{"id":315,"date":"2025-05-01T09:45:07","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T09:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/chainlink\/?p=315"},"modified":"2026-01-02T12:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T12:20:11","slug":"the-symphonies-of-hans-werner-henze-jonathan-taylor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/2025\/05\/01\/the-symphonies-of-hans-werner-henze-jonathan-taylor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Symphonies of Hans Werner Henze – Jonathan Taylor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gesamtkunstwerk<\/em><\/strong> in the Head: The Symphonies of Hans Werner Henze<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all its claims to absolute music, the symphony has always been a hybrid \u2013 maybe even omnivorous \u2013 musical genre, constantly renewing itself by fusing with other genres and art-forms. Haydn frequently employs folk songs in his symphonies, like many composers after him; Mozart\u2019s symphonies can sound operatic; Beethoven\u2019s symphonies encompass everything from the programmatic to something close to oratorio (in the 9th<\/sup>); Schubert\u2019s symphonies sing; Berlioz\u2019s symphonies tell stories; Tchaikovsky\u2019s symphonies are balletic; Mahler turns Wagnerian music drama into psychodrama; Shostakovich\u2019s symphonies often convey the immediacy and impact of Soviet cinema. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The anti-fascist composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) would have understood much of this, particularly as regards the symphony\u2019s close relationship with drama, ballet and opera. He believed that \u201ceverything moves towards theatre or comes from there,\u201d and there are theatrical elements to all ten of his symphonies. Despite Henze\u2019s reputation, his symphonies are by no means monolithically grim works of abstract thinking: they are also full of drama and dance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having said that, there\u2019s no denying that these are \u201cdifficult\u201d works \u2013 they\u2019re dense, barbed and challenging pieces of intense post-war modernism, mingling atonality with tonality, serialism with Stravinskian polytonality. There are no immediately \u201chummable\u201d tunes, and I don\u2019t think they\u2019ll be featuring on Classic FM any time soon. Henze probably wouldn\u2019t have minded this \u2013 he once provocatively declared that he wanted to \u201ccompose against <\/em>the bourgeoisie.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all the difficulty and provocation, though, one way of accessing his symphonic music is through the theatre proscenium, as it were. In other words, one route into this apparently forbidding music is to understand it as a sort of displaced drama. After all, Henze was an accomplished opera and ballet composer \u2013 in his life-time, arguably more well-known for his stage works than his concert pieces, with the possible exception of the Fantasia for Strings<\/em>, made (in)famous as the exit-piece to The Exorcist<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is near-filmic horror in Henze\u2019s music: horror which no doubt arose, in part, from his experiences as a youth, then soldier, then prisoner in World War 2. Henze challenges the listener, both musically and politically, confronting trauma head-on in a way that Mahler, Hartmann, Shostakovich, Penderecki, Schnittke do, but other musicians can shy away from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, as he says himself, there is also \u201caffirmation\u201d in his music, along with the horror. There are glimpses of joy, as well as fantasy, dance, drama, narrative, grace, transcendence \u2013 all of which he has, perhaps, imported into the symphony from his experiences in the theatre.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is most explicit in the beautiful 8th<\/sup> Symphony, which is a kind of fantasy woven round scenes from Shakespeare\u2019s Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>. The third movement is a visionary and ultimately reconciliatory response to Puck\u2019s final speech in the play: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we shadows have offended,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think but this and all is mended:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That you have but slumbered here<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While these visions did appear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this weak and idle theme,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No more yielding but a dream \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The music here is light on its feet, Puckish, the orchestration transparent, subverting Henze\u2019s reputation as grim, po-faced socialist. As Beethoven knew well, liberatory politics can be a matter of joy, and Henze\u2019s 8th<\/sup> is socialism-as-ballet, socialism-as-anarchic-fairy-tale, socialism-as-utopian-dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That dream-like balleticism surfaces in some of his other symphonies, too: the 3rd<\/sup> is close to dance throughout \u2013 sometimes delicate, sometimes weird, sometimes savage. One of the movements was later turned into a stage ballet. The imaginative orchestration is fundamental to the balletic effect: the percussion glitters and dances round the other sections of the orchestra throughout. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henze comprehends what Mahler (as a brilliant conductor) demonstrated: that the symphony orchestra can itself become \u201ctheatre\u201d in performance, in both aural and <\/em>visual terms. The final few minutes of Mahler\u2019s 6th<\/sup> brought this home to me three decades ago, when I saw a concert performance of it that underlined the visual \u2013 theatrical and balletic \u2013 aspects of the experience as well as the auditory drama. Symphonies can be quasi-operatic or quasi-balletic spectacle. Many of Henze\u2019s symphonies exemplify this: the 2nd<\/sup> is both harrowing musical onslaught and a work of visual theatre; the 5th<\/sup> is both a concerto for orchestra and a kind of post-war Rite of Spring<\/em>; the crazy 6th<\/sup> is an almost-situationist \u201chappening.\u201d It is performed by two chamber orchestras, playing in parallel and sometimes in conflict, interweaving revolutionary songs with weird sound effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are theatrical aspects to Henze\u2019s other symphonies, too. The choral 9th<\/sup> is \u2013 like Beethoven\u2019s \u2013 part-oratorio, part-static-opera. It is also a staged novel, its text based on Anna Segher\u2019s The Seventh Cross<\/em>, which tells the story of seven escapees from a Nazi concentration camp. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As such, this symphony-as-novel brings to consciousness the narrative impulse that underlies all of Henze\u2019s symphonies. The most \u201cpopular\u201d of Henze\u2019s symphonies, the 7th<\/sup>, is a case in point: it is both an abstract piece of complex symphonism, and an epic drama on a Mahlerian scale, moving between tragedy and transcendence. No doubt this model of the symphony \u2013 as epic narrative \u2013 has a long tradition, back to Beethoven\u2019s 5th<\/sup>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also has roots in Wagnerian music drama. Wagner, of course, knew better than anyone the narrative power of symphonic music, and his (ambivalent) legacy has haunted Germanic composers ever since. Nonetheless, composers like Mahler, Hartmann and Henze didn\u2019t just inherit that legacy: they also transformed it, subverted it, and, above all, internalised it. They took on Wagner\u2019s immersive theatre \u2013 the dubious model of Gesamtkunstwerk<\/em> (the total work of art) \u2013 and turned it inwards. In Henze\u2019s symphonies, for all their gestures towards spectacle, the music drama is staged, ultimately, inside the listener\u2019s head \u2013 and this is particularly the case in the age of recorded music, where listeners often listen alone. Here is an inner-Gesamtkunstwerk<\/em>, which democratically liberates the individual rather than, as with Wagner\u2019s Bayreuth, tying them into a collective ritual. That is the kind of political radicalism at work in Henze\u2019s symphonic works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is also why Henze\u2019s symphonies \u2013 like Mahler\u2019s and Hartmann\u2019s \u2013 can feel so uncomfortable: they single us out, operating on a deeply personal, visceral level, recognising inner selves we might not even have known were there. Like dreams, they are royal roads to our unconscious, seeming to circumvent the rational mind; like Wagnerian theatre, they are immersive experiences \u2013 yet, unlike Bayreuth and its direct descendant, the modern cinema, they are immersive experiences into the depths of the self. At their most intense, they aspire to the condition of Gesamtkunstwerk<\/em>-of-the-unconscious.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Taylor<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gesamtkunstwerk in the Head: The Symphonies of Hans Werner Henze For all its claims to absolute music, the symphony has always been a hybrid \u2013 maybe even omnivorous \u2013 musical genre, constantly renewing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1631,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[55,24],"tags":[67],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classical-music","category-music","tag-may-issue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/henze.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1632,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions\/1632"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}