Stage struck

Musical Times, Summer 1999 by Burrell, Diana

DIANA BURRELL finds Buxtehude, barbed wire and blondes in Hans Werner Henze's irresistible memoirs

Bohemian fifths Hans Werner Henze Translated by Stewart Spencer

Faber St Faber (London, 1998); ix, 512pp; L25. ISBN 0 571 17815 4.

SO THAT'S what twelve-note music sounds like... So beautiful and so tender! Such ravishing sounds!...' This was how the seventeen-year old Hans Werner Henze described the German premiere of Frank Martin's oratorio Le vin herbe in 1943 - an event of greater significance than it might seem, as at the time, such music was considered 'degenerate' and generally forbidden by the Nazi dictators. But to Henze, then a student at the Braunschweig State School of Music, it sowed the seeds of his own quest for a compositional technique that would produce music of beauty, style and dignity

Henze's autobiography, Bohemian fifths (the term used to describe the 'forbidden' intervals played by Bohemian horn players), is a large book, jampacked with detail. In many ways, Henze's literary style mirrors that of his music - urbane and colourful, with references to a plethora of peoples, places and musics. He was born in 1926 in Gutersloh, Westphalia, to a primary school teacher and his young wife. A simple yet secure childhood became marred only later as Hitler rose to power and the father, Franz Henze, became a fully paid-up member of the Nazi party, insisting that the teenage Hans and his brothers join the Hitler Youth, with all its accompanying paraphernalia - the black uniforms, the saluting in front of pictures of the Fuhrer, and so on.

In some ways, Henze's description of his youth and the war constitute the most interesting section of the book, not least because of its being a first-hand account of the lives of innocent Germans under Fascism. There are thought-provoking descriptions - such as the young bridegroom Jurgen, 'a sexy, blond SS man with the most perfect profile', who asked for a transfer because he couldn't cope with the sight of his concentration camp prisoners running out of their huts at night and clutching the electrified barbed-wire fence in order to end their misery. Or the day after Reichskristallnacht. German children went to school as usual, and Henze relates how the pale sky was lit up by fires and blackened by smoke; yet no one mentioned it - not even the teacher, nor did anyone ask after the dark-haired school mate who never returned to school after that day As Henze puts it, with the benefit of hindsight and maturity, ` it was as 'tho' the conscience of the German nation had simply been switched off and disconnected.' Sometime later, after the news had broken of Hitler's suicide (to the strains of Siegfried's Funeral March on the radio, on a warm day full of lilac blossom and the singing of larks), Henze, like other German soldiers, had to spend a few months as prisoner-of-war. He filled up the time until his release composing on manuscript paper which he drew himself, and playing the organ in various village churches `on instruments through which the North Sea wind howled.'

In spite of the war, and in spite of his evergrowing awareness of a sunnier, more humane world outside Northern Europe, Henze writes with a certain amount of affection for the people and places of his early life and for the music he heard in the churches - Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Bach; and although he describes Lutheran Christianity as a theology in which `everything is forbidden, from parallel fifths to polygamy', time and time again in his book he refers to its music, and also to the counterpoint in his own music, to classical beauty and to polyphony, to German musical form. He describes his Sixth Symphony as 'a Lutheran, Protestant symphony with a pagan body', and all of this reinforces his cultural roots.

In fact, his leaving Germany in 1953 seems to have been prompted less by leaving behind the past and more by wanting to escape from the German avant-garde. Henze already had several musical successes under his belt, yet he was insecure because of what he perceived to be a hostile modernist 'mafia' running German music during the 1950s. The venom thrown at three establishment musicians and their `sharptongued menopausal spouses' contrasts greatly with the tone of gentle humour in the rest of the book. His leaving is a joy to read about. Henze describes selling his possessions, getting into his car and simply driving out of Germany until he arrives in Italy. His destination? Forio d'Ischia and a little Moorish farmhouse with a small vineyard, an old eel living at the bottom of a well, and an ancient lemon-tree. `Are the Germans Christian?', asked his new landlady on his arrival.

Review-article

As is to be expected, much of the book is taken up with Henze's description of creating his large oeuvre. He is both lucid and interesting on how he puts the music together and honest in his evaluation of it. Of the colourful 'Cuban' Sixth Symphony he writes:

The finale was meant to sound triumphant, affirmative and life-enhancing, which is why I made things so hard for myself when writing it [...] There is a fugal texture divided between the two orchestras, a kind of double fugue that is difficult to bring out in performance, since I was so determined to be strict with myself, to the point at which the rules gained the upper hand and took away the initiative from me as the composer. In other words, at the very moment at which the music could have breathed and sung of freedom and joy, there was for me, only an empirical and theoretical notion of concepts and new forms of expression, new metaphors for this new, socialist kind of joy and freedom...