Hans Werner Henze obituary
Composer devoted to the exploration of political ideas in the opera house and concert hall
He was not on the list.
Hans Werner Henze, who has died aged 86, created an outstanding body of musical works with theatrical and literary dimensions in the opera house, the concert hall and beyond. German-born, but long resident in Italy, he was continental Europe's leading composer of operas in the period following the second world war, during and beyond the decades when Benjamin Britten held the equivalent position in British musical life.
One of the most prolific exponents of the genre, he composed two dozen overall, some in radically different versions, embracing full-scale grand opera, chamber opera, comic opera, a triple-bill of one-acters, concert works, radio works and hybrids with other theatrical forms such as the musical (La Cubana, 1973) and ballet (Venus and Adonis, 1997). His most recent opera, Gisela! Or the Strange and Memorable Ways of Happiness, was premiered in 2010.
He also composed a dozen ballets – including the full-evening Ondine with Frederick Ashton for Covent Garden (1958, revived most recently in 2008), and Orpheus, to a scenario by the playwright Edward Bond (1979) – as well as incidental music to stage plays and films. His output for the concert hall ran to more than 200 separate works, including 10 symphonies, numerous concertos and other orchestral works, five string quartets and other chamber, instrumental and vocal pieces.
The connecting thread between this vast array of works in so many disparate genres was politics, a commitment to which never left him, although varying in degree over time. Henze adhered throughout his life to leftwing ideologies, a reaction to his youth in Nazi Germany, which left an indelible mark on his creative psyche. He was not afraid of courting controversy, even as recently as last month: "So long as there are people living in Israel who endured the Nazi concentration camps, Wagner should not be performed there. I see no pressing reason to play Hitler's favourite music."
He was born in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, the eldest of six children to Margarete Henze and her teacher husband, Franz. During the 1930s, Franz was gradually seduced to the Nazi cause, to the dismay of his son, who 40 years on wrote of how he heard his father "in his Nazi uniform, roaming drunkenly through the woods with his party cronies, bawling out repulsive songs such as When Jewish Blood Splashes Off Your Knife. These are traumatic memories." Hans was forcibly enrolled in the Hitler Youth at 12.
Around the time that he started studying at the Braunschweig state music school, he gained a fuller idea of the extent of Nazi oppression. "If someone like myself," he later reminisced, "a 15-year-old living in the depths of the country knew about the concentration camps by the beginning of the 1940s, then other people, adults, definitely knew better than me what was going on."
The young composer's growing disgust with his compatriots intensified after the war through their refusal to accept responsibility for what had occurred. He observed the reactions of an audience following a performance of Hindemith's symphony Mathis der Maler: "There was an undertone of, 'Now that Hindemith can be played again, our guilt is removed, everything is right with the world, isn't it?'"
The continuance of much of the Nazi administrative apparatus, perpetuated by the cold war, was a development he found irreconcilable with his sense of shame over the Holocaust. On a personal level, he experienced social isolation as a homosexual in an increasingly boorish, intolerant society: on one occasion he narrowly escaped imprisonment after a dawn raid.
By 1944 he was a radio officer with a tank division. Brief internment by the British forces introduced him to the BBC, and a wider range of music on the radio.
After studies with Wolfgang Fortner, he became a repetiteur and conductor, especially for ballet, from 1948 in Konstanz, on the border with Switzerland, then from 1950 at the Hesse state theatre in Wiesbaden. He produced a string of short, inventive ballet scores and his first operas: The Magic Theatre (1949), after Cervantes; Boulevard Solitude (1952), a reworking of Manon Lescaut; and A Country Doctor (1951), after Kafka, originally conceived for radio and reworked 14 years later for the stage.
Despite this burgeoning theatrical career, Henze was deeply unhappy, his disaffection underlined by a holiday in Italy with its unbombed cities, leftwing political orientation and friendly, tolerant people. When his publisher, Schott's, offered him a large advance on royalties on condition that he relinquish his conducting posts and devote himself to composition, he leapt at the chance.
Crossing the Italian border in 1953, he kept on driving until he reached Venice. Eventually, he made his home in Marino, south-east of Rome, with his partner of more than 40 years, Fausto Moroni, whose quiet fortitude helped enable Henze to weather personal crises in the early 1970s.
One of the earliest works from his exile to make its mark was the cello concerto Ode to the West Wind (1953), after Shelley's famous poem inspired by the Peterloo massacre of 1819. The set of Five Neapolitan Songs (1956) bears an Italianate singability unheard before in Henze's output.
However, the major work of his first years in Italy was the fantastical opera König Hirsch (King Stag, 1956), to a libretto by Heinz von Cramer after Carlo Gozzi's play. The score meant a great deal to Henze – indeed, he has written that it was a "diary, an autobiography, which tells how I discovered music" – and he returned to it over and again to make revisions or extracts for concert performance, including his Fourth Symphony (1955).
The opera's premiere in Berlin was highly controversial. Its conductor, Hermann Scherchen, known to orchestral players as "the Red Dictator" and a dominant force in the contemporary musical scene, made many cuts of sections he felt were reactionary. The opera's intelligibility was thereby compromised, and members of the audience protested for half an hour after the premiere, holding both Henze and Scherchen to blame. The score as Henze intended it was produced in something resembling its original form only in 1985.
Despite this disappointment, demand for Henze's music continued to intensify and he enjoyed collaborations with many leading artists, including the film-maker Luchino Visconti, who provided the libretto for the jazz ballet Maratona (1957), and WH Auden and Chester Kallman, librettists of the operas Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1966). His orchestral Antifonie was written for Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, who disliked the score and delayed performing it for two years, until 1962. His orchestrally brilliant Fifth Symphony, inspired by 20th-century Rome, was first performed by Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic.
Henze's trips to the US for that premiere in 1963 and as a visiting professor four years later were important for regalvanising his sense of political involvement, which had begun to slumber in the Italian sun. He was deeply affected by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements and on his return to Europe began to take a more public stance. He campaigned for the social democrat Willy Brandt as chancellor in the 1965 election, though with a feeling of "uselessness and impotence", and from 1967 to 1969 more successfully for the release of the composer Isang Yun, abducted and imprisoned by the South Korean authorities.
At the same time, Henze was beginning to experience a crisis with his music. Barely 40, he was unquestionably a leading European figure. Despite severe critical misgivings, he had succeeded in fusing a style simultaneously radical but acceptable to modern audiences. He enjoyed a string of great public successes, much to the disgust of avant-garde figures such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, including the premieres of the comic opera Der Junge Lord (1965) and, at the Salzburg festival the following year, The Bassarids. For all his acclaim, Henze felt he lacked direction and needed a cause. He found it in 1968 in the student protest movement. His association with the students (he even sheltered their leader, Rudi Dutschke, after an assassination attempt) was to have severe consequences for his standing in Germany. His style lost its opulence and lyricism in favour of a leaner, more angular sound, seemingly designed to be provocative.
The crucial flashpoint occurred on 9 December 1968, at the Hamburg premiere of his oratorio volgare e militare, The Raft of the Medusa. The music was not heard that night, as a riot ensued when first a poster of the recently killed Che Guevara, to whom the score was dedicated, and then a red flag were in turn displayed and torn down.
Although a studio recording was made without incident a few months later, and a public performance given in Vienna in 1971, the oratorio became infamous. Most of Henze's German friends and associates deserted him, and he became a pariah in his homeland.
The composer's response was largely to turn his back on Germany for 15 years. His frustration and rage found expression in the deeply disturbing cantata Essay on Pigs (1968), written for the London Sinfonietta, and in a further shift to the political left. He made two highly productive visits to Castro's Cuba in 1969-70 from which emerged several important compositions: the much-misunderstood Sixth Symphony, a concerto – Compases para Preguntas Ensimismadas (Metres for Questions Absorbed in Self-contemplation) – for viola, the cantata El Cimarrón and La Cubana. This last was one of several works Henze wrote with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, some of whose poems he included alongside texts by Cuban writers, Bertolt Brecht and Ho Chi Minh in his kaleidoscopic song-cycle Voices (1973), perhaps his most characteristic creation.
Shortly afterwards he began an association with Bond that, as well as the Orpheus ballet, resulted in the choral cycle Orpheus Behind the Wire (1983), and the operas We Come to the River (1976, again for Covent Garden) and The English Cat (1983). All were infused by political and social comment.
In 1975 Henze became involved as director of the music festival – cantiere, or workshop – in the Tuscan town of Montepulciano. This was a local, largely amateur celebration, and the influx of leading, often leftwing, lights of the European contemporary literary and musical scenes, such as Bond, the Italian writer Giuseppe di Leva and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies, caused considerable tensions, involving the composer in politics of a very different stamp. However, the cantieri survived, and Henze enjoyed a second spell as director in the 1990s. Former pupils of his, for example Detlev Glanert, his heir as Germany's foremost living opera composer, also carried on his work there.
The premiere in January 1984 of his Seventh Symphony at last saw a public reconciliation between Germany and the composer. Commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, the work derived its expressive profile from the poems and life of Friedrich Hölderlin. Henze wrote of it as "a German symphony, and it deals with matters German". Such concerns marked much of the music in the final phase of his compositional career, as in his arrangements of Karl Philipp Emmanuel Bach – I Sentimenti (1982) – and Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1995), the chamber guitar concerto To an Aeolian Harp (1986, inspired by an Eduard Mörike poem) and the magisterial Piano Quintet (1991). There was in addition a re-emergence of settings in German – "I can do best when I know exactly what the meaning is, without a shadow of doubt" – for the most part in collaboration with the poet Hans-Ulrich Treichel.
The major fruits of this partnership were the operas Das Verratene Meer (The Ocean Betrayed, 1990, after Yukio Mishima, reworked later as Gogo no Eiko) and Venus and Adonis, plus the choral-and-orchestral Ninth Symphony (1997), Henze's musical summing-up, taking its text from Anna Seghers's harrowing novel of the Nazi era, The Seventh Cross.
He became involved in the summer academy run by his home town of Gütersloh and as artistic director from 1988 of the Munich Biennial festival. During the 1990s he undertook a major revision of his catalogue, withdrawing or developing new versions of several older works, and completed an autobiography, Bohemian Fifths (1998).
In parallel with his return to Germanic subjects, he deepened his connections with Britain, composing the set of nine "spiritual concertos" that made up Requiem (1993), in memory of the London Sinfonietta's director, Michael Vyner, as well as using English texts as the basis of his surrogate cello concerto Liebeslieder (1985) and, from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Eighth Symphony (1993).
The four movements of the Tenth (2000) – A Storm, A Hymn, A Dance, A Dream – suggest an undisclosed programme resulting in a fascinating orchestral panoply that is truly symphonic. Henze's harmonic language in his symphonies may not always have pleased the purists but its always clear (if occasionally halting) flow confirms the logical and unified progression.
The flow of original music – as opposed to orchestrations of that by others or a host of revisions of his earlier pieces – eventually slowed. Nonetheless, the importance to European culture of Henze's musical-theatrical canon was underlined by his last three operas: L'Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe (The Hoopoe and the Triumph of Filial Love, 2003, to his own libretto); Phaedra (2007), echoing Britten's final cantata; and Gisela.
Moroni died shortly after the completion of Phaedra.
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