ORFEO International

News

October 2012

Hans Werner Henze † 27 October 2012

Hans Werner Henze’s passing away at the age of 86 is a sad loss to the world of music, with his works being regularly performed not only in the German-speaking world but far beyond it, too – one thinks, for example, of the recent performances of his operas in Oslo and Philadelphia.
Hans Werner Henze
Foto: Schott Promotion/ Christopher Peter He is represented on Orfeo’s Festspieldokumente label by one of his early operatic successes as well as by a relatively late one: Die Bassariden was recorded at the 1966 Salzburg Festival, Gogo no eiko as recently as 2006.
Hans Werner Henze
Foto: Schott Promotion/ Peter AndersenThe sheer disparity between the two subjects is typical of the whole of Henze’s varied output: in the earlier work, we have a classical subject based on Euripides, while the later piece is an adaptation of a novel by the 20th-century Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. In both cases Henze tailored his musical language and form to the dramatic subject and its development, as only a true master of opera can do. It is no wonder, then, that he finds such outstanding champions on the conductor’s podium as Christoph von Dohnányi in the case of Die Bassariden and Gerd Albrecht in that of Gogo no eiko. Henze has always said that successful performances and thrilling interpreters are an important reason for his uninterrupted urge to create. Perhaps this give and take is a decisive factor in his works’ reception, while also explaining why they are universally accessible without ever seeking to curry favour with their audiences. As a result, his Fantasia for strings (borrowed from the medium of film music) under Leonidas Kavakos and two of his cantatas, Novae de infinito laudes and Cantata della fiaba estrema, could be effortlessly integrated into the Salzburg Festival repertory with such distinguished soloists as Edita Gruberova, Edda Moser and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Apart from Henze, which other composer of the past decades can claim this about himself and do so, moreover, on such a high level?