Hans
Werner Henze, one of the great composers of the Twentieth Century, has died at
the age of 86. The New York Times has
a fairly good biography. He wrote an
autobiography as well: Bohemian Fifths. The only statement that need to be made
concerning either is that his involvement in left-wing politics was more
philosophy than practice. He tried to
support what he considered to be worthy causes, but he never saw them in black
or white, and he viewed his work as an attempt at making art not politics. He thought the student revolts of the ‘60’s
to be a sign that change was happening, but he never pretended to know how or
why or when. He wrote some
overzealous articles about the problems of the ‘bourgeoisie’, though his view
of it and others view of were (often) radically different. Mostly, he just hated the idea of rote
acceptance of social behavior, destructive though the ideas may be to the very
people holding them. And as any belief ‘system’ will prove, truth
can be found in them, just not the whole truth. To state simplistically complex beliefs: in the
‘left-wing’ ideas of the time, society was three-fold: the upper classes, (i.e.
the leaders of the Nazi Party) who held power through wealth and ‘position’ and
rhetoric; the bourgeoisie, (i.e. the German ‘middle’ class) who blindly
followed them, who looked the other way while atrocities were accelerating all
around them, and accepted without question any long-held beliefs that
corresponded to the safety and structure of the status quo; and the poor,(i.e.
the actual soldiers) who had no power and were continually squashed down and
forced to fight and starve and die. He
had lived through the Nazis. He had
witnessed the death of millions of people, mostly poor. He had real reasons to view blind
allegiance as violation of humanity. He
believed that the World could not sustain this paradigm and a ‘revolution’
would take place to relieve the suffering of the disenfranchised. Reading his autobiography spells this out
quite clearly. Alas, many people who seemed to agree with him at first would
turn out to be as despotic as the power brokers he despised. He was often broken by these betrayals. But you don’t have to agree with his complex
view of politics to understand his work.
Verdi himself supported a rebellion against what he and many others
viewed as tyranny (famously, in Nabucco.) And Wagner was, among other things, a
white supremacist, though far more complex in his work than any beliefs that
simplistic.
Henze
was a singular force, never following one ‘school’ or another, making his way
through a difficult time for Classical Music, where musical seriousness and
exploration degraded into pandering to the lowest common denominator. Like many of his age, he resisted both the
(mostly useless) complexity of the post-Schoenberg total serialists, and the derivative ‘homespun’
tonality, with its easy solutions to age-old musical questions. In fact, he would use his personal brand
of serialism and his own version of tonality, straddling the two without
falling into either camp. He had
several ideas, or sounds, that he worked with, in various forms, from piece to
piece. He explored a dark lyricism,
similar to Mahler and (especially) Berg, long-limbed, beautiful music that could
disturb, hurt. He had a sharp
satirical side, often tipping his hat at Stravinsky, where just below the
surface, the music was edgy and castigating.
Pushed a bit farther, it degenerated into the grotesque, a useful tool
when most of your libretti are far more poetic than realistic. He
loved Italian opera of the Nineteenth Century, and used some of its ideas in
his own work. Particularly, he found
fruitful use of the older idea of ‘coloratura’, which he plied with various
degrees of importance, even in his non-vocal work. He would use short quotes from some of his
favorite works from the past: some obvious, some unrecognizable without the
score. He would then transform them into his own
ideas. And he could unleash a violent streak: cruel, jagged,
harsh, giving his listeners a dose of battering ugliness. With these rich ingredients, no two pieces
were alike: the ratio of one musical idea to the others always changed,
especially noticeable in the longer works, in particular his operas. Much of this was accompanied by a strong
political / sociological conviction—frequently stated in some personal testament
written for premieres—which often led to those endless complications and misunderstandings. Truthfully, despite some of his written
opinions, his concerns were for humanity and its struggles, not politics. If you
knew nothing about him, his work would still be valid, powerful, apposite. If nothing else (and there is plenty else) he
should be counted as a major creator of opera in the last century, though he
continued to write them well into the present one.
He looked for poets—past and present—for
texts for all his vocal works. His
friendship with Ingeborg Bachmann produced many masterworks, even masterpieces. (The operas The Prince of Homburg and The
Young Lord are two.) He never
quite recovered from her suicide at a young age. The only writers to compare, and exceed in
many eyes, were W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, primarily known for the
libretto of The Rake’s Progress of
Stravinsky. They wrote two libretti
for him, and the operas produced are unquestionably masterpieces: Elegy For Young Lovers and The Bassarids. They have been produced over and over since
their premieres in the ‘60’s. A small
sampling: The Bassarids saw several
productions in the mid-2000’s. (One
during a strike in Paris.) A live performance of Elegy For Young Lovers was recorded and released as a CD in
2000. English National Opera produced a
very well-received production of Elegy
in 2010. Into the ‘70’s and beyond, he
tried to find some writers who could give him words to which he could express deep
emotions with his heavy arsenal of musical gifts. Edward Bond gave him two very overtly political
texts, We Come To The River and The English Cat, which were less
successful than their predecessors. In
fact, the former has a poor libretto and produced his weakest opera musically,
and the latter ‘comedy’ has some poor rhymes, a weak ending, and an overall
lack of wit. He seemed to want
something along the lines of The Young
Lord. He didn’t get it. After these, he chose German poets of lesser
fame (but not lesser talent) to return to a more abstractly humanistic work. And he wrote one of his own, a masterpiece
as well: L’Upupa or the triumph of
filial love. The video of its
premiere is an essential for anyone trying to know his work. He wrote 17 operas (18, if you count the
almost total reworking of Konig Hirsch
into Il re cervo), all of value and
craft, most wonderful…but none that make for easy listening. (Or ‘difficult’ listening for someone who
could follow, say, Lulu.)
He
has many fans the World over. Dozens of
his works have been recorded, some more than once. He wrote for every ‘classical’ form,
including: 10 symphonies which are highly regarded (as they should be); three
violin concerti; two piano concerti; several ballets (including the great Undine, written for Margot Fonteyn); instrumental
tone poems such as the recent, beautiful Sebastian
im Traum, The New York Philharmonic one of its commissioners (though it was
not the first piece played by them); chamber music of every stripe; vocal music,
from oratorios for huge forces down to songs for voice and piano. He prized the voice particularly. He wrote in his biography that even his
instrumental music sounded like wordless voices in his head.
Personally,
he was an ‘ideal’ 20th Century composer, like Stravinsky or Britten,
who never stopped composing, never grew tired of trying to find that ‘something
new’, ever curious, ever striving for something more than that which he had
composed before. My shelves are
filled with recordings of his work. My
head, too, complex though his music can be.
I have performed some. I am sad that no new pieces will spill from
his pen. I am happy that I know many
that did. May his work live forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment