“During the following days and weeks,” Henze recalled, “we received more and more details about the end of the Chilean democracy. In September, the Allende government was overthrown. In June 1973, Cranko died in a tragic accident. Back in Europe, he was encouraged by choreographer John Cranko to begin a piece based around the Tristan and Isolde myth immortalized by Wagner, and enlisted the help of British electronic music pioneer Peter Zinovieff, who’d worked with Delia Derbyshire and influenced Pink Floyd. Henze himself traveled the following year to Cuba, where he premiered his sixth symphony, took part in the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest of 1970, and began El Cimmaron, a setting of the memoirs of the former Maroon-turned-Cuban-independence-fighter Esteban Montejo for the extraordinary queer African American baritone William Pearson. When student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot by a right-wing gunman in 1968, he recuperated at Henze’s Italian villa. Schnabel’s libretto concludes: “But those who did survive, having learned a lesson from reality, returned to the world again eager to overthrow it.” Ending the piece with the “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” chant on a raft of percussion-as if, he put it, to “lead directly from music into reality”-Henze envisaged that “musicians and audiences can carry on from there and continue the evening singing, discussing, taking action.” Instead, when, at the work’s premiere in Hamburg, students draped Communist banners onstage, the musicians refused to perform, and the evening ended in a frenzy of police violence.
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Sung on the night by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, he provides a voice of moral conscience in a series of dialogues between living and dead. Like Géricault, Henze and librettist Ernst Schnabel focus on the African soldier, his name given in the official record only as Jean-Charles. Over an hour in length, the work was a bleak portrayal of the sufferings of shipwrecked survivors set adrift during a French imperial mission to Senegal, a subject immortalized in Théodore Géricault’s searing painting a century prior.
In 1968, he dedicated his cantata Das Floß der Medusa to Che Guevara. Joining the Socialist League of German Students in 1967, Henze now became an active participant in the New Left. Brandt was duly elected Chancellor, but his rapprochement with right-wing coalition partners and support for the United States was perceived by many radicals as a betrayal. In 1965, Bachmann persuaded him to speak for Social Democratic Party leader Willy Brandt’s election campaign in, of all places, the echt-Wagnerian town of Bayreuth. While staying with composer William Walton, Henze encountered another guest: none other than former Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. Yet he was keenly aware that former Nazis were still a part of the European establishment. In 1953, Henze moved to Italy where, he thought, he might escape the weight of Germany’s Nazi past. Henze and a lover were arrested and interrogated after a complaint from his landlady a few years later, he attempted suicide and was nursed back to health by, among others, East German socialist composer Paul Dessau, his friend and mentor.
Having survived the war, Henze found West Germany to be a place of intense “social isolation” as a gay man faced with the threat of imprisonment and public disgrace. “People like you belong in concentration camps,” he said, intuiting his son’s queer inclinations. Auden.Ī teenager when the Second World War began, Henze saw his father, a provincial schoolteacher, go from being a social liberal to an enthusiastic fascist. Levit’s latest release likewise reclaims a strain of dissidence within and against the tradition, pairing pieces by Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler with the late Hans Werner Henze’s piano concerto Tristan, a work written in the aftermath of the 1973 coup in Chile and the deaths of the composer’s friends and collaborators, poets Ingeborg Bachmann and W. These were models of what a classical concert could be: intimate, accessible, with an ear to the music of leftist composers such as Cardew, Dessau, and Rzewski alongside canonical repertoire. In 2020, when the pandemic temporarily shut down concert life, he put on a series of hauskonzertes livestreamed from his flat. FOR PIANIST IGOR LEVIT, music always opens out onto a social context.
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