Hans Werner Henze

Early life and education

Hans Werner Henze (born Gütersloh, 1 July 1926) is one of the most prolific German composers of the twentieth century. His formidable output of operas, ballets, symphonies and concertos has secured a firm place in the international repertory. Advocating a communicative, deliberately impure music attentive to feeling, ideas, history and politics, he drew inspiration from a wide range of poets, writers and librettists, and his personal and creative development has been well documented in interviews, articles, autobiographical essays and books.

Childhood and training

The eldest of six children of the schoolteacher Franz Henze and Margarete Geldmacher, Henze moved with his family to Bielefeld in 1930. His father, a capable amateur who directed a workers' choir and played viola in a local chamber orchestra, taught at a collective school with a socialist outlook. Hans Werner began piano lessons soon after starting primary school. In 1935, under Nazi orders, the school was closed and his father was posted to the small village of Dünne, where political pressure was hard to escape. Henze later recalled how fascist, anti-communist and anti-Semitic literature gradually replaced banned works by Jewish and Christian authors on the family shelves, and how radio propaganda became compulsory at home, though it also let him secretly discover Mozart.

Wartime years and musical apprenticeship

Despite the war, the young Henze found stimuli: a puppet theatre, the Anna Magdalena notebook that introduced him to Bach, and a small ensemble he formed with schoolfellows, for which he occasionally wrote a piece. With a boyhood friend he read proscribed authors such as Trakl, Wedekind, Werfel, Hofmannsthal, Mann, Zweig and Brecht. In 1942 his father finally accepted his musical vocation, and Henze won a grant to study at the Brunswick State Music School, where he took piano, percussion and theory. There he encountered modern music only fitfully, since the work of Hindemith, Bartók, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg reached him as little more than rumour. As timpanist in the school orchestra he came to know the traditional orchestral repertory from its acoustic depths, a perspective that shaped much of his early output.

In 1943 his father re-enlisted and died on the Eastern Front. Henze was conscripted into an armoured division at Magdeburg and trained as a radio officer; he later worked briefly on a military training-film unit in Prague. After a short internment in a British prisoner-of-war camp, he listened eagerly to music by foreign and exiled composers broadcast by the BBC, which opened for him a world beyond the Third Reich's cultural prison. Decades later he would say that everything the fascists persecuted and hated seemed beautiful to him.

Heidelberg and the discipline of serialism

After the war Henze returned to Bielefeld, shouldering the duties of the eldest son as a transport worker and working as a répétiteur at the city theatre. On the advice of friends he moved to Heidelberg, where he met Wolfgang Fortner, who accepted him as a pupil and secured his admission to the church music institute. Under Fortner he studied counterpoint, score reading, orchestration and music history, and was introduced to contemporary music in depth. His *Kammerkonzert* (1946), a neo-baroque concerto grosso dedicated to Fortner, attracted the attention of the publisher Willy Strecker, beginning a lasting association with Schott.

A year later, after hearing the violin concertos of Bartók and Berg, Henze moved away from post-Hindemithian neoclassicism and explored twelve-note technique. He had occasional guidance from Josef Rufer and René Leibowitz, and became the first of the younger German composers to embrace the method as an answer to his aesthetic difficulties. Works such as *Whispers from Heavenly Death* (1948) and the piano-trio *Kammersonate* show his gradual command of its principles. Over time, however, he grew critical of serial dogma, preferring a flexible, tonally open approach in which rows serve as starting material rather than as absolute law. His *Apollo et Hyazinthus* (1949) he later regarded as one of his first mature works, uniting twelve-note method with an extramusical narrative culminating in a poem.

Theatre, ballet and the search for a personal idiom

Between 1946 and 1952 Henze moved from near-penury to a flood of commissions, with spells in Göttingen, Konstanz, Berlin, Wiesbaden and Munich. His interest turned towards the theatre and above all towards ballet. *Das Wundertheater* (1948), based on a Cervantes intermezzo, and *Ballett-Variationen* (1949) were early essays in these forms. In Konstanz he compiled *Jack Pudding*, later reworked as *Le disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella*, and his *First Piano Concerto* (1950) keeps a danced structure. In Berlin the choreographer Tatjana Gsovsky supported him, though the city was a harsh school for a young provincial composer. In these years he absorbed many styles, unifying them within a lyrical, tonally oriented idiom, and became adept at quotation and parody.

In the 1950s he became artistic director and conductor of the ballet at the Hessisches Staatstheater in Wiesbaden. He later judged the quality of many works from this period unevenly: three were withdrawn from his catalogue in 1964, and several were thoroughly revised.

Italy: the great transformation

Around 1953 Henze settled in Forio, on the island of Ischia, seeking to escape the personal and social pressures of Germany. There he wrote the cello concerto *Ode an den Westwind*, his first attempt at a closer interaction between music and text, with Shelley's sonnets sung by the instrument itself. His major project was *König Hirsch* (The Stag King), an opera on a Gozzi fairy tale that occupied him for three years. In it a decisive change took place: he gradually abandoned rigid serial writing in favour of simpler melody, inspired by street cries and canzonetti built on natural intervals. As he put it, discovering melody enriched his expressive means.

On Ischia he met the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom he collaborated six times. Their conversations about literature, history, music and philosophy laid the foundations of his understanding of the relationship between word and sound. Together they produced *Quattro poemi* (1955), with which Henze declared his independence from the Darmstadt avant-garde. From the same period come *Undine*, a ballet for Margot Fonteyn, and the *Fünf neapolitanische Lieder*, evocations of his new home in Naples.

His opera *Der Prinz von Homburg* (1958), after Kleist in Bachmann's adaptation, sets reality against dream, freedom against coercion, and was dedicated to Stravinsky. Encouraged by its success, Henze asked W. H. Auden and Chester Kallmann for a chamber drama, which became *Elegy for Young Lovers* (1961), an opera about mutually exploitative relationships around a Romantic poet, with a percussion-and-celesta scoring that suggests the cold of the Austrian Alps. Henze directed its staging at Schwetzingen himself.

In 1962 he settled in the Castelli Romani, at Castel Gandolfo, where he found the rural calm he sought while remaining close to Rome. His *Fifth Symphony* (1962) reuses the opening of a song from *Elegy*, an idea that sums up his conviction that everything moves towards the theatre and returns from it.

International success: *Der junge Lord* and *The Bassarids*

In 1964 the Deutsche Oper in Berlin commissioned an opera buffa, *Der junge Lord*, with a Bachmann libretto based on a Hauff parable. Henze took as models the buffa tradition of Rossini and Mozart, with a classical orchestra and a parodic humour. Its success funded his villa, La Leprara, at Marino. That same year the five symphonies were performed in Berlin under Karajan, with the premiere of *Being Beauteous*.

His next opera, *The Bassarids* (1965), with a libretto by Auden and Kallmann after Euripides, was premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1966. Henze conceived it as a four-movement symphony, with a farcical intermezzo interrupting a long adagio scene. Its structure condenses all he had learned since emigrating to Italy, though the Wagnerism Auden recommended left few traces on the score.

Political commitment and crisis

By the mid-1960s the demands of teaching, commissions and the composition of two such different operas in quick succession brought a personal and creative crisis. Pressure from the left-wing intelligentsia around him, from Bachmann and other friends, drew him towards antifascist literature and current affairs. There followed works such as *In memoriam: Die Weiße Rose* (1965), a double fugue for twelve instruments dedicated to the Scholl siblings, and a series of concertos, for piano, double bass, oboe and harp, in which the individual and society confront one another in a more social, discursive dialogue.

In 1967 and 1968, student protests in Berlin and his participation in anti-Vietnam War congresses marked his public engagement. His *Das Floss der Medusa* (1968), an oratorio dedicated to Ernesto Che Guevara, was premiered in Hamburg amid scandal: students hung a red flag from the conductor's podium, provoking a boycott by the orchestra and choir, and Henze found himself attacked by promoters, audiences and Marxist militants alike. From the same period comes *El Cimarrón* (1969–1970), a recital for four performers on the fugitive slave Esteban Montejo, which became one of his most performed chamber works, and *Voices* (1973), a set of protest songs for mezzo-soprano and tenor. His *Second Violin Concerto* (1971) and *Tristan* (1972–1973) incorporate electronic tape: the former is a theatrical commentary on Enzensberger, the latter an elegiac homage to Wagner and a lament for Bachmann, Auden, Neruda and Salvador Allende.

Reflection and synthesis

From 1976, with his leadership of the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte in Montepulciano, Henze devoted more time to the social life of music and to his own past work. He gave his manuscripts to the Paul Sacher Foundation and, while writing his memoirs and preparing an annotated catalogue, revised pieces that no longer met his standards. At Montepulciano he composed *Royal Winter Music* for guitar, *Orpheus* (1978), a ballet in which instruments take the place of voices, and *We Come to the River* (1974–1976), a stage work to a text by Edward Bond. With Bond he also wrote *The English Cat* (1983), a satirical animal opera, documented in an autobiographical diary kept for his students in Cologne.

His *Seventh Symphony* (1983–1984) returns to the four-movement classical plan, while the *Eighth* (1992–1993), inspired by *A Midsummer Night's Dream*, reaffirms his affection for England and Italy. After working with Hans-Ulrich Treichel as librettist, he produced *Das verratene Meer* (1986–1989), after Mishima's novel, and *Venus und Adonis* (1993–1995), in which the love triangle extends to every formal level. He received many honours, among them the Bach Prize of Hamburg (1983), the Grosses Verdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany (1991) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Osnabrück (1996).

His legacy combines an enormous catalogue with a constant concern for communication. Henze always sought a music capable of speaking of feeling, ideas and social reality, and in that quest kept a critical distance both from dogmatic serialism and from mere tradition. His works remain in the repertory of major theatres and orchestras today.