Programme note
Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926)
Symphony No 1 (1947)
Now in his eighties, Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926) remains one of the giants of contemporary music today. Few 20th century composers have managed so well to combine gorgeous lyricism with a command of both traditional and serial techniques, fusing them with neoclassicism to produce a swathe of sumptuous music spanning over sixty years.
Henze studied with René Leibowitz (1913-72) a Polish-born pupil of Ravel deeply versed in Viennese serialism, whose other most famous student was Boulez. “In my world,” Henze had observed, “old forms strive to regain significance, even when the modern sound or timbres rarely permit them to surface audibly.
“It’s like a Classical ideal of beauty: no longer attainable, yet still visible from a great distance, stirring dream-like memories.”
Henze grew up in a Germany riven by Nazism and World War Two. Already a member of the Hitler Youth, he served in the Wehrmacht for the war’s dying months.
Such grisly experiences deeply affected his attitude to his music, although they scarcely show in his First Symphony, composed in 1947. Yet they clearly infused his bitter and violent Second Symphony, “utterly grey and gloomy, as though my experience of the war was responding to a demand in my music.”
By contrast, Henze’s First Symphony is almost pastorally cheerful and extrovert. Its premiere in 1948 was not an unmitigated success, but the work’s audible rapture was (unwittingly) appropriate, for “in the festival canteen, I met my first real love; and I now had eyes for nothing else. I suddenly knew where I belonged: he taught me tenderness; and for the first time in my life, I was happy.”
The originally four-movement symphony should have been heard at Darmstadt in 1947, with Hermann Scherchen conducting. But after a crisis (the watery ink faded on the orchestral parts and the 21 year old composer spent all night re-inking and re-copying), only the slow movement was played. The symphony was first heard a year later, conducted (rather unsympathetically) by Henze’s other great teacher, Wolfgang Fortner. The Lento is the only bit of the original that survives, largely unaltered, today.
“Throughout the rehearsals I became grimly conscious of the weaknesses of this frivolous, infantile composition,” he recalled. Henze junked the original (though revamped some of its melodic and rhythmic material), also reducing its forces prior to conducting tonight’s 16-minute chamber version with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1963.
The aerated woodwind aubade that opens the Allegretto con grazia, with its pellucid textures and sudden climaxes, call to mind the music of Michael Tippett. Climaxes come and go, but the atmosphere is delicate, shifting and (already) rather nocturnal, with percussive interjections from piano and harp, plus alternating whispers of flute, clarinet and wafting brass.
Stravinsky presides over the Lento: the Russian, along with Hindemith, was audibly a key influence on the young Henze. A viola solo and rocking flute import an impressionistic quality that feels more like Paris than Berlin. It has often been said that the music of Henze, who soon afterwards made his main home on the Bay of Naples, suggests Southern European warmth as much as any Austro-German influence.
The Allegro con moto imports new rhythmic urgency, emphasised by demonic, syncopated brassy outbursts and skitterings of busy, nervy woodwind. Here one senses Henze the master of counterpoint, so that the movement’s underlying beauty, with its soft soli, is not compromised by such terse argumentative outbreaks. The bassoon seems to herald a new direction, but then suddenly the symphony is over.
© Roderic Dunnett
