Hans Werner Henze, German composer, dies
Hans Werner Henze, a prolific German composer who came of age in the Nazi era and grew estranged from his country while gaining renown for richly imaginative operas and orchestral works, died on Oct. 25 in Dresden, Germany, where he was due to attend the premiere that evening of a ballet set to one of his scores. He was 86.
His longtime publisher, Schott Music, announced his death in a statement. No cause was specified, and no further details were provided.
Born into a European generation that wanted to make a fresh start at the end of World War II, Henze did so without wholly negating the past. He wanted a new music that would carry with it the emotion, the opulence and the lyricism of the Romantic era, even if those elements now had to be fought for. Separating himself from the avantgarde, he devoted himself to genres many of his colleagues regarded as outmoded: opera, song, the symphony.
By the early 1960s Henze was an international figure with enthusiastic admirers in the United States. His Fifth Symphony was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, which gave the work’s premiere in 1963, with Leonard Bernstein conducting. More than 40 years later, the orchestra took part in commissioning one of Henze’s last orchestral works, the tone poem Sebastian Dreaming.
He maintained relationships with other U.S. institutions as well, including the Boston Symphony, which commissioned his Eighth Symphony (1992-93), and the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he was composer-inresidence in 1988.
His music expressed passionate but mixed feelings about his German heritage. His Nazi-era childhood alone would have produced, at the least, ambivalence about that heritage, but his homosexuality only further estranged him, particularly from the bourgeois West German society of the immediate postwar years. And he found little sympathy at home for his embrace of the Romantic past.
As he grew older, the matter of Germany became increasingly important to his music. Having written his Cuban-inflected Sixth Symphony (1969) — produced during a period when he spent a great deal of time in Cuba — he composed his Seventh (198384) for the Berlin Philharmonic, taking Beethoven as his model. Again with Beethoven in mind and again writing for the Berlin Philharmonic, he made his Ninth a choral symphony — and a drama — telling a story of desperation and hope set during the Nazi epoch.
Hans Werner Henze was born on July 1, 1926, in Gutersloh, Westphalia, in northwest Germany. After army service in 1944 and 1945 he studied with Wolfgang Fortner at the Heidelberg Institute for Church Music and with the French composer Rene Leibowitz. He soon became acquainted with the modern music that had been banned by the Nazis — notably Stravinsky and Berg, as well as jazz — and gained the means to create a sprightly style that carried him through an abundant youthful output. By the time he was 25 he had written three symphonies, several ballets and his first full-length opera, Boulevard Solitude (1951).
In his Second String Quartet (1952) he drew close to his more avant-garde contemporaries, but the moment quickly passed. The next year he left his post as music director of the Wiesbaden State Theater to settle on the Bay of Naples, and his music at once became luxurious and frankly emotional, as exemplified by his fairy-tale opera King Stag, first performed in Berlin in 1956.
It was an exultant period, which also brought forth his Fourth Symphony (1955); the full-length ballet Ondine (1956-57), produced with choreography by Frederick Ashton at Covent Garden; Nocturnes and Arias, for soprano and orchestra (1957); and Chamber Music, for tenor, guitar and octet (1958).
In his next opera, The Prince of Homburg, first produced in Hamburg in 1960, he caricatured German militarism within a style fashioned after the bel canto operas of Bellini and Donizetti. After this came Elegy for Young Lovers, to a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, about a poet’s use of his family and acquaintances in his art. The story’s alpine setting offered Henze the opportunity for glistening, radiant music, scored for a chamber orchestra.
The work had its first performance in Schwetzingen, Germany, in 1961, and has been more widely seen than any of the composer’s other operas. It was presented by City Opera in 1973 — though that production remains the only professional staging of an opera by Henze in New York.