Hans Werner Henze

1926–2012

musiche per chitarra

In 1951 the young Henze experienced Italy for the first time — an encounter with far-reaching consequences: in 1953 he left Germany for good. Yet his motives had little to do with dolce vita; for him it was a journey into the past, with ancient Greece setting the course.
On the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples Henze found his new home, where he was able to redefine himself and his music and where he would compose King Stag (König Hirsch) until the autumn of 1955. In the orchestra of this opera a delicate instrument appears, the guitar. From then on it would accompany Henze throughout his life, although he himself never played it.
While preparing my course “Contemporary Music for Guitar”, a passing remark in Henze’s autobiography Bohemian Fifths (Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten, 1996) caught my attention immediately: “The atmosphere was often depressed, composing difficult. As an exercise and a form of retreat after the luxuriant proliferations of the King Stag music, I had prescribed myself a sporadic cycle of strictly written serial pieces, wrote the Three Symphonic Studies (and incidentally guitar music for Ernst Schnabel’s radio play The Sixth Canto).”
Music for guitar for a radio play? I knew nothing about it. And it became even more intriguing a little later, when Henze writes about the Tentos from Chamber Music 1958 (Kammermusik 1958) — generally regarded as his earliest guitar solos: “The latter actually originate from the already mentioned radio music for Ernst Schnabel’s The Sixth Canto (from the Odyssey) and were partly used earlier in Maratona.”
Now my curiosity was truly aroused. The research that followed soon turned into an odyssey of its own — through archives and sound and text documents. In the end I was able not only to locate the manuscript of the long-lost musiche per chitarra / accompagnando il SESTO CANTO di Ernesto Schnabel, but also to examine the broadcast script containing all the entries relating to the music, and beyond that to clarify the circumstances of the work’s genesis and of the radio production connected with it.
Ernst Schnabel’s “novel for the radio” Der sechste Gesang (The Sixth Canto — the title used for a BBC production; the English book edition appeared as The Voyage Home) is a contemporary adaptation of the Odyssey, recounting how the hero of Troy is washed ashore as a castaway on the island of Scheria, how he arrives at the court of Alcinous, is confronted there with the stories told about him, falls in love with Nausicaa and, instead of returning to Ithaca, would rather continue sailing across the seas.
Henze had met Schnabel in 1951, when the latter had just become director-general of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. A long-lasting friendship developed from this encounter. Freed since January 1955 from the burdens of his position, the writer spent the summer with his friend on Ischia and wrote his novel there. By mid-August The Sixth Canto was finished. At some point during the following two months the idea arose of including music in the radio production.
At the end of October Schnabel wrote to his friend: “I am in Baden-Baden and have today reached an agreement with the NWDR and the SWF that The Sixth Canto will be broadcast by both stations. Both sides are quite agreeable to the idea that you should write guitar music for it […] Altogether there would be some thirty-five musical moments […] In about five cases you would have the opportunity to expand somewhat more.”
Henze delivered as commissioned. The pieces he composed were recorded in Baden-Baden — yet in the broadcast version only a very small part of them was actually used, and even this little only rarely at the places originally intended.
After this non-realization of his music, the composer reused several of the ideas conceived for The Sixth Canto over the following three years: in the Five Neapolitan Songs, in Maratona, and finally in the Tentos of Chamber Music 1958.
In 2013 I published the results of my research in an extensive essay entitled „Ein Gedankenstrich, der zitternd Wellen schlägt“ – Hans Werner Henzes Annäherung an die Gitarre in seiner Musik zum Rundfunkroman „Der sechste Gesang“ (1955) in the journal concertino, and simultaneously in the Italian guitar magazine il Fronimo under the title 1955: Hans Werner Henze si avvicina alla chitarra attraverso la musica per “Der sechste Gesang”. Yet the question of whether and how Henze’s first guitar work actually functions within its originally intended context still remained unanswered. To find out, the radio novel had to be realized once again — this time with Henze’s music. It was a monumental undertaking, for which I was able to enlist the O-TON ensemble wort of the Trossingen University of Music. Under the direction of the then rector Elisabeth Gutjahr, sixteen performers presented the more than five-hour radio version of Schnabel’s Odyssey novel in a semi-staged reading during the Trossinger Tage der Neuen Gitarrenmusik (Trossingen Days of New Guitar Music) in 2016, dedicated to Henze’s guitar oeuvre.
What had begun as a matter of purely historical curiosity gradually took on audible form and ultimately proved capable of sustaining itself. And yet, although the spare guitar pieces serve merely as dark pauses between often expansively developed scenes, Henze succeeds in creating through these “punctuations” a meaningful and expressive thread within the dramatic arc of the story. In their contemplative character they cast an additional light on the action, often linking directly to the text. Again and again, Henze’s motifs echo the last words or respond onomatopoetically to the events of the story. Even in these radio miniatures Henze reveals himself as a composer of the stage.
A year after this posthumous premiere I published an account of our revival of Hans Werner Henze’s first work for solo guitar — and of the insights gained from this performance — in the EGTA Journal: „Wohin nun?“ – Hans Werner Henzes Gitarrenmusik zum Rundfunkroman „Der sechste Gesang“ – revisited / reloaded / reanimiert.

Andreas Grün

Literature

Andreas Grün: „Ein Gedankenstrich, der zitternd Wellen schlägt“ – Hans Werner Henzes Annäherung an die Gitarre in seiner Musik zum Rundfunkroman „Der sechste Gesang“ (1955) (PDF)
published in three parts in concertino 3/2013, 4/2013 and 1/2014

Andreas Grün: 1955: Hans Werner Henze si avvicina alla chitarra attraverso la musica per ‚Der sechste Gesang‘
published in three parts in il Fronimo nos. 162, 163 and 164 (2013)

Supplement
Andreas Grün: „Wohin nun?“ – Hans Werner Henzes Gitarrenmusik zum Rundfunkroman „Der sechste Gesang“ – revisited / reloaded / reanimiert (www.egta-d.de)
published in EGTA-Journal no. 2 (4/2017)

Short version of the two essays
Andreas Grün: Sechs Saiten für den sechsten Gesang – Die Wiederentdeckung einer verschollenen Gitarrenmusik Hans Werner Henzes (www.nmz.de; behind a paywall)
published in neue musikzeitung 7·8/2016

Summary of the texts from concertino and the EGTA-Journal (PDF)