HANS WERNER HENZE - Schott Music

The Contessa, the Duchessa, Don Calafrone and
Don Platone are passing the time with games,
hunting, culinary pleasures and other forms of
merrymaking. The men take pleasure in their roles of
competing wooers currying favour from the women
who in turn enjoy discountenancing their adorers
with erotic squabbling. The chamber maid Carmosina
and the housekeeper Cardolella are amused by the
playfulness of their masters.
Don Chisciotte and his page Sancio Pansa burst in
on this atmosphere of sophisticated boredom. The
insane knight who lives in a dream world and is unable
to distinguish between dream and reality is on
the search for new adventures and for his beloved
Dulcinea.
The nobility take advantage of Don Chisciotte’s confusion
for their own fun and distraction; they taunt
and ridicule the outcast through acting out his adventures
in the form of a farce.
Don Chisciotte is a willing victim and joins in the vulgar
entertainment; his sense of mission and his belief
in courtly behaviour, honesty and humanity are
stronger than any form of humiliation. He continues
his travels with his page in search of new adventures.
He leaves behind the nobility who remain unaware of
their meaningless and empty existence.
The alterations made by Henze and Di Leva to Paisiello’s
original work go far beyond mere adaptation.
They added recitatives and arias, altered the dramatic
structure, changeed the order of events and supplemented
the dialogue. Their intention was to give
Paisiello’s opera buffa with its deep-seated roots in
the 18th century a different slant. In this new version
of the well-known story, two spheres encounter
one another representing two social classes – the
vacuous existence of the “genteel” society on the one
hand contrasting with simple people and their grand
dreams, utopias and a never-ending belief in humanity
on the other hand. It cannot be missed that Henze
and Di Leva sympathise with the latter group.
“
It was originally my own idea to make an arrangement
of the score of Paisiello’s comic
opera Don Chisciotte for the local wind band for the
first Cantiere. This daring project was to have been
the chief attraction of the first festival year and was
to be performed in an open air setting in the huge
square, the Piazza Grande. In October 1975, I made
a rare visit to the rehearsal of the wind band and
immediately realised that these amateur musicians
were never going to be capable of learning Paisiello’s
music within a period of eight months. They
were out of practice and lacked the necessary stamina
to play their constantly out-of-tune wind and
brass instruments (which they also never practised)
for a continuous period of at least two hours.
What was I going to do? I neither wished nor would
be able to dispense with the participation of the
wind band which was the only active musical group
in existence in Montepulciano. I hit on the solution
of arranging the Don Chisciotte arias and ensembles
for a small group of professionals with substantial
help from my former pupil Henning Brauel. This was
also in retrospect a mistake, as the delicate tone of
the chamber ensemble was rendered almost inaudible
due to the strong wind which swept across
the square during both performances (this would
continue to cause us problems in subsequent years).
The wind band, whose sound could not even be
drowned out by a hurricane, was allotted the “sinfonia”
and the frequent brief interludes interspersed
throughout the noble adventures of Don Quixote.
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