Hans Werner Henze

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(b Gütersloh, 1 July 1926). German composer. He studied at a music school in Brunswick and, after war service, with Fortner at the Institute for Church Music in Heidelberg (1946-8). At first he composed in a Stravinskian neo-classical style (First Symphony, 1947), but lessons with Leibowitz in 1947-8 encouraged his adoption of 12-note serialism. Unlike such contemporaries as Stockhausen, however, he held his music open to a wide range of materials. Occasionally he made his obeisance to Darmstadt (Second Quartet, 1952), but his large, varied output of this period also shows the continuing importance to him of neo-classicism, Schoenbergian or Bergian expressionism and jazz. Nor was he dismissive of old forms or, in particular, the theatre: he conducted the Wiesbaden ballet (1950-53) and composed ballets (Jack Pudding, 1951; Labyrinth, 1951) and operas (Boulevard Solitude, 1952).

In 1953 he moved to Italy, where his music became more expansive, sensuous and lyrical and he concentrated on a sequence of operas (König Hirsch, 1956; Elegy for Young Lovers, 1961) and cantatas (Kammermusik, 1958; Cantata della fiaba estrema, 1963). The climax to this period came with a rich and elaborate but also dynamic treatment of The Bacchae in the opera The Bassarids (1966), followed by a period of self-searching; that was externalized in the Second Piano Concerto (1967) and eventually gave rise to an outspoken commitment to revolutionary socialism. Henze visited Cuba (1969-70), where he conducted the first performance of his Sixth Symphony, incorporating the tunes of revolutionary songs. He also developed a bold, poster style in music-theatre works (El Cimarrón, 1970), leading to his dramatization of class conflict in the opera We Come to the River (1976).

But he was also continuing his exploration of an expressionist orchestral sumptuousness in such works as Heliogabalus imperator (1972) and Tristan (1974), and an enjoyment in reinterpreting old musical models (Aria de la folía española for chamber orchestra,1977). Later works, including the opera The English Cat (1983) and the Seventh Symphony (1984), continue his highly personal synthesis of past and present, lyricism and rigour.

works:
Dramatic music

• Boulevard Solitude (1952)
• König Hirsch (1956)
• Der Prinz von Homburg (1960)
• Elegy for Young Lovers (1961)
• Der junge Lord (1965)
• The Bassarids (1966)
• Moralities (1968)
• Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer (1971)
• La cubana (1974)
• We Come to the River (1976)
• Pollicino (1979)
• The English Cat (1983)
• Das verratene Meer (1990)

Ballets

• Jack Pudding (1951)
• Labyrinth (1951)
• Der Idiot (1952)
• Maratona (1957)
• Ondine (1958)
• L′usignolo dell′ imperatore (1959)
• Tancredi (1966)
• Orpheus (1979)

Orchestral music

• 7 syms. (1947, 1949, 1950, 1955, 1962, 1969, 1984)
• 2 vn concs. (1947, 1971)
• 2 pf concs. (1950, 1967)
• Sym. Variations (1950)
• Ode to the Westwind (1953)
• Quattro poemi (1955)
• Sonata per archi (1958)
• Antifone (1960)
• Los caprichos (1963)
• In memoriam: Die weisse Rose (1965)
• Double Conc., ob, harp, str (1966)
• Dbn Conc. (1966)
• Telemanniana (1967)
• Compases para preguntas ensimismadas (1970)
• Heliogabalus imperator (1972)
• Tristan (1974)
• Aria de la folía española (1977)
• Il Vitalino raddoppiato (1977)
• Allegro brillante (1989)

Choral music

• Novae de infinite laudes (1962)
• cantata della fiaba estrema (1963)
• Das Floss der ‘Medusa’ (1968)

Solo vocal music

• Kammermusik (1958)
• Being Beauteous (1963), Versuch über Schweine (1968)
• El Cimarroón (1970)
• Voices (1973)
• The King of Harlem, (1979)
• 3 Auden Pieces (1983)

Chamber music

• 5 str qts (1947, 1952, 1976, 1976, 1977)
• Pf Sonata (1959)
• Vn Sonata (1976)
• Va sonata (1979)
• Sonata für sechs Spieler (1984)
• Serenade (1986)

Incidental music, film scores

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Hans Werner Henze (born 1926) is a German composer of unusual productivity and diversity of style. He is best known for unorthodox operas such as "Boulevard Solitude" (1952), with its unique treatment of the "Manon" story used by Puccini, and the comic opera "Der junge Lord" (1965). His later works show his political affiliation with socialism, as in a requiem for Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary.

Born in Gütersloh, Germany, on July 1, 1926, Hans Werner Henze majored in piano and percussion at the Staatsmusikschule in Braunschweig. He was drafted into the Germany army in 1943 and served in the tank corps before being taken prisoner by the British.

Early Training and Work

After World War II, Henze became a student of composer Wolfgang Fortner at Heidelberg. The style of Henze's first mature compositions - a violin sonata, a chamber concerto, and the First Symphony (1947) - was neoclassic in the manner of Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók. After his introduction to the 12-tone technique, Henze's next scores showed his mastery of this technique: the piano variations and a violin concerto (1948); Symphonies no. 2 (1949) and no. 3 (1951); a piano concerto (1950); The Idiot (1952), a ballet; the First String Quartet (1952); and a Wind Quintet (1953). He also exploited jazz idioms in Jack Pudding (1951) and Maratona di danza (1956).

Henze was musical director of the German Theater in Konstanz (1948-1950) and composer and adviser on ballet for the Wiesbaden State Theater (1950-1952).

Later Work and Awards

Henze considers his opera König Hirsch (1952-1956) and the Fourth Symphony (1955-1963) as the end of his "exploratory" period. In his later compositions many styles and techniques are assimilated, including polytonality, neoclassicism, romanticism with elements of jazz, and an Italianate lyricism. Out of these, says Joseph Machlis (1961), Henze "forged an original language marked by brilliance of instrumentation, rhythmic urgency, and lyric intensity." His theatrical works, especially, aroused heated controversy because of the bold librettos and astringent musical idiom.

In 1959 Henze won the Berlin Kunstpreis and in 1962 the Grand Prize for Artists at Hanover. In 1961 he became professor of composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Henze's important compositions include Undine (1958), a ballet; The Prince of Homburg (1960), a semihistorical opera; Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), with a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman; and The Bassarids (1966), an opera with a libretto by Auden and Kallman, which many consider Henze's most felicitous score. He also wrote the Second Piano Concerto (1968); an oratorio, Das Floss der Medusa (1969); Concerto for Double Bass (1969); and the opera El Cimarron (1970).

In 1963 Henze remarked: "The twelve-tone problem does not now play a great part in my music. … I have always been concerned with musical substance, particularly with melody, and have tended to express the most difficult musical processes in the simplest forms I could devise. My music has as much to offer the naive listener as it has for the expert who can base his judgment on extensive technical knowledge."

Henze visited the United States in 1963 for the world premiere of his Fifth Symphony, performed by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.

Hans Werner Henze continues to capture the attention of music critics. The English National Opera celebrated his 70th birthday in 1996 by performing some of his works. His Symphony no. 7, which was called "bone-rattling and exciting," was reviewed in Stereo Review (April 1994), by David Patrick Stearns, who claims that Henze has "been through more stylistic changes than Madonna."

Further Reading

David Ewen, The World of Twentieth-Century Music (1968), treats Henze briefly but thoughtfully and analyzes six major works; Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961), and Otto Deri, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music (1968), are good background studies.

Additional Sources

Stereo Review, April 1994.

Henze, Hans Werner (b Gutersloh, 1 July 1926). German composer. A prolific writer for the theatre, fascinated by the challenge of creating new music for theatre, many of his works have featured such closely integrated vocal, dance, and mime elements that they can barely be put in a separate category from pure ballet scores. He wrote several of the latter, however, including Pas d'action (chor. V. Gsovsky, Munich, 1954, revised as Tancredi, chor. Nureyev, Vienna, 1966), Ondine (chor. Ashton, London, 1958), and Orpheus (chor. Forsythe, Stuttgart, 1979). Among the other ballets created to his scores are Fragmente (Cranko, 1968), Gemini (Tetley, 1973), Einhorn (Neumeier, 1985), and Labyrinth (M. Baldwin, Schwetzingen, 1997).

Henze, Hans Werner (Gütersloh, 1926- ), the son of a primary schoolteacher, is the most prolific and versatile composer of post-war Germany, and one who has had unusually close contact with literary figures. He studied at the Brunswick State School of Music from the age of sixteen and was called up in 1944, resuming his studies at the Heidelberg Church Music Institute under Wolfgang Fortner in 1946, and subsequently in Darmstadt and Paris with René Leibowitz, a specialist on Schönberg. Although Henze was the first of his generation to revive the note-row technique (dodecaphony) and was influenced by Stravinsky, he has explored all aspects of traditional forms and modernity, always insisting on self-expression and communication. A major trait of his individual approach is the interplay of contrasts culminating in unresolved conflict.

A substantial part of his œuvre is devoted to vocal music, ballet, and opera, drawn from literary models and writers congenial to his own aspirations. He began with a one-act opera for actors (Sprechoper), Das Wundertheater (The Miracle Theatre), exposing hypocrisy. Based on an Intermezzo by Cervantes in the translation of A. F. von Schack, it was performed in Heidelberg in the year after its completion in 1948 and revived in a new version for singers in 1964. It was followed by Boulevard Solitude (libretto by Grete Weil), a ‘lyrical drama’ on a tragic love story, premièred in Hanover in 1952. Having cherished the poetry of Trakl since he was fourteen, Henze set the eight lines of ‘Im Park’ in Apollo et Hyazinthus (1949) for harpsichord, alto voice, and eight instruments, perceiving the piece, subtitled ‘Improvisations’, as a threnody and a tribute to the poet, to whose Verwandlung des Bösen (in Sebastian im Traum) he was particularly indebted. His first radio opera, Ein Landarzt (1951, stage version 1964), commissioned by E. Schnabel, supported the reintroduction of Kafka, whose works were prohibited during the National Socialist period. The early 1950s mark Henze's first meeting with Ingeborg Bachmann through Gruppe 47. Their collaboration began with her libretto for his chamber ballet Der Idiot (after Dostoevsky), which was premièred at the Berlin Festival in 1952. In the same year he wrote the music for her radio play Die Zikaden, and the climax came with her libretto for his opera Der Prinz von Homburg (after H. von Kleist, premièred in Hamburg in 1960), in which she entered into the spirit of the outsider and sleepwalker, the poet and his composer, in equal measure. She then wrote the text for the comic opera Der junge Lord (premièred in Berlin in 1965), in whose gruesome finale the title figure turns out to be a monkey, tormented by his master; it is based on the parable ‘Der Mensch als Affe’ (in Der Scheik von Alexandrien und seine Sklaven by W. Hauff). Nachtstücke und Arien (1957) and Chorfantasie (1964) are remarkable settings of Bachmann's poetry. Henze also composed the satirical radio opera Das Ende einer Welt (1953, stage version 1964) to a libretto by W. Hildesheimer, a perceptive early supporter.

Distraught about his Berlin critics, Henze moved in 1953 to Italy. Here after three years of work (1952-5) he completed his most expansive and personal project, collaborating with the writer and librettist Heinz von Cramer (b. 1924): König Hirsch (after Carlo Gozzi) was premièred in an abridged version at the Berlin Festival in 1956. Henze's own shorter version appeared as Il re cervo oder Die Irrfahrten der Wahrheit (1962); the original opera was performed in Stuttgart in 1985. The highlight of his ballets, as well as of his collaboration with the choreographer Frederick Ashton, is Ondine (freely adapted from Fouqué), premièred at Covent Garden in 1958 with Margot Fonteyn in the title role. At this time he began to work with W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, who produced the libretto for the three acts of his Elegy for Young Lovers, to which an ageing poet, whose obsession with his art obliterates his humanity, is central; it was premièred as Elegie für junge Liebende at the Schwetzingen Festival in 1961, and with great success by the company of the Berlin Staatsoper in Tokyo in 1966. The collaboration with Auden and Kallman resulted in his opera seria The Bassarids (after the Bacchae of Euripides, premièred as Die Bassariden at the Salzburger Festspiele, in 1966), which proceeds from the conflict between social repression and sexual liberation.

Henze's social concerns show in most of his works as well as in his move to Italy, which was partly motivated by his reaction against West German materialism. From the mid-1960s he made public his political commitment, first stimulated by P. Dessau, an admired and loyal friend who had also introduced him to Brecht. In 1968, the year of the student protest movement, he wrote the oratorio Das Floß der Medusa (see Schnabel, E.), visited Cuba in the following year, and collaborated with H. M. Enzensberger, composing El Cimarrón (1969) and the ‘vaudeville’ La Cubana (premièred at the Munich Staatstheater in 1975). Edward Bond wrote the libretto for his opera We Come to the River (premièred in London and Berlin, as Wir erreichen den Fluß, in 1976). Bond subsequently wrote the libretto for the comic opera The English Cat (after Balzac), in which most figures are (vocally convincing) cats. Described as a ‘story for singers and instrumentalists’, it was premièred, as Die englische Katze, in Schwetzingen (1983). In a later work, the ‘Musikdrama’ Das verratene Meer (after the novel Gogo No Eiko by Yukio Mishima), Henze collaborated with the librettist Hans-Ulrich Treichel (b. 1952), a prominent young lyric poet; its disturbing plot proceeds from the protest of a gang of youths against the materialism of their elders. Henze also wrote the music for Volker Schlöndorff's first film, Der junge Törless (1966), from Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, and for his adaptation of Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1975) by Böll.

Henze's Requiem, written purely for instruments, commemorates primarily all those who have died through the ravages of war and AIDS; it was premièred at Covent Garden in 1990. The Robert Schumann Prize of the City of Düsseldorf (1951) was the first of the prizes he has received during his long career, in the course of which he has taught and promoted young composers, at the Salzburg Mozarteum (1962-6), in the USA (at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, 1967), and by instituting the Montepulciano Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte in 1976. In 1975 he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music. His essays are contained in Undine. Tagebuch eines Ballets (1959), Essays (1964), Musik und Politik. Schriften und Gespräche 1966-1975 (1976, enlarged version up to 1984, 1984; English edn. by P. Labanyi as Music and Politics. Collected Writings 1953-81, 1982), and Die englische Katze. Arbeitstagebuch 1979-1982 (1982). In 1996 Henze, who had settled in Italy, published his autobiography as Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten. Autobiographische Mitteilungen 1926-1995.

• Period: Contemporary (1950- )
• Country: Germany
• Born: July 01, 1926 in Gütersloh, Germany
• Genres: Ballet, Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Miscellaneous Music, Opera, Orchestral Music, Symphony, Vocal Music

Biography

Hans Werner Henze has been a prolific composer over a career spanning six decades, writing extensively in all the standard genres such as symphony, concerto, opera, and song, in a remarkable variety of styles. As he has said, "I am bored by the idea of employing approaches which I have already tried." At times in his career, his controversial political views have attracted almost as much attention as his music.

Henze started composing at age 12, even before his formal music education began at the Braunschweig State Music School, which he attended from 1942-1944. From an early age, he was interested in political and social issues. His rejection of the bourgeois values of his upbringing and the Nazism that he encountered first hand probably had a large influence on his later political thinking. He served for a time in the German army in World War II and was briefly held as a prisoner-of-war. After the war, he continued his musical studies at the Institute for Church Music in Heidelberg, where he worked with Wolfgang Fortner, and at Darmstadt, where he studied with Schoenberg disciple René Leibowitz. His earliest acknowledged compositions date from this time, like the Chamber Concerto (1946) which was Henze's first publicly performed work. His first full-length opera, Boulevard Solitude, was completed in 1951.

Despite the hints of jazz and neo-Classicism in some of that early music, Henze was strongly identified with the post-Arnold Schoenberg serial composers for several years. With his move to Italy in 1953, Henze sought to change that perception and brought to his music a new lyricism. One can hear this in his second opera, König Hirsch, premiered in 1956, and the Symphony No. 4, "Il Re Cervo" (1955), which makes use of music from that opera's second act finale. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Stravinsky's librettists for The Rake's Progress, provided the words for Henze's fourth and sixth operas, Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1965-1966). It was around this time that Henze took his first teaching post, director of master classes in composition at the Salzburg Mozarteum.

The notorious premiere of the oratorio Das Floss der Medusa (The Raft of Medusa, a requiem for Che Guevara) in Hamburg in 1968, at which the work's librettist and others were arrested, brought Henze further notoriety. Interactions with German students and Italian intellectuals had motivated Henze to bring to his work an increasing political consciousness. Socialism and the New Left were very appealing to him, even more so after a year of teaching in Cuba in 1969-70, during which he led the Cuban National Symphony in the premiere of his Symphony No. 6 for two chamber orchestras.

Voices (1973), a song cycle with texts by Ho Chi Minh, Bertold Brecht, and others, reflects Henze's political commitment and his musical eclecticism. In his later works, Henze has incorporated such disparate elements as rock and popular music, electronics, taped sounds, microtones, and extended vocal and instrumental techniques. His harrowing Symphony No. 9, premiered in 1997, tells the story of prisoners who escape from a German concentration camp; the Symphony is dedicated to "the heroes and martyrs of German anti-fascism."

Henze has written for many of the great performers of his time, such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Pears, Julian Bream, Heinz and Ursula Holliger, and Christoph Eschenbach. He has also actively championed his own music, traveling the world to conduct and record his compositions. ~ Chris Morrison, All Music Guide

Discography

Hans Werner Henze: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 6; Five Neapolitan Songs Buy this CD

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