Five Night Pieces (Henze)

Listening Guide. Hans Werne Henze, 5 Night Pieces (1990) for violin and piano, No. 1 Elegie..

Henze lived a life of contradictions. His father Franz Henze was a teacher in a progressive school that was shut down in 1933 by the Nazis, but Franz was later influenced by Nazi propaganda and expected his entire family to subscribe to the same ideology. The younger Henze was conscripted in 1944 and was quickly captured by the British before he was released at the end of the war.

In 1947, Henze turned to the musical technique that was discursively constructed (in part through the global efforts of the US) as a symbol of Western democratic freedom (as opposed to fascist censorship of modernism). This technique was serialism, which Henze encountered at Darmstadt. After moving to Italy in the 50s, however, Henze turned back to the neo-tonal idiom with which he began composing, writing neo-Romantic music which prefigures the musical world’s turn away from Darmstadt in the 60s in a musical postmodernism which was descried as conservative and reactionary.

The stylistic convolutions which make it difficult for us to ascribe a clear “left-” or “right-wing” label to Henze and his music are further complicated by Henze’s politics and sexuality. Henze was an avowed communist and expressed this in his 1968 Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of the Medusa), a requiem for the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara: at the première of the work in Hamburg, where a red revolutionary flag was planted onstage, the West German musicians refused to perform and the librettist Ernst Schnabel was arrested. Henze was also openly gay and lived with his partner Fausto Moroni for over four decades.

Henze’s “neo-Romanticism” is expressed as a propensity for sonorous, lyrical intensity that is overtly emotional. The first movement, “Elegie,” from 5 Night Pieces (1990) features an intense, soaring neo-tonal melody in the violin over mercurial collections of fleeting atonal pitches in the piano. This is a raw expression of the kind of intensity which is found in Henze’s huge output of operas, symphonies, and orchestral, chamber, choral, and solo music. The contradictions of Henze’s life suggest to us that there is more than traditional conservatism in his music, and that the discursive opposition between heroic serial freedom—versus neo-tonal conservatism associated with the repressive regimes in interwar Germany and Russia—may not hold up to close scrutiny.