Hans Werner Henze:HANS WERNER Henze, who has died aged 86, created an outstanding body of musical works with theatrical and literary dimensions in the opera house, concert hall and beyond.
German-born, but long resident in Italy, he was continental Europe’s leading composer of operas in the period following the second World War.
One of the most prolific exponents of the genre, he composed two dozen overall, some in radically different versions, embracing full-scale grand opera, chamber opera, comic opera, a triple-bill of one-acters, concert works, radio works and hybrids with other theatrical forms such as the musical and ballet. His most recent opera, Gisela! Or the Strange and Memorable Ways of Happiness, was premiered in 2010.
He also composed a dozen ballets as well as incidental music to stage plays and films. His output for the concert hall ran to more than 200 works, including 10 symphonies and numerous concertos.
The connecting thread was politics. Henze adhered to left-wing ideologies, a reaction to his youth in Nazi Germany. He was born in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, the eldest of six children to Margarete Henze and her teacher husband, Franz. During the 1930s, Franz was gradually seduced to the Nazi cause, to the dismay of his son.
The young composer’s growing disgust with his compatriots intensified after the war through their refusal to accept responsibility for what had occurred. He also experienced isolation as a homosexual in an increasingly intolerant society.
After brief military service and studies with Wolfgang Fortner, he became a répétiteur and conductor from 1948 in Konstanz, then from 1950 in Wiesbaden. He produced a string of short, inventive ballet scores and his first operas. Despite this burgeoning theatrical career, Henze was deeply unhappy. When his publisher, Schott’s, offered him an advance on royalties on condition that he relinquish his conducting posts and devote himself to composition, he leapt at the chance.
He crossed the Italian border in 1953, and eventually made his home in Marino, southeast of Rome, with his partner of more than 40 years, Fausto Moroni.
Henze enjoyed collaborations with many leading artists, including film-maker Luchino Visconti, WH Auden and Chester Kallman. His Fifth Symphony was first performed by Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic.
Henze’s trips to the US for that premiere in 1963 and later as a visiting professor were important for regalvanising his sense of political involvement. He was deeply affected by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.
At the same time, Henze was experiencing a crisis with his music. Barely 40, he was a leading European figure, but he felt he lacked direction and needed a cause. He found it in 1968 in the student protest movement.
His association with the students was to have severe consequences for his standing in Germany. The crucial flashpoint occurred on December 9th, 1968, at the Hamburg premiere of The Raft of the Medusa. The music was not heard that night, as a riot ensued when a poster of the recently killed Che Guevara, to whom the score was dedicated, and a red flag were displayed and torn down. The oratorio became infamous. Most of Henze’s German friends and associates deserted him, and he became a pariah in his homeland.
The composer’s response was to turn his back on Germany for 15 years. He made two productive visits to Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1969-1970 from which emerged several important compositions.
The premiere in January 1984 of his Seventh Symphony, which was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, at last saw a public reconciliation between Germany and the composer.
During the 1990s he undertook a major revision of his catalogue, withdrawing or developing new versions of several older works.
The importance to European culture of Henze’s canon was underlined by his last three operas: L’Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe (The Hoopoe and the Triumph of Filial Love, 2003); Phaedra (2007); and Gisela.
Moroni died shortly after the completion of Phaedra.
Hans Werner Henze: born July 1st, 1926; died October 27th, 2012