Henze, Hans Werner

composer

born: 01.07.1926 in Gütersloh

died: 27.10.2012 in Dresden

In the 1950/51 season, Henze was appointed artistic director and ballet conductor at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden by the artistic director Heinrich Köhler-Helffrich. After training at the Braunschweig State Music School, he continued his studies with Wolfgang Fortner at the Church Music Institute in Heidelberg, where he learned the twelve-tone technique and the entire repertoire of New Music at the Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt and with René Leibowitz in Paris.

The permanent position in Wiesbaden was to provide Henze (who had started composing at an early age) with the basis for his further compositional work. However, it was here that he also became acquainted with the sobering realities of everyday theater life and there were repeated frictions with the artistic director. Henze wrote the festive music, the "Symphonic Variations", for the opening of the Kleines Haus. However, as there was no room for the harp, piano and celesta in the orchestra pit, these instruments were removed from the score without consultation and Henze had to conduct the work "with holes".

On the other hand, he was successful. For example, he managed to win over the French star dancer Serge Lifar for a guest performance (even if the dream of an ambitious ballet company in Wiesbaden did not come true) and to push through the inclusion of works by modern composers (such as Arnold Schönberg and Giselher Klebe) in the repertoire - no small undertaking in view of an audience that was predominantly only familiar with the traditional repertoire. And a number of his own compositions were created or completed here.

These included the radio opera "Ein Landarzt" (based on Franz Kafka's story of the same name), the incidental music for "Der tolle Tag" (based on the comedy by Beaumarchais), the ballet pantomime "Der Idiot" (based on scenes from Dostoyevsky's novel), a composition commissioned by the famous dancer and choreographer Tatjana Gsovsky, and Henze's first opera "Boulevard Solitude" (a reinterpretation of Abbé Prévost's novel "Manon Lescaut"). It was the first great success of Henze's career. During his time in Wiesbaden, he was able to get to know the different facets of theater work. He had acquired further knowledge of orchestration in many technical discussions with the musicians.

With their open form, his works already contained the basic elements of Henze's composing. In their multifaceted tonal language, tonality and atonality, montage technique, electronic sounds, Sprechgesang, jazz elements and an equally differentiated and expressive tonality form a distinctive synthesis of tradition and avant-garde.

In 1953, Henze left for Italy, a country he rarely left for any length of time. He no longer tied himself to a theater. In 2000, the Rheingau Music Festival dedicated a composer portrait to him. In addition to numerous other awards, he was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.