A German composer, principally known for his operas and ballets, Hans Werner Henze also wrote seven symphonies and other orchestral, choral, and chamber music, as well as several film scores. His music is eclectic, drawing on periods past and present, and ranging from serial techniques to the jazz idiom.
Henze was born in Gutersloh, Westphalia, on July 1, 1926. He attended the music school in Brunswick, where he studied piano and percussion. In 1944, at the age of 17, he was drafted into the army. He was eventually captured and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp.
On his return to Germany, he worked for a while as a rehearsal pianist in theatre, and then enrolled in the Church Music Institute in Heidelberg. There he studied with the composer Wolfgang Fortner, who started out as a neoclassicist, but had just begun experimenting with serialism. He also attended the annual summer school at Darmstadt, where Rene Leibowitz was lecturing on 12-tone composition.
Henze wrote his first symphony in 1947, the piece showing the influence of the neoclassicists Paul HINDEMITH and Igor STRAVINSKY. The Violin Concerto, premiered in Baden-Baden in 1948, showed his initial flirtation with 12-tone composition in its first movement. This was followed by the totally serial Piano Variations, written in 1949 while Henze was having private lessons with Rene Leibowitz.
Henze’s heart, however, was in the theatre. After his Ballet Variations was published in 1949, he was hired as director of the Wiesbaden ballet. While at Wiesbaden he wrote several ballets, including Jack Pudding (staged 1951), The Labyrinth (1951), and Der Idiot (1952), based on the Dostoevsky novel, The Idiot
Influenced by his experience in the theatre, Henze’s music at this time was essentially dramatic, freely combining modern serial sound patterns with more thematic neoclassical tonal and harmonic relationships. In 1952, the same year that his Piano Concerto No. 1 won the Schumann Prize at Diisseldorf, his first opera, Boulevard Solitude, was premiered in Hanover. A modern treatment of the Manon Lescaut story, the music, though atonal, contains passages of PucciNi-like lyricism; at other times, the singers are directed to use sprechstimme, a form of semi-spoken delivery used in the works of SCHOENBERG.
In 1953, Henze moved to Italy, where he continued to write operas, including König Hirsch, a fantastical fable whose magical qualities were reflected in the music, Der Prinz von Homburg and Elegy for Young Lovers. He also wrote the music for the ballet Ondine, which was premiered in London in 1958 with Margot Fonteyn.
The early 1960s saw a further development in Henze’s musical style into a smoother, richer expression. This climaxed in the opera The Bassarid? (a version of Euripides’ The Bacchae, in which elaborate, dynamic, and richly textured music spanned moods of decadence, romantic love, violent bacchic dances, and the yearning for solitude.
In the mid-1960s, Henze became increasingly interested in Marxism, and after the premiere in 1968 of his oratorio, The Raft of the Medusa, which was dedicated to Che Guevara, Henze went to Cuba and taught in Havana from 1969 to 1970. Henze continued to write revolutionary works in the 1970s, including his Symphony No. 6 and the opera We Come to the River. In 1980, he became a professor at the Hochschule fur Musik at Cologne. Later works include the opera The Englis Cat (1983) and Symphony No. 7 (1984).
Jane Prendergast
SEE ALSO:
OPERA; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC; SERIALISM.
FURTHER READING
Ewen, David. The World of 20th Century Music (NY: Prentice-Hall, 1968);
Henze, Hans Werner. Music and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982);
Morton, Brian, and Pamela Collins. ContemporaryComposers (Chicago, IL: St. James Press, 1992).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Ariosi; The Bassarids; Being Beauteous; Choral Fantasy; Elegy for Young Lovers; Der Prinz von Homburg; Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5.