About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Hans Werner Henze

Encyclopedia : H : HA : HAN : Hans Werner Henze

Hans Werner Henze (born July 1 1926 in Gütersloh, Westphalia, Germany) is a composer well known for his left-wing political beliefs. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of intolerance towards his politics and homosexuality. He continues to live in the village of Marino in the Lazio region of Italy.

An avowed Marxist and member of the Italian Communist Party, Henze has produced compositions honoring Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. The librettist of his requiem for Che Guevara, titled Das Floss der Medusa (The Raft of Medusa), was among several people arrested at the 1968 Hamburg premiere for placing a red flag on the stage. Henze spent a year teaching in Cuba, though he later became disillusioned with Castro. His music is extremely varied in style, having been influenced at various times by atonality, Italian music and jazz.

Contents

Life and works

Early years

Henze was the oldest of six children of a teacher, and showed early interest in art and music. This, along with his political standpoint, led to conflict with his conservative father. He began studies at the state music school of Braunschweig in 1942, but had to break off studies after being called up to the army in 1944, in the latter stages of the Second World War. He was soon captured and was held in a prisoner of war camp for the remainder of the war. In 1945 he became an accompanist in the Bielefeld City Theatre, and was able to continue his studies under Wolfgang Fortner in Heidelberg in 1946.

In his early years he worked with twelve-tone technique, for example in his First Symphony and Violin Concerto of 1947. In 1948 he became musical assistant at the Deutscher Theater in Konstanz, where his first opera Das Wundertheater (after Cervantes) was created.

In 1950 he became ballet conductor at the Hessian State Theatre in Wiesbaden, where he composed two operas for radio, his First Piano Concerto as well as his first stage work of real note, the jazz-influenced opera Boulevard Solitude, a modern recasting of the traditional Manon Lescaut story. He also took part in the famous Darmstadt New Music Summer School, a key vehicle for the propagation of avant-garde techniques.

Move to Italy

In 1953 he left Germany in disappointment, reacting against homophobia and the country's general political climate, and moved to Italy, where he has remained for most of the rest of his life. Initially he suffered further disappointment, with disputed premieres of the opera König Hirsch, based on a text by Carlo Gozzi, and the ballet Maratona, with a libretto by Luchino Visconti. However, he then began long-lasting and fruitful co-operation with the poet Ingeborg Bachmann. Working with her as librettist, her composed the operas Der Prinz von Homburg (1958) based on a text by Heinrich von Kleist and Der junge Lord (1964) after Wilhelm Hauff as well as Serenades and Arias (1957) und his Choral Fantasy (1964).

From 1962 until 1967, Henze taught masterclasses in composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and in 1967 became a visiting Professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. One of his greatest successes was the premiere of the opera Die Bassariden at the Salzburg Festival.

In the following period, he greatly strengthened his political involvement which also influenced his musical work. For example, the premiere of his oratorio Das Floss der Medusa in Hamburg failed when his West Berlin collaborators refused to perform under a portrait of Che Guevara and a revolutionary flag which his librettist had placed upon the stage. His politics also greatly influenced his Sixth Symphony (1969), Second Violin Concerto (1971) and his piece for spoken word and chamber orchestra, El Cimarron, based on a book by Cuban author Miguel Barnet about escaped black slaves during Cuba's colonial period.

An established composer

His political critique reached its high point in 1976 with the premiere of his opera We Come to the River.

In 1976, Henze founded the Cantiere Internazionale d´Arte in Montepulciano for the promotion of new music, where his children's opera Pollicino premiered in 1980. From 1980 until 1991 he led a class in composition in the Cologne Music School. In 1981 he founded the Mürztal Workshops in the Austrian region of Styria, the same region where he set up the Deutschlandsberg Youth Music Festival in 1984. Finally, in 1988, he founded the Munich Biennale, an "international festival for new music theatre", of which he was the artistic director.

His own operas became more conventional once more, for example the 1983 The English Cat and Das verratene Meer (1990) based on the novel Gogo no Eiko by Japanese author Yukio Mishima.

His later works, while arguably less controversial, continued his political and social engagement. His Requiem (1990) comprised nine spiritual concertos for piano, trumpet and chamber orchestra, and was written in memory of the musician Michael Vyner who died young. The Ninth Symphony for mixed choir and orchestra (1997), including verses from the novel The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers is a coming to terms with the darkest parts of Germany's past, with which Henze himself lived as a child and teenager. His most recent success was the 2003 premiere of the opera L'Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe at the Salzburg Festival, based on a Syrian fairy tale.

In 1995 Henze received the Westphalian Music Prize, which has carried his name since 2001. On 7 November 2004 Henze received an honorary doctorate for 'musical science' from the Munich Conservatory and Theater School.

Style

Henze's music has incorporated neo-classicism, jazz, the twelve tone technique, serialism, and some rock or popular music. He was taught by the German composer Wolfgang Fortner, and his 1947 Violin Concerto shows that he could write excellently in the 12-tone style. Later however, he reacted against atonalism and his opera Bouvelard Solitude includes elements of jazz and Parisian popular music. After his move to Italy in 1953, his music became considerably more Neapolitan in style, with lush, rich textures in the opera König Hirsch, and even more so in the opulent ballet music that he wrote for English choreographer Frederick Ashton's Ondine, completed in 1957. Henze received much of the impetus for his ballet music from his earlier job as ballet adviser at the Wiesbaden State Theatre. Ondine is classical in appearance, but contains some jazz and, although Mendelssohn and Weber were important influences for this composition, plenty of it is redolent of Stravinsky, not only Stravinsky as a neo-classical composer, but also as the composer of The Rite of Spring. The textures for the cantata Kammermusik are far harsher, however, and later Henze returned to atonalism in Antifone, and later again other styles mentioned above became important in his music. Political considerations have often played a part in shaping Henze's style at different times in his career.

Works

Operas, music-theatre and other dramatic works

Symphonies

Other works for large forces

Ballets

Choral

Vocal solo

Chamber

Instrumental

Arrangements

References

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: