Portrait of Hans Werner Henze

Text: Albrecht Selge, March 2026

»Where is Henze?« This question might be asked today, perhaps in reference to a phrase once common throughout (West) Germany: »Where is Behle?« These were the words that the sports commentator Moravetz famously kept shouting into the microphone during a television broadcast of the 1980 Winter Olympics, in a futile search for a German cross-country skier who had been in the lead but was then forgotten about by the cameraman. This went down in cultural history and, as late as 1998, the German singer Marius Müller-Westernhagen recorded a song entitled »Where is Behle?« Perhaps in 2026, a figure at the forefront of contemporary music should compose a similar work, with perplexed questions loosely echoing Moravetz’s: »What about Henze? Where is Henze? We know nothing; we do not see [or hear] him. Henze is gone.«

One key difference from the leading »progressive« composers of his generation lies in the fact that, for Henze, opera remained the defining genre throughout his life. As a creator, Pierre Boulez could no longer relate to this genre (the »most elegant solution,« he once joked, would be to blow up the opera houses, though he later conducted in them). Karlheinz Stockhausen distanced himself through the monomaniacal expansion of his vast »Licht« cycle, a mystically detached life project. Such detachment would not have been for Henze. He disliked »dwelling in an ivory tower,« he said three years before his death in an interview with the newspaper »Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung«; he had »always wanted to be among the people.« This impulse underpins both Henze’s political radicalism (including the missteps) and his determination to create musical theatre that is at once deeply rooted in tradition and immediately accessible to audiences.

And today? Has Henze, like Behle – who once led the Olympic field – slipped into the depths of the broader music-historical rankings? To answer that, one would have to hear him again. Yet in Germany, the operatic paradise where a third of all performances worldwide take place, there is not a single premiere of any of his roughly two dozen stage works in his anniversary year 2026! One minor work, at least – Henze’s »Englische Katze« – was staged in November 2025 at the Bavarian State Opera’s studio, which one might accept with some reservation. Otherwise, for a staged production, one would have to travel as far as Rome, where the vaudeville »La piccola Cubana«, based on texts by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, is being performed. Or to the Salzburg Festival, where at least a concert version of »The Prince of Homburg« can be heard.

Hochklassige Künstler:innen und Orchester widmen sich in mehreren Konzerten der Musik des Komponisten. Henzes späte Sinfonien und seine klangreiche Kammermusik stehen dabei im Fokus.

Or one might stick with concert music altogether. After all, there are programmatic highlights in Cologne, Berlin and not least in Hamburg – the city where the 1968 premiere of Henze’s oratorio »The Raft of the Medusa« so spectacularly foundered. Not because coolly calculating Hanseatic blood had been stirred into a furious boil by such revolutionary, cannibalistic source material (»the sung reading of the logbook of a raft adrift on the open sea, laden with many dying people,« as Henze wrote, »the dying are people of the Third World, victims of the heartlessness of egoists from the world of the rich and powerful«); but rather because, at that time, to quote Monty Python, the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea clashed. Henze, who presented himself as a revolutionary, was accused head of the event of being a musical counter-revolutionary; students occupied the podium in protest against bourgeois concert rituals; the enraged programme director of Norddeutscher Rundfunk tore up a poster of Che Guevara – to whom Henze had, after all, dedicated the work (Che Guevara, not the programme director); the choir refused to sing behind the red student banner; until finally the composer himself showed solidarity with the demonstrators, joining in the rhythmically simplistic ’68 chant: »Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!«, before the Roman occupying forces – in the form of the Hamburg police – brought the Popular Front’s uprising to an end.

Yet the unlikely musical drive of the oratorio »The Raft of the Medusa« – drowned out at the time beneath waves of revolutionary folklore that now seem almost surreal – can also be felt in much of Henze’s later concert music. In the Ninth Symphony, for example, written in 1997 when he was in his early seventies and acutely aware of both history and his own place within it, and conceived for a large choir. Unlike Beethoven, the choir does not appear only in the final movement, nor are there solo voices; yet, as in Beethoven, the great, impassioned hymn to humanity is imbued with a deeply personal current of suffering underlying the grand words and powerful sounds. Henze explained his dedication »to the heroes and martyrs of German anti-fascism« through experiences that shaped his youth under the Nazi dictatorship and during the war: »We identify with these compatriots of ours from back then; we erect a new monument to them, the forgotten heroes of the resistance. And I recall the fears and pains of my childhood and youth.«

Vladimir Jurowski and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, accompanied by the choir, bring this landmark work to the Elbphilharmonie

Hardly any other composer who, even in the broadest sense, counted himself among the musical avant-garde of the 1950s would have turned to the symphony. And yet, although Henze here deliberately draws not only on Beethoven but also – historically speaking – on Hindemith, Stravinsky and even Mahler, he is not an outsider, but very much part of that avant-garde. As a young man, he had attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music since 1947 – where »New« was written with a capital »N« – and, eager to learn, even followed the twelve-tone lecturer René Leibowitz to Paris. But for Henze, who absorbed everything, the trends of the present ultimately became just another layer of tradition. »I believe that the path from Wagner’s »Tristan« to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from exhausted,« Henze said in 1984. »I do not wish to forgo what the centuries have handed down to us.«

So it is no contradiction that in the Ninth, composed half a century after his studies with Leibowitz, the number twelve plays an important structural role (one need not consciously perceive it), as does the number seven, referring to Anna Seghers’ anti-fascist novel »The Seventh Cross«. At the same time, following the fierce intensity of the first movement, the second unfolds into a broad choral landscape filled with sorrow, whose soaring beauty recalls Stravinsky’s »Psalm Symphony«. And »The Salvation«, as the seventh and final movement is titled, does not emerge through phonetic excess, but through quietness, reflection, gratitude – in short, remembrance. There is a swelling at the end, lasting only a few seconds, yet it remains a delicate fortissimo: this salvation does not proclaim itself loudly.

Even in Henze’s purely instrumental music, one can at times experience grand musical theatre within the concert hall. The power of his opera »The Bassarids« (which was performed just a few years ago at the Komische Oper Berlin) is similarly present in the incredibly energetic Seventh Symphony, composed in the early 1980s. Given its raw, at times darkly driven character, it may seem somewhat disconcerting to read critics of the time describing the Seventh as a »dithyramb to life« or even a »dance of joy«. On the other hand, Henze’s reference to Friedrich Hölderlin’s sombre night song »Hälfte des Lebens« – which early editors regarded as the work of a madman – itself points to an unwaveringly confident core personality. Henze did in fact inscribe a verse from this poem – though not sung – into the score of his Seventh, at the opening of the fourth movement; and what could be more optimistic than to confront the »Half of Life« at nearly sixty years of age – no matter how »speechless and cold« Hölderlin’s vision of the second half may be? And one might well ask today: where is Henze’s confidence?

All of Henze’s music is theatre music, at times even the music of his own theatre of the soul: this is one way of restating his pointed assertions that music is, first and foremost, a »performing art« for him, and second, that it originates in the theatre. Henze’s relationship to art was marked by an intensity that went beyond that of many of his contemporaries, not only in relation to tradition, but also to other disciplines. Above all, his affinity for literature. This applies not only to classical poetry, such as that of Hölderlin, whom Henze had already set to music in his work »Chamber Music 1958«. Henze also remained closely engaged with the literature of his own time. And so it seems almost inevitable that in 2001 a novel should be published describing an encounter with a composer in whom Henze’s traits are clearly recognisable, even if the character is named »Bergmann«. The author, Hans-Ulrich Treichel, had written not only the texts based on Seghers for Henze’s Ninth Symphony, but also two opera libretti.

In contrast to the laborious emergence of a musical idea, akin to rowing, Henze maintained a highly structured working method, which, as Treichel remarked in an interview, »is reminiscent of Thomas Mann in its synthesis of genius and almost bureaucratic discipline.« Or, as the Hamburg musicologist Peter Petersen, one of the leading experts on Henze, summarised in his 2022 Henze Handbook: »With ironic reference to Mozart, Henze would occasionally say that he – following Mozart’s example – went ›to work‹ from early morning until noon sharp; that is, he composed regardless of his personal mood and without waiting for any ›divine‹ inspiration.« A disciplined routine that also made Henze one of the most prolific composers of the twentieth century; or, as Treichel’s protagonist observes on seeing Bergmann’s scores alongside those of Bach, Mozart and Wagner: »In terms of sheer volume, Georg could see at a glance that Bergmann already held his own among his great colleagues.«

Matthias Pintscher conducts the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. Also on the programme: Wagner and Szymanowski.

When discussing Henze and literature, however, the name that comes to mind first is not Thomas Mann, nor Hölderlin, nor even Treichel, but without doubt Ingeborg Bachmann. Their correspondence, published in 2004 while Henze was still alive and spanning two decades from 1952 to 1972 – only months before Bachmann’s tragic death in Rome – stands as a moving testament to a profound emotional bond. This platonic love between the gay composer and the deeply vulnerable poet may well have been closer than any sexual relationship could ever have been. Their relationship was far more than one of the most important artistic collaborations of the century, including Bachmann’s libretti for Henze’s operas »Der junge Lord«, »Der Prinz von Homburg« and »Der Idiot« (the latter based on Kleist and Dostoevsky).

The roots of this inner closeness surely also lie in the traumatic backgrounds of these two individuals, born in 1926 just one week apart – she in Klagenfurt, he in Gütersloh. Both grew up as children of terribly National Socialist parents and, with their childlike sensitivity, experienced dictatorship, war and paternal guilt as wounds that would never fully heal, shaping them into lifelong committed anti-fascists; a commonality that endured, even as Henze’s naïve enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution alienated Bachmann. Incidentally, this »Cuban error« likely also stems from Henze’s longing for the south and for sunlight – a longing Bachmann shared and which drew both of them permanently to Italy. For Henze, practical considerations also played a role: as a homosexual in 1950s Italy, he could feel more secure in his civil existence than in Adenauer’s Germany, which was undergoing a period of political restoration. Their alienation from their origins went so far that they frequently corresponded in Italian – and occasionally in other languages – albeit sometimes rather clumsily.

Ultimately, it was perhaps a shared longing for light, love and warmth that Henze and Bachmann shared – a longing that, despite their openness to modern artistic movements, never severed their deep connection to musical and literary traditions; on the contrary. A work such as Henze’s »Tristan – Préludes for Piano, Tapes and Orchestra«, composed in 1973 – the very year in which Bachmann, addicted to pills, died – engages directly with this longing for beauty, while also confronting its temptations and dangers. This piano concerto, too, is a form of »imaginary theatre«, which inspired John Neumeier, among others, to create a ballet in Hamburg. The fact that Henze also composed a »scenic cantata« titled »Strike at Mannesmann« shortly after »Tristan« further demonstrates the astonishing versatility of this composer. The film score for Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s socially engaged adaptation of Böll’s »The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum« also dates from this period. At its core, this striking diversity likely stems from Henze’s aforementioned desire to »always be close to people« – and not confined to the ivory tower of his own longing and pain.

Nevertheless, there remains a profound difference in the artistic outlook of these two, in some ways solitary, figures Henze and Bachmann. While for Ingeborg Bachmann the sublimation of art ultimately leads (especially in her later, increasingly dark »Todesarten« project) towards self-erasure in her own work, towards vanishing into the wall like the narrator in her novel »Malina«, which Henze described enthusiastically in 1971 as Mahler’s Eleventh Symphony, for Henze there persists something like an unwavering confidence that the living human being can outlive death within the work. And just as one might best prepare to listen to Henze’s music by reading Bachmann’s poetry, one may also open oneself inwardly to encounter in his music that same confidence – that same affirmation of life.