HANS WERNER HENZE - Schott Music

6
MAN OF THE THEATRE,
‘HOMME DE LETTRES’
AND POLITICAL ARTIST
by Klaus Oehl
(Translation: Lindsay Chalmers-Gerbracht)
According to Hans Werner Henze’s concept, music also
possesses a linguistic quality and is no mere abstract artefact,
but is irrevocably bound to the reality of human
life. He distances himself from the musical avant-garde
following 1945 with this musical perception. He had already
disassociated himself at an earlier stage from the
Darmstadt circle of serial composers led by Stockhausen
und Boulez, and his relocation to Italy in 1953 only
underlined his individual stance. Henze chooses to assume
the position of solitary artist and relinquishes the
group which he increasingly perceives as a dogmatic
circle. For the composer, abstract serial music appears
restrictive in its standardisation and limitation of the
artistic means of expression. He pursues a non-doctrinaire
and free treatment of his musical medium right
from the start and distances himself from serial music
at an early stage, a process also subsequently followed
by Cage, Nono, Ligeti und Kagel.
Henze has always been a man of the theatre and his
extensive out put of music for the stage owes its origins
to dance theatre. After the
end of the Second World War,
he takes up a position as repetiteur
at the Stadttheater Bielefeld and
subsequently occupies a similar post at
the Theatre in Constance under Heinz Hilpert.
In 1950, he is appointed as artistic director
and conductor for the ballet company at the Hessisches
Staatstheater in Wiesbaden.
The impressive phalanx of his numerous operatic compositions
and other associated genres such as scenic
cantatas and oratorios commences with the three early
ballets Ballettvariationen, Jack Pudding and Rosa Silber.
His first “opera” also dispenses with the singing voice:
Das Wundertheater is a melodrama “for actors and orchestra”.
It was not until the lyrical drama Boulevard
Solitude that Henze integrated sung roles for the first
time in his stage works in this ballet opera.
The composer finally approaches opera in its traditional
sense with König Hirsch in which melodies built up
from Italian folk songs and opera are integrated within
the work’s atonality. His “Italian experience” is based
on his observation that singing in the piazza is just as
natural as singing in the opera: “Singing on the street is
transferred as it were without interruption to the operatic
stage, and it is self-evident that the Italian public
does not have the least suspicion that opera could be
anything artificial, antiquated or requiring editing, let
alone be seen as a monster.”
His aesthetics of a “musica impura”, music which does
not exist in a closed environment but remains permeable
to all manner of human, literary and allegorical
influences, appear to have become much more focused
during his early years in Ischia, Naples and Rome. He
not only shares his adopted country Italy with Ingeborg
Bachmann: both are linked in close friendship and
through two completed operatic pro-jects: Der Prinz
von Homburg and Der junge Lord. He enlists Wystan
Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman for the libretti for
two further music theatre works: the Elegy for Young
Lovers and The Bassarids. The former opera is Henze’s
most successful music theatre composition of the 1960s
and is performed to great acclaim first in Schwetzingen
and subsequently in Zurich, Glyndebourne, Munich,
Berlin, Helsinki, New York and other cities. The Elegy,
König Hirsch and The Bassarids all hark back to a common
theatrical tradition. Although Italian influences
and a number opera structure [Nummernoper] have
been relinquished in favour of a through-composed
form, these works all share the common factors of pronounced
theatricality, the treatment of musical material
and their linguistic character.
Henze’s music for the stage displays an extraordinary
degree of dramatic effectiveness and is
quintessential theatrical music with its
blend of physical-gestural and
pictographic content.
He is attuned to
a specific
con-