Why are Germans so ashamed of their best modern composer?
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
It’s about time Germans got to grips with their greatest modern composer. While Berlin plays reams of Rihm and Munich wallows in Orff, the life and works of Hans Werner Henze are considered too recent and controversial to be admitted to bourgeois concert halls. Of the nine symphonies — two of them masterpieces — none gets done by major state orchestras. We’re in 2022 and Henze has been dead for ten years. Surely it’s time for the Germans to get over their Henze issues…..
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
In Czech here.
In The Critic here.
Photo: Hans Werner Henze on Iscia, 1954, from Guy Rickards book Hindemith, Hartmann, Henze
https://basiaconfuoco.com/2018/03/12/hans-werner-henze-esthetisch-theatrale-wereldverbeteraar-in-drie-operas-en-een-biografie/
But Henze is the “bourgeois” composer par excellence !!!
I met him a couple of times in Cleveland after concerts he conducted. Norman: Which two of the symphonies are your choices for masterpieces? (Because I very much like all of them, hedging maybe on No. 6.) Love the Requiem, and Undine is lovely.
7 and 9
The failure of Henze’s work to survive is probably due to the fact that the composer was openly Communist and openly gay (and reportedly something of a camp queen). That wouldn’t faze German society today, and either of those two things alone probably wouldn’t have harmed his career, but the combination of the two in his heyday decades ago stood in the way of acceptance from broad German society.
You totally miss the point. That has nothing to do with such parameters… and Henze was the ultimate fake communist (un communiste en peau de lapin).
I completely IGNORE him because of his sympathies with Fidel Castro. I know it is ILLOGICAL, but I just cannot accept Henze because of that. Laugh all you want at me. I stand firm.
To be fair, I think HWH (whom I knew ever so slightly in the late 1980’s) rather moved away from Communism tout court to a more humanist, social democrat position. I speak as someone of the centre-right, incidentally!
I know that the demolition of the Berlin Wall made him very happy.
Apart from him being the archetypal champagne socialist (as WH Auden said of him, he wears a Mao jacket, but with plenty of money in his pockets) the problem with his music is that it aims high but does not always reach the heights, in spite of many ravishing passages and occasional hits. He tended to write far more notes than could be heard, especially in the orchestral music. I think the late 1950’s – early 60s was possibly his best period, with ‘Nachstucke und Arien’, Ariosi, the Double Concerto. I think The Bassarids and The Prince of Homburg are pretty damn good as well.
10 symphonies?
I for one, having worked on several of his works and having met him on occasion, share your regret.
His last big outing in my town was a very good Bassarids in 2019.
What do you mean? I have seen several of his operas on German stages. Granted, his symphonies are not played often, but what contemporary symphonies are played regularly, German or not?
I seriously doubt that Germany has “Henze issues”. If anything, Henze had “Germany issues”, which he articulated often and loudly and without repercussions.
Henze followed a long tradition of Germans not liking Germany and withdrawing to Italy.
I have thought quite a bit about this. Whom do you have in mind? I can literally come up with no one who fits that description. Okay, Winckelmann – but not for political reasons, and not permanently. Johann Simon Mayr, but that was for musical reasons, not for “not liking Germany”. Händel, but again that was professional and only a transition. Is there any person prominent in culture and esp. music who withdrew to Italy? Whom were you thinking about? I’d be really interested.
Mendelssohn always happily went to Italy and compared it positively with Germany. And before him, Dürer went south to find himself; in the 1st half of the 19th century there was a whole German colony of painters settled in Rome and trying to paint ‘al italia’; Brahms spent as many holidays in Italy as he could and Wagner withdrew to the southern country when he wanted to recover from strain; Nietzsche compared the two countries in a way devastating for Germany; there may be more but these come to mind.
From your full article, “turned Communist and gay”… would appreciate it if you changed it to ‘came out’ or something because otherwise it implies he chose to convert, which of course isn’t right.
Indeed. And a coming-out as a communist is a more painful one.
Absolutely.priceless!!
Here are the Caprichos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bE8aUx8CC0
It is not really modernist music, in the sense that Alban Berg’s music is not really modernist – using some modernist aesthetics (generous doses of dissonances) but using them with traditionalist expression and gestures. This was for the postwar German new music establishment ‘not done’ – references to ‘romanticism’ were taboo if they had some beauty. The new music fanatics preferred the romanticism of progress: dramatic ugliness and nihilism. So, Henze had turned his back on the Berührungsangst and that was hurtful.
Thank you for posting this – I didn’t know it. it’s very beautiful.
His “Il Vitalino raddoppiato” is one of the most glorious things I have ever heard; totally out of this world. I adore it.
That is a very good piece indeed, and entirely traditional:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjY40WDHtaU
I just listened to the whole piece for the first time ever, from your link. Wonderful! Thank you.
Have just discovered, on YouTube, Falzone’s piano solo transcription of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto 3. Do you know if the sheet music is available anywhere? I ask you as you are so knowledgeable about everything! Best wishes, Alwyn.
Yes, Henze’s music certainly deserves to be performed far more regularly. But, that would require principled and original thinking, as well as a measure of imagination.
I’m not sure he is Germany’s “best modern composer” but he was gay and a communist. Plus, he moved from Germany to Italy and later Cuba. Wikipedia says, “…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.”
This simply means Henze was a very stupid man, burdening his talent with crazy thinking.
Thanks Norman. I’m a huge Henze fan since I listened to Janowski’s recordings of the symphonies a few years ago. No’s. 2, 5, and 10 are the ones that made the biggest impression on me then, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on which two symphonies you consider masterpieces, and why. Thanks.
It’s simple: Audiences don’t like the abrasive, atonal stuff. People are instinctively drawn to melodies. Can you hum a Henze tune? Case closed.
That is not an argument at all. No audience member can hum a tune from Debussy’s La Mer, and yet the piece has become increasingly popular. And how many people can hum tunes form Bach’s Brandenburg concertos?
I don’t think you’d have to be a Pavorotti to sing the big cello melody (harmonized by divisi celli) from the first movement, or a melody from one of the “Brandenburg” Concerti. I rather disagree. Pehaps the more salient question is this: who’d WANT to sing a melody from a Henze symphony.
Yes, in that sense you may be right.
Agreed it’s not an argument. But neither is your refutation! I can certainly hum (and tiddly-pom, etc…)my way thru lots of Debussy, and his Mère (Mother of all Sea-Pieces!), in her third mvt (“Dialogue…”), probably provided the source for one of the most hummed tunes ever: “Cheek to cheek” (Irving Berlin)…altho i admit this is meer conjecture.
As for Brandenburgs; don’t get me started…tho i do have some problem humming the cadenza of the fifth!
Our-hum is humour!
OK….
It was a generalization. There will be audience members who hum or whistle Messiaen (bird whistle) or Birtwistle and the like.
Although to my own surprise I can clearly hum or note down themes from Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony and Vergangenes (From the 5 orchestral pieces) – because they are very prominent and memorable.
My PA sometimes imitates the Sprechstimme from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire when under stress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UerrKaDBmg0
“There will be audience members who hum or whistle Messiaen (bird whistle) or Birtwistle and the like.”
Or wheeze. Aleatory.
To give a little credit where due, the Berlin Philharmonic did a few Henze works during Sir Simon’s tenure.
It’s odd how celebrated composers are dropped once they die (and maybe the stream of first performances ceases?). Think Tippett, Boulez, Carter …. one may not particularly like their music but the almost total neglect is surprising.
All these composers deserve to be performed more often.
It’s true that Henze is not performed enough, but all together he doesn’t do too bad in Germany. He’s a regular presence. A list of his performances is here. Click on the country and month in the right hand column:
https://www.hans-werner-henze-stiftung.de/en/events/?tx_news_pi1%5BoverwriteDemand%5D%5Bcategories%5D=16&cHash=8453d15e95b4c782c6f47c575e336c6e
Stockhausen is another composer relatively neglected in Germany. Some say he became isolated after he broke from Schott and began publishing his own music. Some say “the Mainzer Mafia” (Schott) was behind this. I don’t know. Probably just rumor.
The German new music world is a tight web of professional interconnections centered mostly around new music editors in the semi-autonomous state radio and television networks. The devotion to high modernism is fanatic. Anything that doesn’t sound like Darmstadt in about 1974 is immediately suspect. These people suffer from ideologically induced deafness.
Henze and Stockhausen transcended this provincialism and became a bit isolated due to it.
“The devotion to high modernism is fanatic. Anything that doesn’t sound like Darmstadt in about 1974 is immediately suspect. These people suffer from ideologically induced deafness.”
Indeed. And this is the result of the war: the nazis were against modern art (‘Jewish degeneration’), so embracing atonal modernism had to demonstrate that the new Germany had entered the free, modern world.
There has been emphasis on modernism to counter-balance its rejection by the Nazis, but I think some of the reasons are more complex. Postwar German artists rejected most any performing art related to the Romantic era’s pathos because they correlated it with Hitler’s rhetorical methods, all that wrought emotion tied up with Romantic cultural nationalism. This went beyond music and also affected their concepts of spoken theater with unique manifestations in both East and West Germany.
Few historians have understood that Hitler was the last Romantic. The last artist-prophet of the Romantic cultural nationalism that so strongly shaped the Germanic world from about 1830 to 1945. For postwar Germans, the dry objectivity of serialism became a conscious or unconscious way of escaping the fanaticism of heroic cultural nationalism, the bathos of of war, and a genocidal past. These same sensibilities also strongly affected France, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands.
By about 2000, younger composers no longer sensed those connections so directly. They did not live through the war years and did not witness the Nazi’s Romantic pathos, but modernism and a vague rejection of emotionality in art had become so entrenched that it has continued with a momentum of its own made all the more intractable because of the rigid and hierarchical way new music is organized on much of the continent.
The English-speaking world did not have this history, and by the 1980s modernism gave way to postmodern aesthetics such as neo-Romanticism and minimalism. The result is a larger gap between the Anglo-American and continental new music worlds than has ever existed before in history. Henze is especially interesting because he sits right in the middle of this gap and created a repertoire that transcends the narrow ideologies of both sides.
All true.
But German nationalist romanticism got blurred with their own classical tradition rather an the end of the 19th century, and this overgrowth suffocated the tradition’s own integrity. Nobody would seriously claim that Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler and even Strauss represent political romantic nationalism, let alone Schreker, Hindemith, Braunfels etc. (throwing Austrian composers into the melting pot).
The sad thing is that in Germany, the original and authentic tradition has been tainted with association. A lot of this was the result of Wagner’s blurring of music and politics.
As I understand it, the reason Stockhausen stopped getting performed widely during his final years, when he published his own music, is that the fees were exorbitant. I don’t know if that’s still the case.
What are the issues with Henze actually? Is it just a German thing. I love his work and fortunately there are a number of good recordings to choose from. Wasn’t there a similar situation with Berthold Goldschmidt in England (another great composer IMO)?
Goldschmidt would have been considered one of the greatest post-Mahler, German speaking composers if the nazis hadn’t come along. The same probably would have been true for Korngold, Schrecker, Schulhoff, Pavel Haas, Braunfels, Hans Eisler, etc. All of them vastly more ‘listenable’ than Henze or Rihm.
Probably true. Especially Goldschmidt is an interesting composer, although rather grim in his sound scapes.
“Why are Germans so ashamed of their best modern composer?”
That’s not a leading question at all! 😀
They’re not ashamed but unaware of Henze.
I recently came across this observation by Henze circa 1982:
“Everything now had to be stylized and made abtract … Discipline was the order of the day. Through discipline it was going to be possible to get music back on its feet again, though nobody asked what for. Discipline enabled form to come about; there were rules and parameters for everything … The audience at whom our music was supposed to be directed, would be made up of experts. The public would be excused from our concerts; in other words, the audience would be the press and our protectors.”
This echoes Milton Babbitt’s famous essay from 1958, “Who Cares If You Listen?” If any artform fails to connect with its audiences, regardless of its technical expertise, we shouldn’t be surprised if it gets neglected. For decades awards and commissions were given to composers whose music failed to connect to the public in a meaningful way. Like it or not, aesthetics still wins the day. The human desire for beauty is atavistic. Music that moves the heart and mind speaks to the totality of who we are.
That is all true.
But there are still many staff around who think that contemporary music should reflect the concerns of the modern world: ugliness, alienation, nihilism, abstraction, violence, destruction, etc. The problem is not the performers or audiences but staff: still with their mindset of half a century ago. The result is an island of old works cultivated as a museum and as a business.
Actually, there are 10 symphonies. He went past the Curse of the Nine
He’s too “modern” for most and not modern enough for the few.
That’s kind of it. Tuneful tonic music too now is the thing, and those 60’s politics aren’t woke enough.
I guess David Hurwitz speaks for many now — he can’t stand Henze. Is always badmouthing him as a boring, overrated mediocrity, and who was a silly Marxist to boot. Wrote a couple good symphonies and then what a Teutonic bore.
I like Henze a lot.
Who cares what DH (who?) says?!
Composer Mel Powell told me that “when Pierre [Boulez] came to America, he said we didn’t have any composers … not even a Henze, and we believed him.”
I am now listening to a Rattle/City of Birmingham Symphony recording of the 7th. Too much dissonance and unpleasantnance, for me at least. I think his cold reception has little to do with his political views; nor does going to Italy affect his reception: after all, Mozart spent lots of time in Italy as did many others. Many composers are/were leftists including Bernstein, Weil and dozens more.
I agree with a commentator who said there is nothing that can be hummed of his. This is his fundamental problem. If you like dissonance, he’s great. Most people, including myself, hate this kind of music. Boulez has received the same cold shoulder and even Bernstein’s latter works are not well received.
I can never understand why the Violin Concertos (1 and 3 at least) aren’t taken up by more soloists. Readily communicate, not at all arid, and – I would have thought – challenging but not impossible to play.
Isn’t that a familiar phenomenon that composers are ignored for at least a decade after their death no matter how important they were during their lifetime?
Ten symphonies I think.
Henze: Symphonies 2 & 10
Radio & Symphony Orchestra Berlin (Artist), Henze (Composer), & 1 more Format: Audio CD
(Marek Janowski’s 75th birthday in February 2014, the eagerly awaited complete recording of Hans Werner Henze’s symphonies has now been finalised with Symphonies Nos. 2 and 10.)
Henze – Symphony No 10; (4) Poemi; La Selva Incantata
Hans Werner Henze (Composer), Friedemann Layer (Conductor),
“This disc is full of vibrant music and includes (especially in the closing La Selva Incantata) a good taste of Henze’s vivid orchestral writing. The Tenth Symphony breaks some new ground, with middle movements devoted to strings and then mainly percussion.”
Amazon reviewer.
He beat the curse of the ninth.
“A Beatles song is far shorter and much more intelligent than a Henze Opera” Pierre Boulez
Another utterly idiotic comment from ‘The French Correction’, n’est-ce pas? 🙂
“WHY ARE GERMANS SO ASHAMED OF THEIR BEST MODERN COMPOSER?”
There’s a simple answer: he’s abrasive to the ears, d*** near impossible to play, and performing his music is about as satisfying as a golden bowl of rancid ricotta. I’d rather play Sleigh Ride because at least the pain is short-lived.
In short, he stinks.
Some of the worst moments I have ever spent in a concert hall were listening to HWH. He is dead .RIP with his music.