Marxist Art, Capitalist Style

By Michael Walsh

Hans Werner Henze is unembarrassed by his royalties

He is a Marxist composer in striped pants and gold cuff links who talks about revolution while sipping Calvados and puffing unfiltered Gitanes in an elegant hotel restaurant. "Because you're a socialist, people expect you to dress in flour bags and eat garbage," says Germany's Hans Werner Henze, at 55 the leading composer of his generation. "But I say better a Communist in a Rolls-Royce than a Fascist in a tank."

Henze does not drive a Rolls-Royce, but he is no stranger to capitalist success. The premiere in 1952 of his first major opera, Boulevard Solitude, brought him widespread attention. By age 40 he had recorded all five of his symphonies--he has since written a sixth--with the redoubtable Berlin Philharmonic. His opera The Bassarids was given a triumphant first production in 1966 at that bastion of conservatism, the Salzburg Festival; another opera, We Come to the River, was premiered by London's Royal Opera ten years later. Commissions are plentiful, and Henze is active as a conductor of his own music. Last week in Chicago, the composer led the mighty Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a program devoted entirely to his works--something that in this country is practically unheard of for any living composer not named Aaron Copland.

The paradox of Hans Werner Henze extends from his life to his art. A member of the progressive Darmstadt circle of composers after World War II, Henze broke decisively with the avant-garde in the mid-'50s and today sneers at the "utter boredom" of doctrinaire serialism. For all his radical leftist politics, Henze's own music is on the musical right. In a way, he is the Brahms of his day, writing in forms such as symphony, concerto and oratorio, preserving the traditional structures in the ace of the avant-gardist onslaught. Henze has mixed idioms freely throughout his career: harshly dissonant modernism, soaring lyricism and frankly tonal conservatism. But the glue that holds his work together is its humanism. Henze's music is meant to be played and listened to by people, not computers. With serialism now in some disrepute, his stature as one who saw another path for postwar music looms larger than ever.

The works performed in Chicago were typical of Henze's eclectic style. In Los Caprichos, a gentle, evocative fantasy for orchestra, he draws on a series of etchings by Goya for inspiration. For Il Vitalino Raddoppiato, Henze goes back to the Baroque Chaconne attributed to Tomaso Vitali, composing an extended (26 minutes), virtuosic set of variations for violin and orchestra that preserves the repeating harmonic structure of Vitali's music while steadily growing in complexity. Arien des Orpheus is an elegiac suite from his full-length ballet Orpheus, based on the Greek myth. And in Barcarola, a darkly impressive work for large orchestra, Henze imaginatively and theatrically depicts the gloomy world of Charon, the ferryman of dead souls across the river Styx. On display in each were Henze's command of orchestration, his sturdy sense of musical architecture and his unerring ear for effective sonorities.

Barcarola is dedicated to the late Paul Dessau, a German composer who shared Henze's Marxism. Henze's political beliefs stem from his upbringing in Nazi Germany and his experiences as a soldier in World War II, a background, he says, that "was sufficient to create a politically minded person. Either that or a monk." Explains Henze: "Politics has become so much a part of my thinking and feeling that it is difficult to say where politics ends and my music begins." In 1968 the premiere of his oratorio The Raft of the Medusa had to be aborted when Hamburg police burst into the theater to quell a political demonstration; the work is dedicated to Che Guevara. Henze premiered his Sixth Symphony in Cuba in 1969, quoting a National Liberation Front song in the score.

As Henze sees it, it is the artist's responsibility to "fight the reactionary forces in the world--any sort of racist, enemy of peace, any person who threatens the freedom of others, anybody who wants to suppress the young in the striving toward new experiences and knowledge." He defines fascism as "the bourgeoisie in arms against the proletariat," and professes himself a supporter of the burgeoning European peace movement. So what was his reaction to the violent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? "Ah," says Henze, "that was the [Soviet] workers in arms."

Although publicly identified as a German composer, Henze left his native land almost 30 years ago for Italy, where he has lived ever since. One of the reasons he left was personal: as a homosexual, he found greater freedom in Italy. Recalls Henze: "Thirty years ago, I had an active homosexual life. But you could be arrested for having a boyfriend. One was permanently humiliated and terrified that one's music could be declared biologically inferior."

In some respects, Henze's life mirrors that of another German composer, Richard Wagner. Like Wagner, Henze is a political activist; he sheltered Rebel Rudi Dutschke during the European student uprisings in the late '60s, just as Wagner had actively supported the Dresden uprising of 1849. And like Wagner, Henze is willing to compromise on political principle to have his music played: Wagner was a polemical anti-Semite who still chose Hermann Levi to conduct the premiere of Parsifal, while Henze is a dedicated Marxist unembarrassed by being supported in high style by his royalties. Both are men of the theater: with seven major operas to his credit (and three more on the way), Henze is the foremost figure in the lyric theater today. But Henze disdains the comparison, noting that he cannot bear either Wagner's music or his politics. "You must take your gifts--your means of production--as the tools of a teacher," he says, summing up his activist philosophy. "And you must dedicate your energies to teaching and helping. Wagner was a prophet. I'm a social worker."

--By Michael Walsh

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.