HANS WERNER HENZE - Schott Music

Le disparazioni del Signor Pulcinella
Staatsoper unter den Linden Berlin 1997
Labyrinth was once a mini-ballet of around seven
minutes that was never danced and was only heard
a few times as a concert piece. I have taken the main
theme into the new score but have placed it into a
new tonal and rhythmic context, have transformed
and developed it analogous to the new plot worked
out together with Mark Baldwin, to which the music
throughout closely adheres in gesture and narrative.
Thus it is that in this collaboration, action and
music react to each other especially closely. The
Labyrinth orchestra consists exclusively of percussion
instruments.
Like the early sketch (1950), our new dance piece is
based on André Gide’s “Thesée”. There, as is known,
the terrible minotaur is a quite entertaining contemporary
– Theseus would much rather no longer have
left his presence and would have preferred to forget
Thebes and even Ariadne, who then, naturally, rolls
up the thread and thereby in fact tears from the covetous
grasp of the monster the heroe attached to it.
Here, with Baldwin, it is similar: Theseus befriends
the monster, softens him by the beautiful art of classical
dance and then teaches him the first steps in
this field.
The Son of the Air: in the early ‘60s, Jean Cocteau and
I started to work on an idea for a ballet. The poet had
already made notes on the scenario, and now wanted
to add a text, in which certain parallels to the childhood
and life of Arthur Rimbaud were to have been
drawn. And I, the composer, still had to wait for precise
instructions as to the way in which music was to
have functioned within this Cocteau context. Illness
and death prevented the execution of this plan. What
remained were the scenario and Cocteau’s poem « Le
fils de l’air » from 1934, which he first wrote in German
(with the title “Das Luftkind”) for a journal and
in the (unfulfilled) hope for a setting by Kurt Weill,
and of which he not long after made a gramophone
recording in French. The ballet scenario written thirty
years later refers rather indirectly to the old poem,
even if it does speak of bohemians, gipsies who abduct,
seduce and transform boys with their spells, and
of their mothers who cannot find their offspring and
fall into despair. In the ballet, as in the poem, can be
found allusions to the German Shock-Headed Peter
and to the German Erl King myth; to the traumatic
contact of children’s souls with the charms and curiosity-arousing
mysteries of travelling folk, players and
circus acrobats.
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