remembering Going It Alone Hans Werner Henze was a singular composer.
Hans Werner Henze’s Drei Tentos, written for classical guitar, reimagines the world of the Greek lyre for our age. Naked and tranquil, these short works communicate an intimacy few composers ever achieve. Henze (1926–2012) was a man of his time, and much of his life is reflected in his music. In the late 1940s most of the young composers in the European avant-garde were following the example of Anton Webern, deriving as many of their artistic choices from a single twelve-tone row as they could. Henze’s most extreme venture into this kind of writing can be heard in his Second String Quartet (1952). Soon after its composition, however, Henze found that his collegial journey to discover a new way of writing music had become a way of composing that serious composers were bullied into by Pierre Boulez, who claimed that anyone who wasn’t using these techniques was “useless.” Henze, who had lived through the horrors of World War II, decided that he needed more freedom and fewer rules, and began incorporating into his compositions anything that inspired him. The premiere of his Nachtstücke und Arien (1957), which combined the sounds of the café music of the time with a sonic luxuriousness verging on Richard Strauss, was greeted with a coordinated walkout by Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono within the first few bars. After that, Henze preferred to go it alone, even if it resulted in the scorn of his peers. He became a card-carrying Communist, and his support of the Cuban people after Cas96 • spring 2013
tro’s revolution prompted several large-scale works, including El Cimarrón and his Sixth Symphony, both of which incorporated the island’s folk melodies and legends. The global student uprising of the 1960s inspired works that verged on “happenings,” including The Tedious Way to Natascha Ungeheuer’s Apartment and one of his finest works, Elogium Musicum, written for the passing of his partner of more than forty years, Fausto Moroni. Henze’s detractors often cite his involvement with left-wing politics as an unfortunate distraction for a creative artist, but to deny him this predilection would be to deny his eyewitness account of some of the greatest social and political upheavals of the twentieth century. Born on a farm in the Westphalia region of Germany, the son of a Nazi who forced him into the Hitler Youth, no one
would have imagined that this former prisoner of war would direct so much of his time, energy and money to helping the poor and downtrodden of this world; when the AIDS crisis swept across Europe, he was one of the few openly gay men to raise money for the first wave of victims. But it was the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte — a summer school and music festival Henze founded in Montepulciano, Italy, in 1976 — that put his artistic and political convictions into practice. In this Tuscan village, composers and musicians came together with locals to mount performances of contemporary music and opera. The division between artist and audience, elite and proletariat, rich and poor was erased with the making of art — an art for everyone.
E r i c h Au e r b a c h / H u lt o n A r c h i v e / G e t t y I m a g e s
By Menon Dwarka