Hans Werner Henze

German composer

• Born: July 1, 1926
• Birthplace: Gütersloh, Germany
• Died: October 27, 2012

Hans Werner Henze was one of the most prolific European composers of the postwar era, with a catalog of published compositions numbering in the hundreds and including almost every medium. His success as a modern operatic composer was unique.

Early Life

The first of six children, Hans Werner Henze (hahnz VEHR-nahr HEHNTS-sah) was born in the small Westphalian town of Gütersloh. His father, Franz, a schoolteacher with strong fascist views, found his eldest son’s artistic inclinations objectionable and discouraged him from serious musical study. Finally, in an attempt to prove to him the uselessness of a musical career, Franz allowed his son to leave the privileged Gymnasium and to become enrolled in a much less prestigious local trade school for instrumentalists. There Henze studied piano and percussion.

In 1944, the eighteen-year-old Henze was drafted into the Germany army. Although he was intended for service in an armored division in Poland, Henze was transferred to a unit charged with the production of Nazi propaganda films (an item that Henze omitted from his official 1980 autobiographical sketch). Captured by the advancing British in May 1945, Henze was released in mid-July. Returning home, he found himself the head of his household, for his father had yet to be released by the Allies. To support his mother and five siblings, Henze first worked for the British occupation forces as a transport laborer. Within a few months, he took another job as a rehearsal pianist in the reopened Bielefeld municipal theater.

Henze’s shame in being German, which eventually grew into animosity toward German culture in general, had an enduring effect on his character and music. Armed with forged papers that allowed him entry into the American occupied zone, in early 1946 Henze left his family in Bielefeld to study in Heidelberg. There, at the Institute for Church Music, Henze studied counterpoint and fugue with Wolfgang Fortner, one of Germany’s leading composers and teachers. During his two years in Heidelberg, Henze wrote his first symphony, violin concerto, and string quartet. The Darmstadt performance of Kammerkonzert, for piano, flute, and strings, in 1946 (his first publicly performed composition) resulted immediately in a publishing contract with Schott.

By the close of the 1940s, Darmstadt, West Germany, had become the focal point for the European avant-garde. Founded in 1946 by Wolfgang Steinecke, the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (International Summer Course in New Music) drew to Darmstadt musicians from all over Europe. Henze participated in the very first session, in which he conducted an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis (1929; The Didactic Play of Baden: On Consent, 1960). Returning the following summer, Henze attended lectures by René Leibowitz, a friend of Arnold Schoenberg and a highly articulate apologist for both his music and twelve-tone compositional method. Henze returned to Darmstadt again in 1948, this time studying privately with Leibowitz. Although he immediately began incorporating twelve-tone techniques in his writing (the Variations for Piano being his first twelve-tone work), Henze never became the kind of doctrinaire dodecaphonist for which Darmstadt became famous. Also in 1948, he became musical assistant at the Deutscher Theater in Konstanz, where he staged his first operatic work, the one-act Das Wundertheater, and two years later, he began as ballet conductor at the Hessian State Theater of Wiesbaden.

Life’s Work

At a time when most composers are ready only to make their first steps toward a professional career, by 1950 the twenty-four-year-old Henze was already an established artist. This unusual success was a result of both Henze’s high productivity and the support of what the composer called “angels.” He had been taken up by the professional music world. Yet Henze realized that, as well as benefits, such patronage posed hazards. “Perhaps slowly, and without your recognizing it you begin to repress from your music what you wanted but which others thought inappropriate.”

Thus sustained (and potentially inhibited), Henze produced a body of works unequaled by his contemporaries in their quantity, number of professional productions, and stylistic diversity. In 1949, he completed his Second Symphony. In 1950, he finished both his Third Symphony and First Piano Concerto. The following year, the city of Düsseldorf awarded him the Robert Schumann Prize. That same year, Henze premiered two dramatic works, the radio opera A Country Doctor and the lyric drama Boulevard Solitude. In 1955, Henze completed his first full-length opera, König Hirsch. Its premiere the following September at the West Berlin State Opera established what was to become a tradition with Henze’s first performances: critical accolades mixed with political scandal. The conductor, Hermann Scherchen, was dubbed the Red Dictator for his politics by the orchestra, and the first night’s performance was repeatedly interrupted by catcalls, the noise twice halting the third act altogether.

By 1953, Henze had abandoned Germany for Italy, further life in his homeland becoming intolerable for two reasons. First, the composer believed that he saw the legacy of German fascism neither repudiated nor expiated by the “new” Germany, but rather readopted in subtle forms. Second, Henze believed that his isolation as a homosexual would be less severe among the Italians than among his fellow Germans. Never seeking to conceal his sexual orientation, Henze had been increasingly harassed for it. Apparently his “angels” feared the effect that public knowledge of his homosexuality might have on the public reception of his music (and its marketability). Arrested from his home with a lover in the winter of 1948–49, Henze avoided a trial and possible imprisonment only by denying his sexual orientation, an act he found odiously deceitful.

Selling almost all of his belongings, Henze hired a car and drove into Italy, intending fully to begin a new life. He settled first on the island of Ischia, renting a two-room house. There he came under the spell of Italian folk songs and would thereafter seek to synthesize popular music traditions with his own, highly crafted style. In 1955, Henze moved to Naples, where he wrote Four Poems for Orchestra (1955), Five Neapolitan Songs (1956), the ballet Ondine (1957), the three-act opera The Prince of Homburg (1958), and the pantomime L’Usignolo dell’imperatore. With The Prince of Homburg, he began a long collaboration with poet Ingeborg Bachmann, who wrote many librettos for him. In 1961, Henze moved again, this time to the Roman resort village Castelgandolfo. That year he saw the premiere of yet another opera (Elegy for Young Lovers, begun in 1959 with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman) and the awarding of the Arts Prize of the City of Hannover. He also began work on an oratorio, Novae de infinito laudes, commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society (because the society found the piece too expensive to perform, it was premiered in 1963 in Venice at the Biennale).

Henze first traveled to the United States in 1963 to hear the premiere of his Fifth Symphony by the New York Philharmonic led by Leonard Bernstein. He returned in 1967 to teach as a visiting professor at Dartmouth University and again in 1968 for the first American performance of his opera The Bassarids in Santa Fe (the opera had been premiered earlier that year at Milan’s La Scala). During his 1967 stay, he witnessed firsthand the race riots that erupted in Washington and Newark and asked himself what his contribution would be in these times. He wondered what music could do, and this question quickly came to dominate Henze’s work. He read works by Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilich Lenin and was deeply influenced by Brecht. He became active in the German Socialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), attended the Vietnam Congress, and joined the East German Academy of Arts as a corresponding member. He grew convinced that music and theater not only could but also should advance the spread of world communist revolution.

Although such a stance had been implicit in many of Henze’s earlier works, the first composition in which it was explicit was The Raft of the Medusa , an oratorio that Henze described as a requiem for Che Guevara. Its scheduled premiere in Hamburg on December 9, 1968, was a political event in its own right. At the performance’s beginning, the hall was invaded by protesters who showered the audience with thousands of anticonsumerism leaflets (an event staged, with the composer’s blessing, by music students with the Hamburg and Berlin SDS). When a poster of Guevara, which had been mounted on the podium, was torn up by the event’s producer, Henze himself replaced it with a red flag. Part of the chorus refused to sing in the presence of the revolutionary banner and walked off the stage. While Henze, the producer, and Radio Hamburg’s lawyer were negotiating some sort of compromise that would allow the work’s performance, in came fully equipped riot police who began arresting the protesters. Amid such pandemonium a performance was impossible. Henze responded to the brouhaha the next year with a work for narrator, brass quintet, and chamber orchestra that he called Essay on Pigs .

Probably Henze’s masterpiece of the period was the dramatic song cycle El Cimarrón . Composed after visits to Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1969 and 1970, the ninety-minute work is scored for bass baritone, flute, guitar, and one percussionist. This setting of the rather dubious autobiography of the 101-year-old former slave Esteban Montejo gave Henze an ideal form for both creating a work of riveting theater and presenting an icon of proletarian liberation. Using a largely graphic-style notation, which allowed his performers opportunities for improvisation, Henze’s work moved through Montejo’s reminiscences of slavery, his escape, and his lovers, climaxing in his participation in the revolutionary Battle of Mal Tiempo. Throughout, Henze juxtaposed Caribbean popular songs with aleotoric and atonal techniques.

In 1975, the council of the impoverished Tuscan town Montepulciano wrote Henze for advice after they had failed to establish a music festival. Believing that music could raise the town’s moral, economic, and social standards, Henze began a musical program to strengthen the town’s cultural life. Thus bettered, Henze thought, the citizens would be able to participate more fully in the establishment of a progressive communist italiaità, music here being a tool of the class struggle. In October of that year, Henze brought to Montepulciano a group of composers (the best known of whom was Peter Maxwell Davies). Together they worked on a collective opera (The Oven) and discussed plans for the festival. The Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte, as the festival is now called, was born. In 1978, it included production of a play written by town intellectuals, another play written and performed by children, performances by a visiting band from Yorkshire, and concerts by a choir from Cambridge.

Henze’s organizational work continued. He established the Mürztal Workshops in Austria in 1981, the Deutschlandsberg Youth Music Festival in 1984, and Munich Biennale, a festival for new musical theater, in 1988. He also conducted composition classes at the Cologne Music School from 1980 until 1991.

Although much of his energy was devoted to the Montepulciano Cantiere, Henze continued to receive and fulfill commissions. In 1976 (the year of the first festival), Henze completed his third and fourth string quartets. A fifth followed the year after. In 1979, he returned to the medium of the song cycle with the theater piece for mezzo-soprano and ensemble The King of Harlem. In 1983, he published the opera The English Cat. His Seventh Symphony followed in 1984.

In the summer of 2002, Henze saw the premiere of his Tenth Symphony, a thirty-eight-minute work in four movements that rests on a wide variety of percussion instruments. It has been his Ninth Symphony (premiere 1998), however, that has attracted the greatest critical and popular attention. While the revolutionary fervor of many of his earlier works moderated late in his career, he remained haunted by his experience during World War II, and the Ninth Symphony reflects the fact. Dedicated to the heroes and martyrs of the German antifascist resistance, it is a choral work, and the text, adapted from Anna Segher’s novel The Seventh Cross (1942) addresses the horror and cruelty of the war—in his own words, “an apotheosis of the terrible and painful.”

In a similar fashion Henze’s late operas explore how a painful past shapes the present. In the case of L’Upupa und der Triumph der Shonesliebe , which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2003, it is his own past. Like his own father, who urged Henze to fight in World War II, the father in this opera sends his sons on a quest for the magical hoopoe, a bird that symbolizes beauty. In the end, he must face loneliness and the recognition that he has sent away his favorite son for good. Henze’s thirty-second opera, Phaedra , premiered at the Berlin Staatsoper late in 2007 and concerns the classical Greek tragedy of misbegotten love and loss. Phaedra’s illicit lust for her stepson Hippolytus leads to death for both of them, but in Henze’s treatment, the story continues after death when stepmother and son achieve a reconciliation. In some ways the theme reflects composer's own experience: in 2005, Henze mysteriously fell ill, spent two months near comatose, and after a semi-miraculous recovery, completed the opera.

The variety of Henze’s compositions continued through the 1990s into the twenty-first century with such works as the air Fraternité (1999), the orchestral piece L’Heure bleue (2001), the ballet Le fils de l’air (1995–96), the choral piece Hirtenlieder (1993–95), and the chamber piece Ein kleines Potpourri (2000). Among his many honors, Henze became the first composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic and served in the same capacity twice at the Tanglewood Festival. He won the Westphalian Music Prize in 1995, which was renamed for him in 2001, and in 2004, the Munich Conservatory and Theater School awarded him an honorary doctorate for music science. Henze also won the Ernst von Siemens Music Award (1990), Hans von Bülow Medal of the Berlin Philharmonic (1997), and Cannes Classical Award for best living composer (2001). He was made a knight of the French Legion of Honor in 2003.

Henze dedicated a twenty-minute choral piece, Elogium Musicum (2008), to the memory of his partner of four decades, Fausto Moroni (d. 2007). The deeply emotional work met with critical acclaim. Paul Griffiths, writing for the New York Times, called it "at once vast and intimate, Mediterranean-Classical in its sunlight and German-Romantic in its expressive depth."

In January 2010, Henze's Opfergang Immolazione (Sacrifice), for vocal quartet and chamber orchestra and based on Franz Werfel’s long poem Das Opfer, debuted in Rome. His final operatic piece was to be the revision of Gisela! or The Strange and Memorable Ways of Happiness, with Christian Lehnert and Michael Kerstan. It made its world premiere at the Ruhrtriennale in September of that same year.

Henze died on October 27, 2012, in Dresden, Germany. The following August, Deutsche Grammaphon Recordings released a sixteen-disc compilation of Henze's work, including pieces from throughout his lengthy career.

Significance

For Henze, music has been both a means with which he glorified past proletarian revolutions and a tool by which he effected revolutionary acts. Its impact was primarily political and only secondarily aesthetic. In 1969, Henze wrote,

I can conceive of utopian possibilities only in socialism. Utopia is defined by the absence of capitalism . . . the liberation of art from its commercialization. I visualize the disappearance of the musical elite and of globe-trotting virtuosi. . . . I could envisage composing becoming something that all people can do, simply by taking away their inhibitions. . . . Music would then be something that belongs to all, that is not alien but a part of people’s lives. People will no longer be alienated, but will be able to develop; they will be able to open themselves to all the beauties of life.

He borrowed freely from many sources—folk song, jazz, atonal, and aleotoric practices—using whatever best suited his immediate purpose. Yet Henze’s strong compositional craft and vivid imagination ensured that his political views were consistently presented in musical settings of utmost artistry and theatric power. Moreover, late in his career Henze moderated the dissonances of the twelve-tone style and looked increasingly to nineteenth-century romantic forebears to express his sense of grief over the past and optimism for a better future. As critic Arnold Whittall wrote in 2006,

It is the intersection of, and tension between, such strongly contrasted states of light and dark that make Henze’s life and work so emblematic and so fascinating especially when, in the end, the nightmare might just have been suppressed, if not wholly exorcised, by glimpses of a not-entirely pain-free paradise.

Bibliography

Austin, William W. Music in the Twentieth Century. New York: Norton, 1966. Print. Although dated, an excellent source for the student interested in understanding the developments on which modern composers have built their own styles. Henze is discussed briefly in the context of other, post–World War II German composers.

Baker, Theodore. Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. 7th rev. ed. New York: Schirmer, 1984. Print. Contains a brief biography of Henze followed by a list of works that is helpful in both its completeness and in its listings of both dates of works’ completion and their premiere.

Griffiths, Paul. "Hans Werner Henze, Composer, Dies at 86." New York Times 29 Oct. 2012: D8. Print.

Henderson, Robert. “Hans Werner Henze.” New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Ed. Stanley Sadie. 6th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Print. The best general source on the composer in English. Although the book provides much useful material, Henderson’s enthusiasm for the composer’s work borders on hagiography.

Henze, Hans Werner. Bohemian Fifths. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Print. An autobiography that takes readers to 1995 and is filled with anecdotes. Reflects about Henze's life, controversial events, initial enthusiasm for Fidel Castro and Cuba followed by his disillusionment, and views about music and composers.

Henze, Hans Werner. Music and Politics: Collected Writings 1953-1981. Trans, Peter Labanyi. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Print. Any study of Henze’s work should begin with this translation of Henze’s essays and selected letters. Helpful in understanding the cultural climate of Germany immediately following the Nazis’ defeat, this volume also contains a useful chronology of Henze’s life and works.

Henze, Hans Werner. Ondine: Diary of a Ballet. Alton: Dance, 2004. Print. While Henze was collaborating with Frederick Aston on Ondine in 1957, he kept a diary of his reflections on the choreography and the music, offered in this volume. An invaluable resource for insight into his compositional practices.

Machlis, Joseph. Introduction to Contemporary Music. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1979. Print. Written by one of the generation’s best writers on music. His concluding “dictionary,” which presents brief biographies of several hundred contemporary composers, including Henze, is helpful.

Morgan, Frances. "Hans Werner Henze, 1926–2012." BFI. British Film Institute, 19 Nov. 2013. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.

Salzman, Eric. Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Print. Discusses Henze briefly within a chapter devoted to musical theater.

Service, Tom. "A Guide to Hans Werner Henze." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 29 Oct. 2012. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.

Williamson, Marcus. "Hans Werner Henze: Composer Widely Regarded as One of the Greatest of the 20th Century." Independent. independent.co.uk, 29 Oct. 2012. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.

Whittall, Arnold. “Henze’s Haunted Sensibility.” Musical Times 147 (2006): 5–15. Print. A long essay, ostensibly a review of Henze’s autobiography, evaluating the unrestrained expressions of grief about World War II and deaths of loved ones in Henze’s music, his compositional style, and elements of his background.