Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘Quand viendre ce César, car il viendra?’ asked Catherine the Great during the French Revolution, long before Napoleon appeared. It was equally evident after the last war that a young operatic composer must emerge in post-war Germany. Strauss was an old man, Orff and Egk were already mature, as was Blacher, whose impudent attitude to the Nazis had vitiated his chances of performance.

     Not unnaturally this search for a white hope led to a hysterical and dangerous enthusiasm for the young Henze. That he survived this not untypically German reaction does credit to the intensity of his musicianship; nevertheless, the aesthetic atmosphere of post-war Germany played and still plays a crucial part in Henze’s musical make-up. Not only Schoenberg and Webern, but Hindemith and Stravinsky, had been excluded from the German musical diet for more than a decade. The exclusion of these key figures of twentieth-century music meant that after the war most sentient musicians in Germany sharply concentrated on the riches they had been denied. The young Henze, with prompting from René Leibowitz and the versatile Fortner, set himself to learn the languages of the forbidden music. His early works show the direct influences of these composers, though even in these his passionate and vital personality made its own mark. The violin concerto, ‘Apollo and Hyacinthus’, and parts of the first symphony are works already sure to survive from Henze’s vast output. His facility has its perils, and many of Henze’s early works betray not only the enthusiasm but also the recklessness of his talent. That Henze’s first genuinely operatic work (when he was musical director of the singerless theatre at Costanza he composed an opera for actors and orchestra) should be a 1950-ish version of the Manon Lescaut story is an indication of the composer’s sensitive apprehension of the political and sensual world in which he found himself. The premiere at Hanover aroused storms both of enthusiasm and disapproval. The latter manifestation was partly political, but also engendered by one historical fact: audiences at concerts are far more liberal, or at worst apathetic, than in the opera house. The almost endless list of outbursts in the opera house from La Traviata, Madame Butterfly, Le Sacre du Printemps through the Berlin Moses and Aaron to the latest Fascist outburst during Nono’s Intolerance 1960 in Venice shows how aroused people are by new dramatic or political ideas, which they are prepared to ignore in other places, invading the theatre.

     Boulevard Solitude has perhaps been unfairly ignored because it touches on the ‘twilight of the gods’ atmosphere prevalent in post-war Germany. The stultifying glories of the Wirtschaftswunder have served as an opiate to the inglorious past. In the case of this opera it is a pity because Henze’s lyric and evocative powers were considerably displayed, the library scene perhaps epitomizing the curious magic he sometimes attains. With this opera and the attendant protests, particularly in Rome, Henze was held to have identified himself with the avant-garde. The growls of deception swelling to opprobrious cries of abuse which followed are clear signs that, on the contrary, the composer was a genuine romantic. One should not find it necessary to denigrate the work of the explorers of new sounds and new techniques to realize that there are more ways of killing a cat than one. Henze himself, with that instinctive adroitness that is his substitute for cerebral gymnastics, has rightly asked ‘Who knows what is “forwards”?’

     Henze’s self-imposed exile to Italy was partly dictated by a desire to clarify his own position away from the sycophants and polemicists, above all away from what he has termed, turning on his detractors, the ‘ice boxes of Cologne’. King Stag, with its Italianate text, with enough ideas — and for that matter music — for three operas, remains a testimony to the composer’s exuberance, again dimmed by the unhappy Berlin auspices of its first performance.

     Having rejected various disciplines, such as serialism, Henze accepted for Ondine Ashton’s conditions; at the same time, while producing music suitable for the Ashton-Fonteyn team, and for a company nurtured in classical ballet, he managed to retain enough of his own personal idiom. The bellicosity of the composer’s anti-Prussianism led him to choose for his next opera, The Prince of Homburg. Kleist’s play, with its tussle between human love and military duty, hardly projects its problems outside Prussia; in an attempt to show his own revulsion from Prussianism, Henze succeeded in emasculating even the parochial tension from which the libretto should draw its strength. The music, however, is something different; the score is tougher than Ondine, but with glorious stretches where his often disparate sensibility is concentrated and intensified.

     That, contrary to expectation, Henze is now attempting to compress, even to adapt, his style, is evident from the piano sonata, where of all things the shadow of Boulez causes a certain ambivalence of style. Elegy for Young Lovers, which has its premiere at Glyndebourne this month, is written to an English text by Auden and Kallman, the librettists for Stravinsky, and the re-translators of the Mozart operas. The basic theme attempts to explode the myth of the nineteenth-century Great Man. Today we march under banners with slogans ‘Aut Caesar aut nihil’, making life easy for the critics. Is there a path between Menotti and Stockhausen? If there is, Henze may find it; however, he has trimmed his ship and, when seeming to be courting the wind of favour, has deliberately slipped it. Throughout his liberal career his stage works have generally elicited his most idiosyncratic style: the new work is no exception. Auden and Kallman’s poetic and cunningly-shaped libretto has provided the right kind of material for this volatile composer.