HANS WERNER HENZE - Schott Music

Elegy for Young Lovers
English National Opera 2010
22
most incisive stylistic facets of the music are on the
one hand the vocal parts ranging from parlando and
arioso sections to a variety of ensemble pieces and on
the other hand the dramatic stringency of assigning
specific instruments to the individual characters. This
provides a commentary to the actions on stage and
the psychological entanglements as a form of audible
magnification.
“
What we experience is essentially the birth
of a poem: the poem evolving during the
course of the three acts which we are able to observe
right from its moment of conception up to
the culminating first public reading. The grotesque,
ridiculous, vulgar, iniquitous and cruel accompaniments
to this birth process are all levelled against
the figure of the artist as a hero: the concept of a
heroic life which was never really relinquished by
the 19th century. – One factor of this concept is the
catastrophic vision of the artist living in isolation for
the good of his creativity: his enforced existence as
an outcast, outsider and pariah, as someone forced
to suspend his own self and live according to other
existing principles than are applied to normal per-
sons. The harrowing essence of this concept is revealed
to us in the culminating scene of the opera.
The central figure of the work is the fêted poet Gregor
Mittenhofer who could have been the model
for a number of prototypes within the literary world
around the turn of the twentieth century. His destiny
is his obsession with his work, his inability to
communicate and his alienation from his environment.
Mittenhofer is like a Moloch who is prepared
to sacrifice everything for his creative work. In his
own fascination, he appears as a medicine man and
his mania and demons can be viewed as a part of his
mythical form.