study with Wolfgang Fortner in 1946. Fortner, a neo-classical composer, introduced Henze to the music of Stravinsky. Henze later studied twelve-tone technique more extensively at Darmstadt, as well as with Rene Leibowitz who he met in 19481 and with Josef Rufer, who he met in 1949. More than avant-garde music, though, Henze was drawn to the world of opera and ballet, where he rapidly made a place for himself. Ultimately, the inspiration and the pleasure he found in composing were intimately linked to traditional forms of writing – to the point that, “fifteen measures in2,” at the premiere of Henze’s Nachstücke und Arien, the “trio of minds,” Boulez, Nono, and Stockhausen, ostentatiously got up and left.
In Henze’s first four symphonies, one observes twelve-tone technique that is questing for melodic and rhythmic figures bequeathed by the classical-romantic tradition, following the model set by Arnold Schoenberg, combined with a polytonality and a rhythmic verve that openly draw on Stravinsky. His Second Symphony has a dark mood, but transmits symbolic light with a chorale sounded by the trumpets with twelve-tone harmonization. The Third Symphony takes up an opposition dear to Henze: the Apollonian (“Invocation of Apollo”) and the Dionysian (“Dithyramb”), with allusions to Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (2nd movement, measures 78-96), along with nods to jazz and to the Rite of Spring (3rd movement, “Conjuring Dance”). His Fourth Symphony folds five traditional sections into a single movement; the finale is a series of thirty-two variations. A vein of dance runs through the Fifth Symphony, which depicts “the movement of the metropolis toccata-style, resembling modern-day Rome, but could just as easily be New York City, the physical energy, the unbridled, brutal dance” (Reiselieder, 228).
The opera Boulevard Solitude, an updating of the story by Manon Lescaut, also favors form cut into numbers, with orchestral interludes. Henze effectively assembles da capo arias (n° 5), vocalises (n° 8), and homorhythmic ensembles that recall Mozart’s Singspiele (n° 10, n° 16), with touches of conventional jazz, dance music (cakewalk, slow fox, rumba), and citations (Dies irae, n° 7, measure 30). Henze paints a murky, shady world, and draws on irony and kitsch (the end of n° 16, with women’s choir and Manon’s distant voice), associating opaque, ambiguous chords (polytonal) with tertian ones accompanying an atonal line (n° 3), and layers of thirds (n° 16).
Works from his first Italian period are nourished by a poetic vision of a timeless Mediterranean culture, often leaning toward an aestheticizing expressionism influenced by – as Henze later put it (PR, 9) – the “bourgeois and decadent” work and ideas of the poet Ingeborg Bachmann. Lyricism forms the core of Ode an den Westwind and of Quattro poemi for orchestra, with Wagnerian harmony in “Elogio,” rhythmic ostinatos in “Egloga,” a brief “Elegia” that uses Arnold Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie technique, and then a wrenching “Ditirambo.” Allusions to popular dances (bolero, fandango, tarantella) crisscross through Nachstücke und Arien, making extensive use of layered triads – see the end of Aria II: E-flat major and minor with an added seventh (D), over an E diminished seventh chord. Drei Dithyramben is built on “rhythmic and dynamic rows, in addition to pitch rows” (PR, 3).
In Der Prinz von Homburg, Henze mobilizes both strict serial writing and – to make the world freer and more individualistic – “the angelic melancholy of Bellini, the sparkling brio of Rossini, the sombre passion of Donizetti, all of that brought together, gathered into Verdi’s robust rhythms, his harsh orchestral colors and his incandescent melodic lines, which burn the ears.” Written as a tribute to Stravinsky3, the opera shows Henze’s mastery of characterization; in his melodic writing, he favors recurring intervals (ascending minor sixth for the Prince, octave for Natalie, fifths and fourths for the Elector) or uses the orchestra to comment on a situation: the Prince’s thirst for war is offset (Allegro marziale, I, 3) by paradoxal colors, as the march rhythm is given by the harp, and the fanfares by the English horn and the clarinets4.
This artfulness emerges in Elegy for Young Lovers, the opera that marks the crowning point of this period. It tells the story of the inner circle of a celebrated, self-centered, and aging poet, who is trying to sabotage the love of two young people. When the two become lost in the mountains, he prevents a search party from going after them, and they perish in a snowstorm. Each character is identified with an instrument that performs in the same register as their voice type (see MuP, 231-238). Gregor, a “powerful Dracula,” is characterized by three brass instruments, each of which represents one facet of his personality; the harp that accompanies the elegy that Gregor writes to commemorate the tragic event he himself caused (II, 10) is written to sound like a “parody of Apollo’s lyre” (MuP, 236). Hilde, a medium whose visions Gregor subsumes into his poems, is identified with the flute – recalling the mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor (see MuP, 80) – and her visions are expressed in instrumentation that plays with Boulez’s Improvisations sur Mallarmé. While the dominant interval in the poet’s parts is the fifth, Hilde’s part favors sevenths and ninths, and the diction of early serial music, “that precious and artificial genre” (MuP, 235). The poet’s submissive secretary is an oboe d’amore; the jovial doctor a bassoon and a saxophone; his son, the passionate lover, is a viola; his beloved is a violin. The orchestra (with solo strings) weaves a transparent backdrop in which percussion and real sounds play a significant role, evoking both conventional imagery (instrumental storm, III, 6), and original inventions (snow music with recorder, celesta, vibraphone, pizzicato strings, and harmonics in the strings, II, 6). The opera’s vocal forms include a recitativo in Sprechgesang, refrain arias (I, 2), a love duet in 6/8 time (II, 1), an angry air by the poet that ends in a violent cluster (II, 13), popular-style arias (III, 1), and numerous ensemble pieces in which the diverging emotions of the characters are combined and juxtaposed. In its reinvention of the traditional codes of lyric music, Henze’s score resembles the operas of Benjamin Britten, whose music, like Henze’s, made free use of twelve-tone technique, had a certain chamber quality to it, and embraced suspended temporality.
Three other operas followed: the fairylike Il Re Cervo, the comic Der junge Lord, and the tragic Les Bassarids. In the latter opera, the figure of Dionysius returns. His music “slowly invades everything, smothering Pentheus’ reasonable music” (MuP, 236). According to Henze, this opera marked the end of an era (see MuP, 246). After that, he had trouble composing for some time5, and felt that he was widely seen as a reactionary composer – notably on the occasion of the stormy Berlin premiere of Der Prinz von Homburg in June 1960 (Reiselieder, 211). Henze therefore made the decision to step away from theatre. But his aesthetic positions did not change in any profound way. He continued to object to the idea of a musical avant-garde (see MuP, 186-194), yet paid tribute to certain works by Mauricio Kagel6 and Karlheinz Stockhausen (see Reiselieder, 201). Stylistically, he moved between tonality and twelve-tone composing, the former featuring in his comic operas (MuP, 109) and in works that drew on Mediterranean imagery. Although all of his works were more or less constructed using serial techniques, his rows for the most part serve to provide a “reservoir of patterns7,” to invent lines that can then be harmonized with triads; he was always drawn to serial writing that approached tonal, conventional, recognizable figures. The prime form of the row for the opera The English Cat was determined based on the criterion of the “emotional” nature of each interval8. The result is a striking musical surface in which various allusions and styles are drawn together with virtuosity, which also explains why some criticized Henze for eclecticism.
A series of pieces composed between 1968 and 1973 show a change in style linked to Henze’s connection to student movements and to political struggles in Latin America. During this time, Henze saw himself as a marginal figure: “The emotional causes behind a work of art are important. I think that among the liberation of minorities, that of homosexuals should also be included. My musical behavior is determined by the trauma that society inflicted on people of my category and that it still inflicts in its ‘repressive tolerance.’ Ostracization, insecurity, the danger of distortion – all of that led to my political activism.” (MuP, 192).
In 1965, Henze became involved with the left-wing student movement, developing friendships with Rudi Dutschke and the poets Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Gaston Salvatore. He joined the German Communist Party, read the writing of Che Guevara, and travelled to Cuba (1969 and 1970). In 1968, The Raft of the Medusa, an oratorio based on the story that inspired the eponymous Géricault painting, drew a parallel between the Exodus from Egypt and Vietnamese boat people. In it, Henze built a dodecaphonic oratorio9 whose narrator is Charon. A dialogue is created between the mulatto Jean-Charles, standing center-stage, and – in a tribute to Jean Cocteau’s Orphée – Madame La Mort. She is attempting to get the living, who are placed stage right and accompanied by wind instruments (the lingering breath of life) to come toward her side of the stage, where the music of nothingness rings out in stringed instruments and in Italian lyrics (a reference to Dante’s Inferno). The final chorus is built around the chant “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh.”
In some scores of the 1970s, Henze sought to implicate orchestra musicians by featuring them as soloists – in Piano Concerto No. 2 or Comparses para preguntas ensimismadas (see MuP, 135 et 148), for example – and interrogated the tradition of bourgeois opera using Brechtian forms. This is the case in El Cimarrón, the story of a slave told with flute, guitar, and percussion, which seeks to avoid “bluffing, clouding the judgment of, or mesmerizing” the audience (MuP, 166). It also stands out in Versuch über Schweine and even more in Natascha Ungeheuer, which tells the life of a politically engaged woman painter, opposed to the floppy activism of a “bourgeois bohemian” and set against music that is “cold as a November day in Berlin” (MuP, 157), which includes numerous citations: a military marching band, a free jazz ensemble, and tape with recordings of urban sounds.
In Voices, stage narration is abandoned in favor of a cycle of twenty-two lieder and/or songs for tenor and mezzo-soprano, which foregrounds the “voices” of oppressed or rebelling subjects, whose song is accompanied by an ensemble that includes a banjo, an ocarina, and an accordion, blending together the popular and art music worlds. In Streik bei Mannesmann, Henze was participating in a group piece that openly embraced agitprop, with a staged cantata that mixed songs, music for dance, and film. The secular oratorio We come to the River, subtitled: “actions for music”, stages multiple scenes around the theme of violence in war and repression. In it, Henze divides the orchestra, seated on a dais, into three groups. A general is represented by serial music, while tonal music represents the alienation of the dominant class10. The composer makes use of aleatoric passages, micro-tonality, and noise actions; the hopeful final song combines dodecaphonic, pentatonic, and diatonic lines to symbolize universal reconciliation.
His instrumental works from this time also show his openness to more avant-garde techniques: in Violin Concerto No. 2, for example, “thirty-three instrumentalists” form an orchestra that at several points improvises with melodic patterns. The score is a collage, mixing tape sounds (the solo violin dialogues with its recorded double in the third movement) and many allusions (slow waltz, “popular and sentimental” waltz, II, G; big band, II, K) or quotations, including Elizabethan pavanes or genre pieces from the 19th century (II, K, piano). The performance of the soloist, who is meant to personify the Baron von Münchhausen, is highly theatrical (hesitations, interactions).
The Sixth Symphony for two chamber orchestras thematizes Henze’s Cuban experience: “The innovative side of the piece” Henze wrote, “came from the insertion of folklore that was contemporary but also timeless in the music’s structure. […] In the symphony’s finale, the foundational rhythms are systematically forced toward a long-awaited explosive ending, a not-very-likable dance of joy, in which the percussion is liberated in play with the rhythmic cantus firmus of the traditional Son Cubano dance, as in carnival, or liberation” (Reiselieder, 320-321 and 324 sq.). Henze also cites a song of the Vietnamese Liberation Front (I, E), an anthem by Theodorakis (II, V), and offers a broad palette of sounds including banjo, electric guitar, a Hammond organ, and suspended sheet metal and bamboo.
By that point, he had become a suspicious figure for nearly everyone in the music world: he was portrayed by both the mainstream press and in left-wing publications as personifying a kind of radical chic – an aesthete, a hedonist, a false comrade 11. In 1968, the premiere of the Wreck of the Medusa in Hamburg came to a halt when Henze refused to take a red flag off the stage when members of the choir balked at singing under it amidst the chaos of two clashing factions of the SDS (the German Socialist student union), one that supported the composer and one that did not12.
Henze began to turn back to figures of Romantic subjectivity, never entirely abandoned, in particular in his third piano concerto, Tristan. Starting with a twelve-tone row from which he singled out guiding motifs13, in a prelude for solo piano Henze contrasts calm, cold harmony with the tense harmony of Wagner’s Tristan. An a-minor triad opens a suite of five sections threaded through with citations14. A tape adds in noises, warped fragments of Wagner recordings or previously heard passages, as in the “Epilogue,” where we hear, layered on top of the prelude to Act III in Tristan, a young boy recounting Thomas’ English version of the story of Isolde’s death. The music oscillates between an elegiac tone and often saturated pathos. It may be understood as an extension of Mahler’s music, while also illustrating what Henze was then describing as musica impura (see MuP, 186-194) – the first German figure in musical post-modernism.
Henze conceived his children’s opera Pollicino for Montepulciano, after working with William Forsythe on the ballet Orpheus: in it, Apollo has become a malevolent figure, trapping Orpheus by commanding him to turn around. The opera The English Cat, a social satire after Balzac, was “masquerade music” (Reiselieder, 493). Among the major works of these years is an opera after Mishima, Das verratene Meer, whose dramaturgy was inspired by the Japanese Noh tradition and by 19th century French opera, with a kind of slow solemnity (see Reiselieder, 527). Another is Requiem, dedicated to the memory of Michael Vyner, the administrator of the London Sinfonietta, a victim of the AIDS epidemic. The orchestra is scattered throughout the space, and its composition changes constantly. The Tuba mirum returns to the idea of musica impura in its “concentration of popular music […], memories of marches and hymns, radio hits, and songs from the gutter […], fanfares of the worst order,” in a recollection of the Nazi gatherings filmed by Leni Riefenstahl (see Reiselieder, 574-577).
In 1996, Henze published an autobiography in which he once again placed his composition in the continuum of classical tradition: “I could describe more or less my current composition technique, which I took a half-century to develop, using the notion of ‘psycho-polyphony.’ Indeed, I appreciate the old ways of composing, because I would not be at ease without them.” (Reiselieder, 47).
This aesthetic, still oscillating between twelve-tone neoclassicism and neo-expressionism, remains the guiding force in the Henze’s last three symphonies. The Eighth Symphony, in three movements, as the previous ones, was inspired by the characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His Ninth Symphony, a programmatic symphony based on Anna Seghers’ 1942 Novel The Seventh Cross, tells the story of a man escaping from a concentration camp. Symphony No. 10, his final symphony, is a kind of hermeneutic interpretation of the traditional schema: the title of the opening movement in sonata form is “Ein Sturm” (A Storm); the lyrical second is called “Ein Hymnus” (A Hymn); the scherzo is “Ein Tanz” (A Dance); the finale is “Ein Traum” (A Dream).
Once again, three operas written in the 2000s set out the three guiding lines of Henze’s lyric production: first, L’Upupa, a dreamlike, masquerade-inspired performance based on a Persian folktale, featuring transparent writing with multiple references to The Magic Flute, which would also become the subject of a journal describing its creation. Similarly, Phaedra, a retelling of Ovid’s tragic story, in which, Hippolytus, resuscitated by Artemis, remembers his past only in fragments, and returns to the forest to lose himself in a kind of ecstatic dance, as the Minotaur begins a new reign. The dramaturgical impact and the artful characterization – in Act II, where the part of Artemis is sung by a counter-tenor, we hear a waltz, an ancient madrigal, jazz allusions, a dissonant storm – counter-balance the lack of authentic inventiveness; the artistic urgency is assured by the force of the narrative. Finally, Gisela! illustrates Henze’s lighter vein, theatre within theatre (a commedia dell’arte performance in Naples), as well as the narrative arc (autobiographical) of a subject caught between two loves, symbolizing two countries, Italy and Germany, represented in the protagonist’s nightmare by a warped Bach melody.
Throughout his life, Mozart remained Henze’s touchstone – a model for a humanistic aesthetic that invents itself, with happy wordiness, as it goes along. Mozart symbolized beauty itself, beauty that, for Henze, mapped directly onto the lyric world; as with Mozart, chamber music pieces were, for Henze, “steps toward the essential: theatre, opera, where all creative energies must be mobilized together, and the five senses must be integrated, in concentrated form, into actions” (Reiselieder, 45). His aesthetic links expression (music must clearly communicate certain feelings, ideas, or images) and expressiveness, mistrusting for these linked reasons all speculative research taken as an end in itself. Henze wavered between rhetorical expression and romantic subjectivism, seeking the difficult synthesis between objectivity – the pragmatism of a composer who wishes to be understood – and subjectivity – that of the marginal, sensitive, dreamy artist. At the end of the day, it is the idea of music that speaks that emerges triumphant, integrating immediately into a communicative form by playing with established codes: “My music has all these human, allegorical, literary significations… My music is impura, as Neruda said of his poems. It does not try to be abstract, it does not try to be clean, it is “soiled” – by weaknesses, by dross, by imperfections. […] What I would like is for music to become language, for it not to remain simply a sound space in which feelings can be reflected in a controlled manner, as if “emptied” – one should be able to understand music as a language” (MuP, 187).
This tension commands Henze’s style, in which pathos is never understood without convention, nor dissonance without its resolution: “Using my dissonances, I register the distance that separates modernity from the reality of Mozart […] My music feeds on these contradictions, in it there are spiny bushes, thorns, annoyances. It is venomous, like a snake bite” (Reiselieder, 73). This immediate intelligibility tends toward eclecticism, which makes sovereign use of the styles of the past, renouncing the idea of constructing a new language. Henze thus incarnates what Adorno called “moderate modernism15,” or the “culture of beauty,” anti-sublime and anti-avant-gardist, that Richard Taruskin detected in 19th century composers such as Bizet or Tchaikovsky and which Benjamin Britten incarnated in the 20th century16.
Do you notice a mistake?