This paper was given at the recent
Wagner World Wide conference at the University of South Carolina. It gives a little taste of what will be in the chapter on Henze in my forthcoming book, to be published at the end of this year by Boydell and Brewer, though that will of course both be more detailed and more wide-ranging. I should normally remove, or rather not include, footnotes here, but have retained them, in case they are of any help to someone seeking the sources.
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Hans Werner Henze was born in 1926,
in Gütersloh, Westphalia, growing up in a village thirty kilometres from
Bielefeld, which he would occasionally be able to visit for musical events. He
saw himself as having been triply cursed. Not only was he a German, but a
German cut off from the preferable ‘south German, Bohemian, and Austrian world
of sun and pleasure,’ and also – important for his experience both during and
after the war – a German homosexual in what was, to put it mildly, an
unfriendly climate.
He felt
scarred by seeing his father, an apparently liberal schoolmaster, become
transformed into not just a party member, but a Nazi enthusiast. Conscripted
during total war, he eventually spent several months as a prisoner of war.
Henze began to feel,
as a German,
responsible for the sufferings of the entire continent and sickened by the attitude
of many of his countrymen. He would write, concerning his return to
Bielefeld:
The crimes
committed in the concentration camps were now being talked about more or less
openly, resulting in a growing sense of shame and horror. No one had known a
thing. Everyone had been against it. The men and women of the occupying armies
looked disbelievingly at us Germans, or their eyes were filled with loathing.
Ever since then I have felt ashamed of our country and of my fellow Germans and
our people. Wherever my travels have taken me, my origins – my nationality –
have always caused me problems, even in Italy. Nor is it any wonder, since
the devils who dragged us into this war did such unforgivable and unforgettable
things to our neighbours, especially in Rome, not only in their persecution of
the Jews but also following Mussolini’s fall from power and during the
subsequent partisan struggles.
For him, moreover, ‘German art – especially
the middle-class, nationalistic art of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries – became insufferable and suspect’.
There are no prizes for guessing that Wagner’s music might fall under that
rubric, especially given the strong ties between the Bayreuth Festival and
Hitler himself. The weight of tradition had grown steadily after Beethoven,
notoriously making Brahms so loath, even for a lengthy period unable, to
complete a first symphony. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in his celebrated 1802
biography of Bach, had portrayed the composer as the musical equivalent of the
classical texts upon which German humanist curricula were founded. Bach, the
‘first classic that ever was, or perhaps ever will be,’ was ‘an invaluable
national patrimony, with which no other nation has anything else to be
compared’.
The posthumous role, then, played thereafter by Bach, Beethoven, and more controversially,
Wagner, as German national heroes is well known. Yet, as Thomas Mann,
after whose
Doctor Faustus Henze would later composer his Third Violin
Concerto, knew all too well, there was a difficult, complicated relationship
between such musical heroism and Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German
catastrophe’.
What remained was the
modernist art proscribed by the Nazis, untainted by association; what had
previously been condemned as abstract, degenerate, un-German, and of course
Jewish, now offered the opportunity for redemption of German music: a message
for ‘outsiders’ that would never leave Henze and would inform the construction,
conscious or otherwise, of his image.
For National Socialism had
prevented German musicians, composers included, for the first time in centuries
from keeping in touch with the latest musical developments. Thus for composers
such as Henze and the young Stockhausen, the International Summer School for
New Music in Darmstadt, founded in 1946, offered the opportunity to catch up.
The occupying powers, subsequently West Germany’s allies, were generally happy
to encourage and indeed to subsidise the ‘break’ with the country’s past,
although reconstruction, as in other areas of German cultural life, was
encouraged too. Moreover, the increasing ‘anti-formalist’ hostility towards
twelve-note and serialist works from the East German authorities with their
approved ‘socialist realism’ gave an opportunity for an allegedly ‘free’ West
to distinguish itself from so-called ‘totalitarianism’ not only past but
present. These factors give a number of clues as to why the more politically
committed composers such as Henze might eventually find themselves out on
something of a limb. How might they reconcile membership of the avant-garde
with their political commitment, given that the avant-garde seemed increasingly
apolitical or even reactionary? For Western European composers of all
nationalities, the strictness of Webern’s apparently hermetic compositional
method, somehow divorced from his utterly German context, provided the
denationalised precedent – or at least so did a ‘productive misreading’, as it
has generally come to be known, of his music. Even the fact of Webern’s
shooting in 1945 somehow seemed to ‘fit’ the myth-making requirements of new
music. The problem, at least for some, was that in practice this had begun to
veer towards a doctrinaire, almost totalitarian attitude on the part of the
high priests of the avant-garde. Henze connected this with a revisiting of the
catastrophic German past and contrasted it with the freedom of his immersion in
Italian life. The tragic irony was that the attempt to nullify the past, or
perhaps in some cases to ignore it, led to its return. His recounting the first
performance of his Nachtstücke und Arien in 1957 is instructive of the
chasm that had opened:
This conflict between freedom and
authority, and the question of what freedom might really entail, is dramatised
in Henze’s opera,
Der Prinz von Homburg (‘The Prince of Homburg’), which
has its origins in Kleist’s
Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, a surprisingly
militaristic, indeed Prussian, text for either Henze or his librettist,
Ingeborg Bachmann. Needless to say, many modifications are made.
Der Prinz
von Homburg was first performed in 1960, Henze provocatively claiming his
model to be nineteenth-century Italian opera.’
Verdi
and Donizetti seemed at least as much his anti-Wagners as inspirations in
themselves. ‘Every bar,’ he would write, ‘reveals Verdi’s influence as a music
dramatist.’
Such
remarks, such intentional implicit criticism of Wagner, could certainly never
have emanated from Schoenberg, his circle, nor from anyone seeking to position
himself in the role of successor to the Second Viennese School. The claim of an
‘Italian model’ was indeed largely rhetorical, for Henze also tells us that the
drama ‘very much cried out for this contrast between dodecaphony and what –
with a pinch of salt – might be termed traditional harmony: the dialectics of
the law and its violation, of dreams and reality, of mendaciousness and truth.’
One
could also point to the Nietzschean dialectic – actually Wagnerian in origin –
between Apollo and Dionysus. This is all thoroughly Germanic, not Italian at
all, but so of course is the desire to escape from Germany to the warm
Meditteranean south. Henze’s words are thoroughly German.
Needless to say, many modifications
are made; the Prince’s battle-cry, ‘In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs,’
bidding Brandenburg’s foes return to dust, no longer plays a role of
jubilation, quite otherwise, in Bachmann’s and Henze’s conception, which might
be understood to echo Brecht’s earlier (1939) rewriting, a sonnet upon the
play, the prince lying not dead but ‘on his back with all the foes of
Brandenburg in the dust’.
As
Frederic Jameson remarked in that very context, ‘where American pop psychology
would evoke adaptation, Brecht overtly specifies learning.’
So do Bachmann and Henze, knowing, or at least believing, not unlike Wagner
with his mediæval sources, that their audience will be aware of the ‘original’,
though without going to the extreme of making appreciation dependent upon that
knowledge, without tending to the world, as it were, of meta-art. To present
march rhythms on the harp, for instance, rather than trumpets and drums, seems
in context a statement, an inversion, in
itself, both of pacification and of passive aggression against the political (and
æsthetic) authorities that had brought the world to war and might do so again
The first two scenes of Henze’s
second act are punctuated by the repetition of distorted brass fanfares, as
Friedrich realises that he is hemmed in: ‘I am lost’, he sings. (Unfortunately, I do not have time to play an
excerpt.) Nothing changes; what can he do? He has broken the law in order to
attain victory for the Elector of Brandenburg, and death will be his reward.
The contrast between twelve-note technique and Henze’s ‘traditional harmony’
evokes not only musical but also dramatic crisis – and, in a broader sense, the
dialectic of crisis between the modern subject and the objective world.
Meanwhile, the ‘modern’ quality of the fanfares suggests the powerlessness of
the subject in relation to the fatal power of the state and its laws. Always we
seem to return to the opening scene of this act, to Friedrich’s powerless
plight. In Henze’s own words:
Der Prinz von Homburg… sets itself against the blind unimaginative application of
laws, in favour of an exaltation of human kindness, an understanding of which
reaches into deeper and more complex realms than would be ‘normal’ and which
seeks to find a place for a man in this world even though he is a Schwärmer and
a dreamer, or perhaps because of that.
Are the laws of Brandenburg as
impervious as those of Schoenberg and, after him and deadlier still, Darmstadt,
let alone those of the Third Reich, being reconstructed before their eyes?
Could things actually be otherwise, without a radical transformation of society
as a whole? That brings us to the question of intention. Henze claimed:
I have striven for greater freedom,
or at least what I understand by it: certainly not improvisation, but
independence, and a preparedness for decisions outside established categories.
Music is not musicology, and the logic of a work rests on a unique
constellation of incident, encounter, experience, agreement; it transcends
inherited rules, construction, calculation. It seems that the vegetative
element of music surpasses its other, lesser, musicological dimension, and
that, as in the life of the Prince of Homburg, illuminations and discoveries
take place in dreams, not in the laboratory. Not, however, in a state of
haziness, but in the wakefulness of sleepwalkers, where facts are perceived
with abnormal clarity.
There is something Romantic about
this; we might imagine ourselves returned to Wagner’s Nuremberg. Walther’s
Prize Song was conceived in a dream, although it then had to be refined by the
Master, Hans Sachs. Moreover, Walther’s songs also transcended inherited rules
and calculation, outstepped established categories. Henze’s drama throws up
another Meistersinger problem. Where is the social world; where is the
public nature of art? A dream is all very well, but without transmission and
reception it remains but a dream.
International climax was arguably
centred upon the triumphant 1966 premiere of The Bassarids at the Salzburg Festival – Karajan’s
citadel, no less. Aware of Henze’s hostility towards much Wagner, his
librettist WH Auden had coaxed him very much in that direction, insisting that
he study the score of Götterdämmerung – Henze always had less of a
problem with Tristan, and
indeed would write his own Tristan-work
himself – and even had him attend a performance in Vienna, where he met Adorno,
incidentally, intently studying his score, in order, according to his
autobiography, that he should ‘learn to overcome’ his ‘aversions to Wagner’s
music, aversions bound up in no small measure with my many unfortunate
experiences in the past’. And, of course, with Germany’s many unfortunate
experiences in the all-too-recent past. Success was at best mixed. According to
his autobiography:
I was
perfectly capable of judging the wider significance of Wagner’s music: as any
fool can tell you, it is a summation of all Romantic experience … But I simply
cannot abide this silly and self-regarding emotionalism, behind which it is
impossible not to detect a neo-German mentality and ideology. There is the
sense of an imperialist threat, of something militantly nationalistic,
something disagreeably heterosexual and Aryan in all these rampant horn calls,
this pseudo-Germanic Stabreim, these incessant chords of a seventh and
all the insecure heroes and villains that people Wagner’s librettos.
The result was nevertheless in many
respects Henze’s most Wagnerian drama, and one which he considered confronted
‘this “I was always against the Nazis”’ position, ‘a banal and frivolous stance
(created on … stage in the last scene…
)’.
At the time, Henze was willing to consider that the musical path from
Tristan,
at least, might be of some importance in his work. In an interview for
Die
Welt, marking the premiere, he proclaimed his belief ‘that the road from
Tristan
to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and with
The Bassarids I have
tried to go further along it.’
Moreover, he could claim impeccable musical and German warrant for what many
would decry as the score’s eclecticism:
It may be
unfashionable to continue musical traditions in this way [he is specifically
referring to the use of symphonic forms in the opera’s four ‘movements’], but
with Goethe under my pillow, I’m not going to lose any sleep about the
possibility of being accused of eclecticism. Goethe’s definition ran: ‘An
eclectic … is anyone who, from that which surrounds him, takes what corresponds
to his nature.’ If you wanted to do so, you could count Bach, Mozart, Verdi,
Wagner, Mahler, and Stravinsky as eclectics …
The composer could not, should not,
‘spend all his time destroying language instead of developing it
dialectically’.
That said, the very success of the
opera in so bourgeois a context troubled Henze, that unease not merely
coincidental with his political move from what he would call ‘generalised
anti-fascism’, inspired, he explained, by the example of Italian Marxist
friends. He had intervened politically, not least in 1965 during Willy Brandt’s
election campaign, but now, from Rudi Dutschke and his comrades he ‘now learned
to see contexts, and to see myself within those contexts’. This was why he took
the decision that he would write not for himself and his friends, but ‘to help
socialism’, that he would embody in his work ‘all the problems of contemporary
bourgeois music,’ and yet ‘transform these into something that the masses can
understand’. This certainly did not involve submitting to commercial
considerations, but nor was there any ‘place for worry about losing elite
notions of value’.
In September 1968, Henze published a declaration, ‘Mein Standpunkt’, ending:
Unnecessary
are new museums, opera houses, and world premieres. Necessary, to set about the
realisation of dreams. Necessary, to abolish the dominion of men over men.
Necessary, to change mankind, which is to say: necessary, the creation of
mankind’s greatest work of art: the World Revolution.
Those words could almost have come
straight from an earlier German revolutionary-composer’s pen, from Wagner’s
1849
Die Revolution.
Henze
had by this time lent his support to the APO (the Ausserparlamentarische
Opposition) and the SDS (the Socialist German Student-league).
This brings us to Der
langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer, entitled a ‘show for
seventeen performers’, rather than an opera. Work began in January 1971, when
Henze and some friends recorded street sounds near the Zoo Station in West Berlin, along with newspaper extracts read onto tape
at varying tempi and pitches. The text’s author was a Chilean poet, Gastón
Salvatore, who had been an active participant as a member of the Socialist
German Student-league in the events of 1968, was imprisoned for a few months
thereafter, and was Salvador Allende’s nephew. It is worth quoting from
Salvatore’s account, which introduces the printed score:
Natascha
Ungeheuer is the siren of a false utopia. She promises the leftist bourgeois a
new kind of security, which will permit him to preserve his revolutionary
‘class conscience’ without taking an active part in class warfare. This false
Utopia should be regarded as an all-denying immobility, as a kind of cowardice,
which permits itself to appear identified with the ‘Revolution’ and believe
that such an identity could equal the consummation of revolution.
Such an existentialistic,
non-historical form of political self-reflection places the leftist bourgeois
in the position of exploiting the proletarian struggle, as an occasion for a
merely self-indulgent moralising. He ‘muddles through’ between the temptation
either to surrender consciousness and return to the bourgeoisie or to choose
one of the two possible forms of helplessness: either that of the lonely
Avant-garde in their homes or that of Social Democracy.
Natascha Ungeheuer promises both
possibilities. The leftist bourgeois sets out for her apartment, plagued by all
the anxieties and insecurities which characterise his social position ...
Natascha Ungeheuer knows ... [them] only too well. She torments him, she
provokes him, yet at the same time she lures him into her apartment ...
The leftist bourgeois ... refuses to
go the full way to the apartment of Natascha Ungeheuer. He has not yet
discovered his way to the revolution. He knows that he must turn back on the
way he has gone so far, and begin again.
Everything about the work – its
ideological intention, its music, and its staging – was calculated to provoke,
and it was roundly booed when performed at West Berlin’s impeccably bourgeois
Deutsche Oper.
The musical forces required are a
vocalist – a baritone of sorts – a brass quintet, a Hammond organ, percussion,
a jazz ensemble, allegedly redolent of the Berlin underground, though perhaps a
few decades late, and, perhaps most notably, denoting the bourgeois origins of
the protagonist, an instrumental quintet (piano, flute, clarinet, viola, and cello)
identical to that used in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Here is sickly,
decadent, bourgeois expressionism. (Here, I might personally add, is the more
compelling music; perhaps Henze spoke more truly than he realised.) To
underline the already heavy symbolism, Henze, who also directed the first
performances, had the Pierrot quintet – Peter Maxwell Davies’s Fires of
London – dress in blood-soaked white coats, each member sporting a different
physical injury: ‘one with eye bandaged,’ presumably a coincidental homage to
Wotan, ‘another his leg and yet another his arm in plaster of Paris, etc.,
etc.’ Once again, conflict between different sound worlds, representing
different aspects of the political and social situation is readily apparent in what is notably called a deutsches Lied, a German song.
[text and
translation at end]
In a 1972 interview, Henze also
made an interesting connection with his experience of Italian opera and the
physicality of the human voice he experienced in that, and implicitly not in
German tradition:
When I wrote my
first opera, Boulevard Solitude in 1951 – it had its premiere the
following year – 50 per cent of it was dance. The singers were treated in
rather a statuesque manner because I didn't believe in the traditional
movements for them. I overcame that view when I saw Italian opera and I
realised that the physical presence of music in a human body is much stronger
in a singer because of his voice. This process of making music physically
present is still concerning me today. In Cimarrón and Natascha
Ungeheuer, I make even the musicians visible and they more or less become
actors. I think I will pursue this line.
The score tells us that ‘the work
can be performed in gymnasiums, in the open air or on concert platforms.’ Yet,
the opera house, or at least the theatre, retains a certain primacy. ‘When
performed on the stage, dance elements and lighting effects can be increased.
It is conceivable to blend in films and to add to the scenic actions.’ Shorn of
the optionality and translated into Hegelian, Henze’s notes might come from
Wagner’s Opera and Drama. This is a Gesamtkunstwerk of the early 1970s,
however much Henze might have wished to escape Wagner’s legacy.
The protagonist’s predicament was
clearly Henze’s own: stuck somewhere between Natascha’s flat in Kreuzberg and the
German bourgeoisie which, even during his self-exile, had funded so many of his
activities to date – and would continue to do so. However, most of his audience
had not even begun its journey. In Henze’s words, ‘our hero does not reach his
destination: but … he hears in his head the sirenlike voice of Comrade
Natascha, who, far from welcoming and accommodating, reels off a list of objections
to him.’ Has nagging Fricka been resurrected, post-
Götterdämmerung, to assail our artist-Wotan? ‘Attempts to renew his
bourgeois connections prove a failure. It is a lonely show that our hero
stages.’
Having
turned back from the former, he does not return to the latter, though it
remains quite unclear what will happen next. Such would be the besetting yet
fruitful problematic of Henze’s career and œuvre.
L’Upupa
und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe, another Salzburg commission (2003), would
be in character if not in form his
Singspiel,
a loving tribute to the composer of
Die
Zauberflöte. However, despite its debts to Wagner and to Berg, Henze still
did not feel comfortable with an unalloyed tribute to the former and never
really would; Mozart was for many reasons more approachable. And yet, in an
unguarded moment during a 2010 interview, shortly before the British premiere
of his penultimate opera,
Phaedra,
Henze would aver, ‘
German music,
it’s difficult to match isn’t it? It’s so rich and so deep and has inspired so
many adventures – and still can, I believe.’
If he had not yet made peace with German politics – and why should he have done
so in the age of Merkel any more than during the era of Adenauer? – then the
richness of his engagement with German music, and more broadly German history
and culture, would never be in doubt.
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8. deutsches lied
bruitage (40″)
FEMALE VOICE
was treibt die revolution
VOCALIST (ausdruckslos,
noch immer seine zigarette rollend)
danke
in
diesen zeiten
ist
sie ein wenig fett geworden
(eine silbe wie die andere)
hinter der allgewalt von genähten
und
eingedämmten
winden
bedeckt mit rechenschiebern brüsten
und
mahlzeiten
von schlafsäcken und
hodenentzündungen
begleitet
eintönig wie ein endloses sinken
breiten sich aus die kreuzberger
wohunungen
…
8. german song
how is the revolution coming
(expressionless, still rolling
his cigarette)
thank you
during these
times
it has become a
little fat
behind the overpowering strength of
the
sewn-in and dammed-up
winds
protected by slide-rule bosoms and
mealtimes
accompanied by sleeping bags and
inflamed
testicles
monotonous like an endless sinking
lies the expanse of kreuzberg flats
…
