Surprise at Schwetzingen

As the thunder of a spring storm crackled overhead, opera buffs from all Europe converged on lushly landscaped Schwetzingen Castle, in the heart of the Rhineland. They crossed the moat, crowded through the rococo entrance gallery, sat down in the gilded 18th century theater and waited to be shocked. The program that promised so much musical surprise: the latest work by the controversial Wunderkind of modern opera, German-born Hans Werner Henze, 34, whose cherubic face and businesslike manner disguise a talent for brazen dissonance, eerie melody and phantasmagorical plots. For good measure, the libretto was by British Poet W. H. Auden and the U.S.'s Chester Kallman, their first since they teamed with Stravinsky on The Rake's Progress a decade ago.

The four-hour chamber work was innocently titled Elegy for Young Lovers, but the plot was anything but innocent. A predatory poet has earned fame by secretly transcribing the rantings of a middle-aged widow, driven mad by the wedding-night death of her bridegroom 40 years earlier. For further inspiration, the poet sends two young lovers to their death on an Alpine peak, and as the curtain falls, he is reciting his latest opus: Elegy for Young Lovers. The tragicomic moral: death for art's sake is O.K.

Though Henze's melodies were somewhat diffuse, critics were impressed with the lavish production put on by the Bavarian State Opera which featured Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Soprano Ingeborg Bremert, and they were unanimous in their praise. Said the authoritative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "Henze has arrived at the point of decision. All the lessons which he learned from Verdi, Berg, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Britten and Weill have been absorbed in his tremendously creative feeling for sounds and his sense of the dramatic." This mixture of old and new, of atonality and traditional harmony, was precisely what Henze was after. It was a synthesis that he had been building for a long time.

Son of a grade-school teacher in the Westphalian city of Bielefeld, Henze played the piano at five, took ballet lessons at six. Drafted into the Wehrmacht at 18, he continued his musical education at Heidelberg and Paris, soon decided that "old-style music sounds pale and insufficient." He spent the next 15 years rattling off dozens of chamber works, symphonies, ballets and operas that earned him a name as a one-man revival of German music.

Last week, following the premiere of Elegy for Young Lovers, Henze took to his bed with a high fever. "It's the anticlimax he suffers after each premiere," reported his secretary. "Every time, he thinks he has made it, and then his sensitive nature tells him: 'Not yet, not yet.' "

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