There is a story that Hans Werner Henze reports in his fascinating and brave autobiography Bohemian Fifths that symbolises his central place in the cultural and political conflicts of postwar music. It's about Henze's opera, Der Prinz von Homburg, a piece that had premiered in Hamburg in 1960. Henze relates that at a dinner party (at which he wasn't present), the Italian composer Luigi Nono threw some Meissen porcelain to the floor in disgust at the mere mention of Henze's opera. The reason for the offence? Well, as the philosopher Theodor Adorno also said to Henze about the piece, "your music is not chaotic enough." As Henze put it, when I met him in 2009 at his home near Rome: "What a thing to say! There you are every day, trying to put something reasonable and clear on paper, and somebody comes and says it is not sufficiently chaotic."
Now whether Nono really did throw the pottery, Henze was (it's shocking to have to write that past participle following news of his death, even in his last years, the twinkle of his blue eyes and his Puckish energy seemed inextinguishable) certainly an outsider in the terms and frames of the postwar avant garde – especially to one of the most single-minded modernists of them all like Nono. That's what Adorno meant by the lack of chaos: Henze's music simply wasn't deemed abrasive or critical enough in the 50s and 60s by his ultra-critical colleagues. He wrote operas, and avowedly lyrical, large-scale operas at that (the sequence starts with Boulevard Solitude, the by turns limpid and dramatic retelling of the Manon Lescaut story in 1952, and ends with the luminous myth of Phaedra in 2007, with another work for an entire community of musical and theatrical performers called Gisela! that he completed in 2010: be entranced by Henze's shimmering music theatre here). By 1970 he had even written six symphonies, a genre that no self-respecting avant gardiste would consider using without a shrug of ironic distance.
Yet Henze's creative exile from the ideologies propagated by the generation of young musical Turks such as Nono or Stockhausen meant that he connected with more listeners, with more institutions, and that his music achieved its arguably more radical aims more completely than many of his contemporaries.
From the start, Henze really was an outsider. Born in 1926 in Westphalia, he had no choice from his surroundings or his Nazi-sympathising father but to enlist in the Hitler Jugend and serve in the war. Those experiences marked his entire life; even his last pieces are concerned with confronting and coming to terms with the darkest periods of Germany's history, and his own. He moved to the remote Italian island of Ischia in the early 1950s, and based himself in Italy for the rest of his life. His home in the hills outside Rome was as lavish, abundant, and sensual as his music, yet his political sympathies were those of a lifelong communist. And Henze did more than most to make his music part of the enlightening of international social consciousness, premiering his Sixth Symphony in Cuba and living there in 1969 and 70. But Henze was never an ideologue, and he supported artists who spoke out against the Cuban regime. Just as in his music, it was human and the individual that mattered more to him than the aesthetic position or orthodoxy.
And unlike so many of his contemporaries, writing music for Henze was an unavoidable, irresistible compulsion. It flowed from him in a nearly continuous stream. Even after the mysterious illness that struck him in 2005, when he returned to the world from weeks of near unconsciousness, the same unquenchable thirst to compose was there, as he completed the second act of Phaedra – music that dramatises Hippolytus's return to life – and composed large orchestral and vocal pieces.
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You can hear that fluency at its best in Ondine, the masterful ballet he wrote for Frederick Ashton and the Royal Ballet in 1958. The idiom is quintessential Henze, a fusion of Stravinskian neo-classicism and rhythmic drive with a voluptuous expressive language, bringing the tragic water-nymph of the story vividly to life – Oliver Knussen's recording with the London Sinfonietta is one of the classics of the gramophone, as they used to say, and one of the pieces to hear to convince anyone who thinks that postwar music cannot be sumptuously beautiful.
For Henze, his music was the sound of his inner life. There was only a gossamer-thin separation between the man and his music, and his fundamental artistic credo was that music ought to have something to say about human emotion and ought to contribute to contemporary society. That way of thinking also meant that he was out of step with the formalist side of postwar music. Music, for Henze, was the living, breathing sound of resistance to any kind of system, a means of creating political and cultural freedom.
And Henze was unafraid to give an explicitly political message to his music. His piece Voices is a collection songs for the oppressed, a piece that gives voices to those who otherwise would not be heard; El Cimarron tells the story of the Cuban slave Esteban Montejo; We Come to the River was an overtly anti-war music-theatre experience, a set of "Actions for Music" devised by Henze and Edward Bond for Covent Garden in 1976.
As well as those pieces of Henze's that make their politics obvious, his renewal of the idea of symphony, concerto, and opera in the late 20th century is a much more radical project than it might seem at first. Henze's operatic subjects take in the tragic, the comic, the mythic and the exotic. Among the best, I think, are The Bassarids (and there's a fantastic suite of orchestral music from this 1966 work, with its libretto by WH Auden and Chester Kallman), and from the other end of his career, L'Upupa, is a magical Middle-Eastern fairytale from 2003.
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Henze's symphonies are just as diverse; listen to the magnificently angry expressionism of his Sixth Symphony and compare it to the frankly gorgeous pleasures of the Eighth, inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream (including the most opulently orchestrated Bottom, if you see what I mean, in its second movement; a fantastical orchestral scherzo that's a great place to start if you're a Henze newcomer), or the choral Ninth. Henze knew exactly what he was doing composing a choral symphony as his ninth essay in the genre: unlike the Beethoven, the choir are present throughout, and Henze's piece is a personal and public attempt to reflect and reconcile the nightmare of Germany's early 20th-century history, setting a version of Anna Seghers's 1942 novel about prisoners attempting to escape from a concentration camp, dedicated "to the heroes and martyrs of German anti-fascism" – and it's a gigantic, fearlessly coruscating work to experience.
You'll sometimes hear a mealy-mouthed criticism of Henze's work that he wrote too much, that he couldn't stop himself overloading his orchestral textures with too much detail, with too great a density of line and activity. But listening now to works that I thought in the past were over-written or overwrought, I hear now instead a riot of colour and imagination. There is always a line to follow in Henze's music, a golden thread of lyricism and narrative that leads you through all of his pieces no matter how densely packed they might seem on the surface. Listen to the Seventh Symphony to hear what I mean – music of abundant effulgence, no doubt, but also real clarity, with its finale that starts as a gentle song and ends with an emotionally charged peroration.
For all its public grandeur, the reason that Henze's music matters and will continue to matter is that it's a distillation of his essential, generous humanity. The piece he wrote after the death of his partner of more than 40 years, Fausto Moroni, Elogium Musicum, is one of the most moving pieces he ever wrote, and that second act of Phaedra has a visionary luminescence, music that realises a character's return from the dead just as its composition symbolised the composer's recovery.
By the end of his life, Henze was disillusioned with the loss of his health, his bereavement, and his sense of his own death. But he knew that he had outlived an era of ideologies, whether political or musical, and he must have known too, that his music voiced an expressive freedom that inspired generations of German composers from Wolfgang Rihm to Jörg Widmann and Detlev Glanert. That essential freedom of the spirit is something that Henze's music yearns for and realises as completely as the work any other 20th or 21st century composer. Henze's life may be over, but we're only just beginning to understand the real importance of his music.
Five key links
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Reqiuem
Ondine
Seventh Symphony
Phaedra
Voices
