...Hans Werner Henze, Symphony No. 7

A Symphony Called "Symphony"

Henze's 7th Symphony, composed and premiered in the early 80s, is his first contribution to the genre which he entitled "Symphonie" and not "Sinfonia" or "Sinfonie." It is a work commissioned by the Berliner Symphoniker, and thus a work with a political statement per se. Henze's struggle with his German heritage, culminating in his move to Italy, finds its solution in this work and, at least in the mind of the composer, an answer to the question: How to write Symphonies after Auschwitz?

According to the sketches to this symphony which are kept at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, and the comments of Henze on the music, one of its main topics is the romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). Hölderlin, who is nowadays known as one of the most accomplished poets of his time, was (more or less) incarcerated in the clinic of Doctor Autenrieth. Treated for assumed madness, he was tortured (compared by today's medical standards) and not being able to care for himself for the rest of his life.

Friedrich Hölderlin,
painted by Franz Karl Hiemer (1792)
Source: zeno.org

Henze parallelizes Hölderlin's agony with the victims of the atrocities committed in the Third Reich and is hence establishing a link to the 20th century. However, the efficiency of this link has yet to be proven.

The 7th Symphony is a work with an immense orchestration. It features such rarely used instruments like a Heckelphone (kind of a tenor oboe) and is demanding for every single player as well as for the conductor. Following the score while listening to the music might be a futile attempt at first because of Henze's extreme dense but almost always lucid handling of the orchestra.

Fighting through the Score

I managed to lay hands on three scores for my seven students. One was a conductor's score, so three students could follow the music, the others had to share a pocket score (Edition Schott - Music of our time) by two. I never talked about a piece that big - the symphony has a duration of more than 30 minutes - or that complex, so I decided to focus on the first and third movement. Unlike other symphonies (like the 9th), Henze returned to the old four-movement form, which is another hint of his occupation with the German symphonic tradition.

My strategy was to let the students listen to the first movement while pursuing the form, followed by a discussion on the practicability of terms like exposition, development and so on for Henze's music. I was the only one without a score, and it was baffling to experience that the different parts of the sonata form of the first movement were actually distinguishable, even in an atonal context. Before that I was always reading the score along which must have distracted me from the music.

My students weren't that impressed by the music and viewed the organisation of the parts rather arbitrary. Terms like first and second theme seemed to be useless since this theoretical  framework had no impression on the actual sound. I derived an outline of analyses by Albrecht Dümling and Benedikt Vennefrohne, who wrote his dissertation on Henze's Symphonies, but it seems to be less convincing on paper than in the ear. I presented charts provided by Vennefrohne, which obviously did not match the experiences my students had. I have to confirm them: The ties between the parts are loose and faint, difficult to argue and not necessarily convincing. Experiencing the parts that clearly during the lecture certainly was justified by my repeated listening to the Symphony before, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Scherzo of Torture

From the dissertation by Vennefrohne, who evaluated the sketches of Henze as well as a master thesis and an article by Peter K. Freyberg, we learn that the third movement is the real center of the symphony. In this movement, considered a Scherzo, Henze assigns different motives to means of torture, and of course, to Hölderlin himself. The problem is that none of this assignments accurately drafted by Henze and faithfully analyzed by Vennefrohne and Freyberg is compelling at all. The whole conception of the torture instruments "the swing" (a torture practice used in Auschwitz) and "the wheel" (a torture practice used in ancient Greek), resembled by certain motives stands and falls with the knowledge that Vennefrohne derives from the sketches. But even if the liner notes or program notes inform the audience about this circumstances, nobody is obliged to accept this interpretation. Of course, Henze had the notion that music conveys a distinctive message, but we know that this attempt is as futile as ridiculous and an insult of the audience.

Other composers had this crazy idea, too. Think about Karlheinz Stockhausen and his allegedly decent from planet Sirius. But nevertheless, the dominating behavior of Henze seems more serious to me, since it affects directly the reception of the music. That might be the reason why he is so rarely discussed in the University. Henze wants to reign, he tries to hem the listener to his own conception. This is a notion that cannot be accept in the 21st century.

One last example: The last movement is a scoring of Hölderlin's poem "Hälfte des Lebens", but without an actual singer. How is one supposed to recognize this relation? I will not argue that this is not a valid compositional approach, I would use it myself as a composer, and others did it, too. But it is certainly not a valid means of telling the audience, they have to hear Hölderlin's poem out of the music, if they please. In my opinion, this symphony is fantastically written orchestral piece, but I can't accept Henze's urge to control my reception which also smothers a valid analysis. I see it as my obligation as a teacher, to point this out to my students.

Therefore, I am sure, Henze's music will only take its place it deserves in music history when Henze and his scholars will finally set it free.

References:

Vennefrohne, Benedikt: Die Sinfonien Hans Werner Henzes, Hildesheim, Zürich: Verlag Georg Olms 2005.

Freyberg, Peter K.: "Henzes Siebte - Eine Hölderlin-Symphonie", in: Hans Werner Henze (= Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Bd. 20), hrsg. von Peter Petersen, Frankfurt a. Main: Peter Lang 2003, S. 91 - 111.

Dümling, Albrecht: "Ein reflektierter Freudentanz. Versuch einer Interpretation des 1. Satzes von Hans Werner Henzes 7. Symphonie", in: Musik, Deutung, Bedeutung. Festschrift für Harry Goldschmidt, hrsg. von Hartmut Lück und Hans-Werner Heister, Dortmund: Edition V im Pläne-Verlag 1986, S. 107 - 111.

Further reading on the internet
Tom Service: "A guide to Hans Werner Henze's Music"

...the Symphonies of the 20th Century

A venture

I decided to make the symphonies of the 20th century the topic of my analysis class I am going to teach this semester. This is an incredible huge field but I am convinced that it must be possible to handle a topic in a given time frame regardless of its dimensions.

My students are composers, musicologists, and conductors, and were, at least till now, quite eager about my choice. The 20th century offers a vast scope of symphonies, from Shostakovich to Ives, from Maxwell Davies to Pärt, from Henze to Glass. I am really looking forward to teach this class and learn at lot about 20th century music. 

The plan is to listen to symphonies from Germany and Austria, then Russia, Ex-USSR, and Poland, then France and Switzerland, and at least the UK and USA. Unfortunately there will be no time to talk about the vast history of symphonies of the Scandinavian countries.

I post a Google Drive spreadsheet on this blog, so you may keep yourself informed about what symphonies I have already listened to. I call it the "20th century symphony project" (20SP). Sounds pretty cool, huh?

Overview

The first lecture was last Thursday. I spoke about the symphonies form german-speaking countries. At first we were listening to the music by Anton Webern, Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann as examples of pre-World War II symphonies. Everybody was struck by the huge difference between the music of Webern and his contemporaries. Even now Webern sounds fresh and radical, compared to Hindemith, whose music sounds old school and even a bit cheesy.

Anton (von) Webern. Quelle: wikimedia

It is always surprising for me to read that Hindemith was the hero of contemporary music in Darmstadt in post-World War II Germany, at least till 1949. After that the decline of his fame was as fast as the stars of Stockhausen and Boulez rose, but none of them wrote any symphonies.

There are a couple of noteworthy symphonies after 1945. Wolfgang Fortner and Bernd Alois Zimmermann wrote one each, and there is the "Deutsche Sinfonie" by Hanns Eisler. The "Deutsche Sinfonie" might be the best example of an antiquated music, which belongs to a Museum of Music, together maybe with the works by GDR-composer Ernst Hermann Meyer. But all the aforementioned symphonies disappeared from the repertoire.

Hartmann and Henze

Undoubtedly, Karl Amadeus Hartmann and his friend and fellow Hans Werner Henze rank among the most important and prolific composers of symphonies in the german speaking countries. Although Hartmann almost fell into oblivion, his 1. Symphony "Versuch eines Requiems" on a poem by Walt Whitman, his Violin Concerto, and his composition "Miserere" can still be found in concert programs. 

Hans Werner Henze was also a companion of Stockhausen and Boulez, but after asthetic differences they went their own ways. Henze did not chose serial composition, what made him "unnütz" ("useless") in the eyes and ears of Boulez. Detested by not a few of his peers, he nevertheless advanced to be one of the most important German composers. His music is full of overtly shown expression, a trait to which he committed himself already in the 1940's. 

 

Hans Werner Henze. Quelle: wikimedia/Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F008277-0008 / Unterberg, Rolf / CC-BY-SA

His ten symphonies can be divided into five early works, the more mature 6th symphony, and four late masterworks. All of them, from the first to the last, reveal his masterful instrumentation, but not before his 6th symphony he found a individual style. The 7th symphony, his engagement with Beethoven, will be the focus of my next lecture.

...John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble

The "John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble"

After I returned from the concert of the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble in the Wiener Konzerthaus I listened to a couple of songs with his Claudia Quintet. I was instantly struck by the huge difference of this music compared to that I had just listened to at the Konzerthaus. Apparently, John Hollenbeck, drummer of his band, has a variety of styles at his disposal.

At their Konzerthaus performance the band played six pieces, which were similar to the title song of their album "Eternal Interlude" quite long. The most prominent trait of the music presented that evening was its continuous smoothness: this music had almost no rough edges. After listening to his other compositions on CD this characteristic became even more prominent.

Neither Fish nor Fowl

The music of the Konzerthaus performance lacked spontaneity to be jazz, lacked ambition to be classical avantgarde music, and was way too long to be recognized as pop music. Nevertheless, it kept my attention for the whole concert, and I wondered why. It is certainly Hollenbeck's strength to maintain a certain atmosphere over a long period of time, which is a task not easily accomplished by any composer. The music, especially the aforementioned "Eternal Interlude", is in itself not particularly interesting but can serve as an outstanding model for a medium scale composition. It does not break apart into fragments, it rather maintains tension over the whole distance, though on a low level. 

Jazz-aficionados and Hollenbeck disciples might be disappointed by my conclusion as well as by the evening itself. More than a few cleared the hall (which was not sold out) between the last piece and the encore. The mere working off of compositional paradigms apparently was not enough for them.

No need for disappointment

"Der Standard", one of Austria's most important newspapers, cited Hollenbeck with the words, that "jazz only is a part of a whole." That is certainly true and a valid starting point for compositional ambitions. But Hollenbeck still owes me a musical explanation what he considers to be "whole".


In an article on WQXR's website Hollenbeck presents his mixtapes, containing music by the finest composers of the 20th century, ranging from Georg Friedrich Haas, György Ligeti, Steve Reich to Meredith Monk and others. Strange enough, almost nothing of this influences were perceptible in the Konzerthaus concert.


I am really looking forward to listen to Hollenbeck's other recordings with his "Claudia Quartet." The few pieces I've already heard are completely different to yesterday's concert. I guess these are the ones where he carries through everything he is famous for.

...Maurizio Kagel, "Mare nostrum"

I was always a big fan of the music by Maurizio Kagel. I certainly do not know all of his works, but the ones I have listened to so far, have convinced me that Kagel is a composer of the highest rank. Most important for me is his humor which distinguishes him from his peers.

Currently the Wiener Kammeroper is staging a new production of Kagel's chamber opera "Mare nostrum", which translates to "our sea." The opera tells us the story about the colonization of Amazonia, but with swapped roles. The intruders are not men from Europe but natives from the conquered countries, which are going to teach the Europeans their way of civilization.

Kagel limits himself to a very sparse orchestration. He merely uses oboe, flute, cello, and guitar, which are placed on the stage, and percussion and harp, which are offstage. Due to the limitations of the orchestration, the sound is often faint, monophonic and pointillstic, but also strange and exotic. There are also only two actors, one native and one European, which are changing between singing and speaking.

Ben Connor (Amazonian) & Rupert Enticknap (European)
Copyright Armin Bardel

"Mare nostrum" was written in 1975, and it seems to me heavily bound to this time. It breathes the air of post-colonialism and indulges deeply in the guilt of Europeans and what they considered to be "civilizing". Without any doubt, there is an irreparable guilt on part of the Europeans, but would it make an ethical difference if the roles were changed? In my opinion, civilizing other cultures is a crime, notwithstanding who is civilizing by whom. This might be the major flaw of Kagel's work, and he is not the only one falling into this trap.

Hans Werner Henze similarly fall for this idea in "Floß der Medusa", which is also dealing partly with civilizing other cultures, but with a different outcome.
But is an opera really the best way to deal with this part of colonization? Kagel himself, who was Argentine, but spent a lot of time in Europe, might have had an interest in setting the ordeals of his ancestors to music. But there is always the question if the attempt of making these ordeals fitting onto the stage of the opera is rather diminishing them than dignifying.

After the opera, I could not help but notice people complaining about the music. However, I do not share their complaints. Of course, there were no melodies you could sing on your way back home, there were no harmonies you can easily find on the piano. But the music nevertheless had a feeling of wholeness, which I really admire. Kagel seems not to be interested in beautiful sounds. He often employs only one instruments, sometimes only the surface of an object on the stage. The music is tied strongly to the acting, and this inseparability makes it interesting for me.

Ben Connor (Amazonian), Rupert Enticknap (European) &
Members of the Wiener KammerOrchesters. Copyright Armin Bardel

The performance of counter tenor Rupert Enticknap (the European), Ben Connor (the Amazonian) and the instrumentalists was superb. Sometimes I wished they had more opportunity to show their immense and various talents. Especially Connor's delivery of the distorted and meaning-enriched text was impressing. The Wiener Kammeroper is certainly the place for a work like this. But if a work like this is still worth to be performed is another question. The moral implications and the highly visible political ambition is something that does not transport itself easily into our time.

...WANDA

Austro pop taken to a new level

On February 11th the Austrian band "Wanda" gave their first official concert under their new label "Problembär Records" at rhiz, a small but nevertheless prestigious venue for new pop music.

I'd never heard of "Wanda" before, which is a shame, and if not after this concert than after their performance as support for "Der Nino aus Wien" on May 13th at WUK everybody interested in fresh Austrian pop music should (and will) know about them.

From the first chord of the first song "Tu' mir weh, Luzia" ("Hurt me, Luzia") it was clear that the evening would be a success. This is easy to say, since most of the audience was already familiar with the music - thus fans - but even fans might be disappointed if the performance does not match their expectations. But the presence of lead singer (and name donor) Marco Michael Wanda was inescapable as well as the joy the band apparently had throughout the concert, visible even for Wanda first timers like me.

From left to right: Lukas Hasitschka, Christian Hummer,
Ray Weber, Marco Michael Wanda, Manuel Poppe
Photo Credit: Benjamin Meyer-Plutowski

Marco Michael Wanda, who writes most of the songs and lyrics, is already a master of ear-catching melodies. He proves that in almost every song (like "Bologna"), but especially in those which were accompanied by the audience. They gave two frenetically acclaimed encores ("1 2 3 4 - Es ist schön bei dir zu sein" "1 2 3 4 - It is good to be with you" and "Schick mir die Post schon ins Spital" "Send me the mail to the hospital"), the latter almost completely sung by the audience.

The rhiz is admittedly only a small venue, there were a approximately hundred guests or so. But nevertheless, to muster such a dedicated fan base is not a small achievement for a band that young.

Learning from the best

All songs were skillfully produced by Paul Gallister, who, according to their Facebook page, met Wanda and his companions at a cab drive, where they arranged their future collaboration. This is a fortune for us, since Paul Gallister himself possesses plenty of experience as lead singer on the stage. He is not only a scholar of classical rock music like "The Beatles" but also a professional educated composer. Therefor the collaboration of "Wanda" together with Paul Gallister is a perfect match.

It is always difficult to write about the actual sound of the music. There are a couple of videos on Youtube, which deliver a better impression than words can do. About the song "Easy Baby" a commentator wrote that this music reminds him of "Falco", which is an impression I share. There is definitively something 80-ish to this music. The music of Marius Müller-Westernhagen came to my mind, but the lyrics of "Wanda" are much better, either funny or intelligent (often both), than those sometimes asinine or even insulting ("Dicke" "Fat guys") by Westernhagen. Maybe the resemblance is merely physical, since Wanda, as well as Westernhagen, knows how to appear on the stage.

It is about time for "Wanda" to play at greater venues and hopefully on the radio. Paul Gallister told me, that they played half of there oeuvre on this evening. So maybe the best is yet to come.

"Wanda" is Christian Hummer, keyboard; Manuel Poppe, git; Ray Weber, bass; Lukas Hasitschka, dr; Marco Michael Wanda, voc.

...Mohammed Fairouz, Symphony No. 4 "In The Shadow Of No Towers"

Yet Another Commemoration Piece?

To be honest, I hadn't very high hopes when I read the first time about Mohammed Fairouz' Symphony No. 4 "In The Shadow Of No Towers" in the review of Grego Applegate Edwards in his Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review and also in The Classical Reviewer. That was before I heard a single note of Fairouz' music, and even after a couple of minutes into the first movement I wasn't fully convinced if this Symphony wasn't yet another attempt to catch the latest wave of 9/11 commemoration - since this is a piece which is linked to this very disaster by virtue of its title.

My concerns with this piece where twofold: First, as a composer educated in Europe, I have a certain mistrust against tonal streams in otherwise atonal music, or rather against the intermingling of both. This might be the outcome of a Euro-centric attitude nurtured by overambitious Adorno-reading, that music is only modern if it uses the most advanced material available, which "In The Shadow Of No Towers" does apparently not.

My second concern was, since Fairouz is not the first composer writing a 9/11 commemoration piece, that he also gets trapped in a pitfall John Adams and Steve Reich couldn't avoid. Adams in his "On The Transmigration Of Souls" as well as Reich in "WTC 9/11" both availed themselves with the human voice to transport their message. In both cases this seems to me like the hapless attempt to ensure the "commemoration aptitude" of their music, but it is not more than their average output combined with 9/11-related citations.

This was my inital position for Fairouz' Symphony No. 4.

Something is terribly wrong

Fairouz scored his work for winds, supported by percussions. The movements are (the links point to his Soundcloud channel):

1. The New Normal
2. Notes Of A Heartbroken Narcissist
3. One Nation Under Two Flags
4. Anniversaries

The liner notes as well as the blog mentioned above provide ample information on the titles, and I will not repeat them here. Also the connection to the works of Art Spiegelman, from whom Fairouz borrowed the title, is discussed there at length. Nevertheless, and that be again due to my euro-centric point of view, in my opinion the music must be accessible in one way or another without further explanations. Actually, I don't now the vignettes by Spiegelman very well, and the titles of the movements mean nothing to me, but I expect the music to work for me anyway. And it does.

From the very beginning, there is a disturbing atmosphere in the music, which is refreshingly different to the usual mourning sound à la Adams. Fairouz intention is not to remember the victims of 9/11 but rather to trace the wounds and bruises in the American heart. In fact, it is questionable whether this is a commemoration piece after all. Fairouz often uses grand tonal sounds, for example at the end of the Symphony, but also on various occasions within the piece, but something is always wrong, or rather on the verge of something. Especially the end repeats a certain motive so often that it shifts to its own parody (maybe a reference to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4). This passage is accompanied by the clicking of two claves, which resembles a ticking clock.




At this point, the question for me was no longer if I can accept tonality, which Fairouz uses plenty of times, but rather for which purpose he employs it. Fairouz is without doubt beyond the quite ideological distinction between tonality or atonality. His music is the result of a multi-stylistic world of music, since he has mastered the comparatively difficult task of combining them. Maybe Fairouz points in the direction music is heading to in the 21st century.
Other composers, like the aforementioned John Adams, miss this point. Adams is merely composing the soundtrack for a commemoration celebration. Fairouz is achieving much more: His music does not illustrate by means of words, it is having a dialogue with its subject through its very own musical symbols.


Mohammed Fairouz' 4th Symphony "In The Shadow Of No Towers" was issued on NAXOS together with Philip Glas' "Concert Fantasy for two Timpani and Orchestra."

Recently Read

Here are a couple of links I bookmarked during the last weeks. I recommended some of them already via Facebook, Twitter and so on. Check out the overview.

Death has always be an important part of opera. In their article "Four centuries of suicide in opera" for the "Medical Journal of Australia", Saxby A. Pridmore and his co-authors are researching this topic from a medical point of view. In the already in 2013 published results they came to the conclusion, that

 "over several centuries in opera, suicide has been frequently represented as an option when characters have been faced with a distressing event or situation. Historical fluctuations in the frequency of suicidal behaviour in opera may be explained by changes in attitudes towards suicide and its conceptualisation."

Four Centuries Of Suicide In Opera


During the preparation of my upcoming interview with Canadian composer Caitlin Smith, who is working on an opera about the war in Afghanistan,  I found an article (January 13th) on an opera about the US military operation in Somalia. Marsha Lederman, who writes for the The Globe and Mail tells us the story about photographer Paul Watson, who is haunted by the memory of a photo he shot in Somalia of an mutilated US soldier.
The collaboration with US writer Dan O'Brien was supposed to alleviate his fears and yielded an opera, a play, and a book on the Somalia topic. Together with composer Jonathan Berger they wrote the opera "Visitations", comprising the chamber operas "Theotokia" and "The War Reporter", based on Watsons experiences in Somalia and the writings by O'Brien.

Striking Somali war photo inspires new works in curious creative partnership


Astrid Baumgardner wrote on Januar 30th for I CARE IF YOU LISTEN a not necessarily music related but non the less important article for music entrepreneurs. She proposes her SMART-goals, with is short for five steps of achieving a personal goal.

SMART Goals for SMART Music Entrepreneurs



On January 31st Grant Damron wrote for Bachtrack about technologies that change the way the creative process works.

Ten technologies that have reshaped how composers create

Some Tweets

Review: @LondonSymphony; Maxim Vengerov, premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Symphony No.10 pic.twitter.com/4hkMg8b2IL http://t.co/tOkvLiRid7
— The Classical Source (@ClassicalSource) 4. Februar 2014

Classical Super Bowl snacks for Renée Fleming (@reneesmusings). http://t.co/fK0y3Zukq6 pic.twitter.com/2xeo2wpYYK
— Michael Morreale (@18mrm) 31. Januar 2014