Hans Werner Henze: Teaching Journal

Teaching journal.

Repertoire:

Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012, Germany), Being Beauteous (1963), cantata for soprano, harp and 4 celli (symbolist poem by Arthur Rimbaud);

Edward Elgar (1857-1934), Sospiri (premiered 15 Aug 1914)

In this lesson, I guided students towards an appreciation of musical beauty in 20th century music through musical expression of love, first in Elgar’s Sospiri, then in Henze’s Being Beauteous. Sospiri was originally meant to be titled Sigh of Love, an indication that the impassioned yearning of the leaps in the melody express love and desire in what we recognize as conventionally “beautiful” (lyrical, moving) music. In Henze’s Being Beauteous, Elgarian strains can be detected, but are here suffused with a form of suffering that I explained to students as parallel to the pain of being in love (unrequited love, lovers’s quarrels).

To students, I explained that love’s suffering can be understood through the duality of pleasure and pain, in what is perhaps a more complex, 20th-century musical expression of love and beauty. Love’s suffering is erotically expressed in Rimbaud’s poem through the figure of the beautiful and distorted body, a “tall beauteous Being” in which “black and scarlet wounds burst in the superb flesh.” The pain of wounds is interwoven with erotic “shudders” that “rise and fall” in a “trembl[ing]” body that is “adored.” Henze’s music begins with lyrical celli in their sonorous, human voice-like tenor range, aiming for an impassioned expression underscored with pithy dissonance: we hear the lyrical strains of Elgar mixed in with Rimbaud’s complex vision of erotic, suffering beauty. As opposed to a purely pleasurable experience of musical beauty, Being Beauteous, like so much of 20th century music, presents us with an ambiguous experience that is tinged with pleasure and pain, with the interweaving of relative consonance (a section approximates a minor key, but is replete with non-functional clashes that yet suggests directional voice leading) and dissonance, Romantic lyricism and a vision of something darker.

I found it useful to get students to think about Henze through Elgar, and both through the concepts of form and beauty/love. To get student discussion going (after giving a brief lecture on the above), I posed the motion, “Form is irrelevant to beauty,” dividing the class into halves for the pro and against sides. This prompted student exploration of how musical form can be understood as the essential skeleton of melody, harmony, and texture; however, there are other elements such as Rimbaud’s aesthetic, Henze’s creative vision and his timbral world, and the emotive quality of the music, all of which intersect with form in the eventual musical experience, but yet remain distinct components of the creative work. The debate motion helped students to identify key analytics such as form (melody, harmony, texture, timbre), poetry, inspiration, and expression, which helped them to hear and discuss Being Beauteous from a number of perspectives.