Hans Werner Henze
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Hans Werner Henze | |
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Born | |
Died | 27 October 2012 Dresden, Germany | (aged 86)
Education | Heidelberg University |
Occupation | Classical composer |
Organizations | |
Partner | Fausto Moroni (died 2007) |
Awards |
Hans Werner Henze (1 July 1926 – 27 October 2012) was a German composer. His large oeuvre is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition. In particular, his stage works reflect "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life".[1]
Henze was also known for his political convictions. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality. Late in life he lived in the village of Marino in the central Italian region of Lazio, and in his final years still travelled extensively, in particular to Britain and Germany, as part of his work. An avowed Marxist and member of the Italian Communist Party, Henze produced compositions honoring Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. At the 1968 Hamburg premiere of his requiem for Che Guevara, titled Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of Medusa), the placing of a red flag on the stage sparked a riot and the arrest of several people, including the librettist. Henze spent a year from 1969 to 1970 teaching in Cuba.
Life and works
Early years
Henze was born in
Although the Henze household was filled with talk of current affairs, Hans was also able to hear broadcasts of classical music (especially Mozart) and eventually his father realized that his son had a vocation as a musician. Henze began studies at the state music school of Braunschweig in 1942, where he studied piano, percussion, and theory. Franz Henze rejoined the army in 1943 and he was sent to the Eastern front, where he died. Henze had to break off his studies after being conscripted into the army in 1944, towards the end of the Second World War. He was trained as a radio operator. He was soon captured by the British and held in a prisoner-of-war camp for the remainder of the war.[citation needed] In 1945 he became an accompanist in the Bielefeld City Theatre, and continued his studies under Wolfgang Fortner at Heidelberg University in 1946.
Henze had some successful performances at Darmstadt, including an immediate success in 1946 with a neo-baroque work for piano, flute and strings, that brought him to the attention of Schott's, the music publishers. He also took part in the famous Darmstadt New Music Summer School, a key vehicle for the propagation of avant-garde techniques. At the 1947 summer school, Henze turned to serial technique.
In his early years he worked with
In 1950 he became ballet conductor at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden 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. His ballet Ondine was composed for the English Royal Ballet and choreographed by Ashton, for production in 1958.
Move to Italy
Henze left Germany in 1953, in reaction to
He composed his Five Neapolitan Songs for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau soon after his arrival in Naples. A later sojourn in Greece provided the opportunity to complete his Hölderlin-based work Kammermusik 1958, dedicated to Benjamin Britten and premiered by the tenor Peter Pears, the guitarist Julian Bream and an eight-member chamber ensemble.[3][4]
Henze moved in 1961 to a secluded villa, 'La Leprara', on the hills of Marino, overlooking the River Tiber south of Rome. This time also signalled a strong leaning towards music involving the voice.
From 1962 until 1967, Henze taught masterclasses in
In the following period, he greatly strengthened his political involvement which also influenced his musical work. For example, the première of his
An established composer
His political critique reached its high point in 1976 with the premiere of his opera We Come to the River.
In the same year 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. 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 English Cat (1983), and Das verratene Meer (1990), based on Yukio Mishima's novel Gogo no Eiko, known in English as The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.
His later works, while less controversial, continued his political and social engagement. His Requiem (1990–93) comprised nine 'sacred concertos' for piano, trumpet and chamber orchestra, and was written in memory of Michael Vyner, the artistic director of the London Sinfonietta. The choral Ninth Symphony (1997), which is dedicated to the "heroes and martyrs of German anti-fascism," is set to a libretto by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, based on motifs from the novel The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers. It is a rejection of Nazism, which Henze himself had experienced in his youth. His last success was the 2003 premiere of the opera L'Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe (English: The Hoopoe and the Triumph of Filial Love) at the Salzburg Festival, with a text he wrote himself, based on a Syrian fairy tale. Other late compositions include Sebastian im Traum (2004) for large orchestra and the opera Phaedra (2007).
Henze lived with his partner Fausto Moroni from the early sixties, and Moroni planned and planted the hillside garden around La Leprara. Moroni cared for the composer when he suffered a
In 1995 Henze received the Westphalian Music Prize, which has carried his name since 2001. Invited by
Shortly before Henze's death Donald Macleod interviewed him for the BBC Radio 3 series Composer of the Week (broadcast ca 2010, including recordings of Henze's works). In 2023 extracts from these interviews were rebroadcast in a special series celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the programme.[8]
Henze died in Dresden on 27 October 2012 at the age of 86.[9]
Works
Henze's music has incorporated neoclassicism, jazz, the twelve-tone technique, serialism, and some rock or popular music. Although he did study atonalism early in his career, after his move to Italy in 1953 Henze's music became considerably more Neapolitan in style. His opera König Hirsch ("The Stag King") contains lush, rich textures. This trend is carried further in the opulent ballet music that he wrote for English choreographer Frederick Ashton's Ondine, completed in 1957. While Mendelssohn and Weber were important influences, the music for Ondine contains some jazz and there is much in it redolent of Stravinsky—not only Stravinsky the neo-classical composer, but also the composer of The Rite of Spring. His Maratona di danza, on the other hand, required much tighter integration of jazz elements, complete with an on-stage band, which was very different from the more romantic Ondine. Henze received much of the impetus for his ballet music from his earlier job as ballet adviser at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden.
The textures for the cantata Kammermusik (1958, rev. 1963) are far harsher; Henze returned to atonalism in Antifone, and later the other styles mentioned above again became important in his music.
Awards
- Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (1990)[10]
- Praemium Imperiale (2000)[11]
- Deutscher Tanzpreis (2001)[12]
- Knight Commander of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2008)[13][14]
References
- ISBN 0-7148-3174-3.
- ^ Rickards, Guy (27 October 2012). "Hans Werner Henze obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 February 2015.
- ^ "Kammermusik 1958". Schott Musik. Archived from the original on 10 September 2012. Retrieved 27 August 2013.
- ^ "Henze: Kammermusik 1958; Apollo et Hyacinthus; Canzona – review". The Guardian. 1 November 2012. Retrieved 27 August 2013.
- ^ Ernst Schnabel, "Zum Untergang einer Uraufführung" and "Postscriptum nach dreiunddreissig Tagen", in Hans Werner Henze and Ernst Schnabel, Das Floss der Medusa: Text zum Oratorium, 47–61 & 65–79 (Munich: Piper-Verlag, 1969); Andrew Porter, "Henze: The Raft of the Frigate 'Medusa' – Oratorio" [record review of DGG 139428-9], Gramophone 47, no. 563 (April 1970): 1625; "Affären/Henze: Sie bleibt", Der Spiegel 22, no. 51 (16 December 1968): 152. (in German)
- ^ "Honorary Members of the Royal Academy of Music". Royal Academy of Music. 14 October 2009. Archived from the original on 24 September 2010. Retrieved 14 October 2009.
- ^ "Hans Werner Henze". Telegraph. 28 October 2012. Retrieved 3 February 2015.
- ^ Radio Times 29 July-4 August 2023
- ^ "Famed German composer Hans Werner Henze dies". BBC News. 27 October 2012. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
- ^ "Siemens kehrt als Sponsor zu musikalischer Vergangenheit und Deutscher Grammophon zurück". swr.online (in German). 9 October 2020. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
- ^ "Auszeichnung: "Praemium Imperiale" für Hans Werner Henze". Der Spiegel (in German). 12 July 2000. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
- ^ Krause, Bernd (15 September 2001). "Deutscher Tanzpreis an Hans Werner Henze". tanznetz.de (in German). Retrieved 30 December 2023.
- ^ "Musik: Komponist Hans Werner Henze gestorben". Die Zeit (in German). 28 October 2012. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
- ^ "Henze, Hans Werner". Landeshauptstadt Wiesbaden (in German). Retrieved 30 December 2023.
Further reading
- Bokina, John. 1997. Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-06935-9.
- Henze, Hans Werner. 1984. Musik und Politik. Schriften und Gespräche [Music and Politics: Collected Writings] Ed. by Jens Brockmeier. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, ISBN 0-571-11719-8).
- Henze, Hans Werner. 1998. Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography. Translated by Stewart Spencer. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 3-10-032605-9].
- ISBN 0-19-861459-4.
- Palmer-Füchsel, Virginia. 2001. "Henze, Hans Werner". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
- OCLC 925103186.
External links
- Literature by and about Hans Werner Henze in the German National Library catalogue
- Hans Werner Henze at IMDb
- Schott Music: Hans Werner Henze
- Schirmer: Hans Werner Henze Archived 29 December 2004 at the Wayback Machine
- Chester-Novello: Hans Werner Henze
- Sequenza21: Hans Werner Henze
- 'Henze at 80' – BBC website including recorded interview extracts
- Listen to Henze's "The Electric Cop" at Acousmata music blog
- Project "eSACHERe" Archived 10 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine
- Partitur einer Freundschaft – Ingeborg Bachmann/Hans Werner Henze (2006) at IMDb
- Intervista a Hans Werner Henze / a cura di Antonella Calzolari e Velio Carratoni 13 June 2007 – Video with an interview in Italian, by Antonella Calzolari and Velio Carratoni (Fondazione Marino Piazzolla ) and transcription published in the magazine Fermenti n.232 (2008)
- "Hans Werner Henze (biography, works, resources)" (in French and English). IRCAM.
- Interview with Hans Werner Henze by Bruce Duffie, 27 November 1981 (mostly about his operas)