Hans Werner Henze Phaedra - Barbican

programme note
first time in Berlin in 2007 (performed by many of tonight’s
musicians – Ensemble Modern, conductor Michael Boder,
and some of the same singers, including John Mark Ainsley
as Hippolytus), Henze was shocked at the power of his
Second Act. ‘I had a very talented fellow called Francesco
Antonioni who helped me when I was writing the first part’,
Henze says (Antonioni also made the opera’s electroacoustic
‘bruitage’, a tape-track that you’ll hear interspersed
throughout the score), ‘and he became very important for
the second. In rehearsals, he said, “Maestro, the first part
went quite well, but God knows how the second part will turn
out.” And in performance it turned out to be much more
telling and strong than the first one. I don’t know myself why
it is so successful – but it is.’
Yet Henze has a clear idea of how his music has changed in
recent years – and offers a clue as to why his score for
Phaedra is so astonishingly effective. ‘I think if it has
changed, it’s changed for the better. Only the most
necessary notes appear on the paper, the not-so-necessary
are left out.’ You can hear the effects of this musical
distillation in every bar. Henze describes the piece as a
‘concert opera’, a formulation that hints at the soloistic roles
played by the instrumentalists as well as the singers.
Composed for the new-music virtuosi of Frankfurt’s
Ensemble Modern, and scored for 23 players, Phaedra’s
music has a diaphanous depth. Henze uses the colouristic
power of his woodwind- and brass-heavy ensemble (14 of
them, who play alongside a harp, celesta, and piano, two
4
percussionists, and just four strings) to create the mythic
earthquakes and storms that perforate the work’s drama.
But more often than not, the ensemble is pared down to a
handful of individual lines, filaments of sound that weave a
resonant magic around Henze’s vocal lines, from Phaedra’s
music, by turns lovelorn and vengeful, to Hippolytus’s
existential questioning in the Second Act, or the voluptuous
part that Henze composes for the goddess Artemis (the
Greek name for Diana), cast as a countertenor.
At the end of the Second Act, the Minotaur leads the cast in a
life-affirming hymn, music that shimmers with ethereal
energy in Henze’s orchestration: ‘We are all born naked. We
press towards mortality and dance’. That’s a motto that
stands for Henze’s continuing creativity after coming so close
to the end of his life, the end of his dance. Shortly after
Henze had finished Phaedra, his longstanding partner,
Fausto Moroni, died suddenly. Henze’s world changed
again. ‘The loss that I’ve suffered is very strong, and it makes
my whole life, the whole world, seem quite different from
what I thought it was.’ Like Hippolytus at the end of his
opera, Henze lives in a world transfigured by death and
near-death experiences. But he has wrested his creativity
from the crucible of these traumas. Phaedra is his latest
opera, but not the last. In Henze’s study, upstairs in his house
in Marino, are the sketches for a new opera that will be
premiered later this year: Henze’s dance goes on.
Programme note © Tom Service