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29 January 2010, TLS
The Iure of myth in the music of Hans Werner Henze
We're not out of the woods, yet

The myths of ancient Greece still command our artistic attention. Part of the attraction comes from their archetypal Status; they offer us proximity to the sacred sphere, yet are free of the kitsch that clings to modern religious art. h That at least seems to be the view of the eighty-three-year-old composer Hans Werner Henze, who shares his long-standing interest in Greek mytii with everyone eise who has tried composing and writing opera. The genre was, after all, born in an attempt to restore what was believed to be the lost power of Athenian tragedy. One senses in Henze, how-ever, a concern less with the idea of a per-fected union of music and poetry than with the fluidity of borders belween the mortal and immortat realms. Greek myths show man being buffeted by the desires of shallow and self-serving deities, but they also show mortals partaking in divinity, with the capa-city to change the world and to recalibrate its relationship with the heavens.
This interest is particularly evident in Henze's latest opera. Phaedra, the tormented and venal wife of Theseus, has bcen the sub-jeet of surprisingly few operatic treatments, although Rameau' s Hippolyte et A ricie (1733; adapted from Racine rather than from Euripides) is one forebear. But Henze's Version, which concerns itself with the story's philosophical implications, is quite unlike anyone eise's. Its stränge events and transfor-mations are about the nature of human ident-ily itself; speeifieally, the spark of spirit that turns flesh into person, matter into mind. The first aet is orthodox enough, though p sparing as far as the action is concerned: Hippolytus spurns his stepmother Phaedra's advances in disgust, and Phaedra then lies to Theseus (supposedly resident in Hades), tcll-ing him that his son has tried to rape her; the result is the son's death and the mother's sui-eide, a kind of inverted Liebestod to which Aphrodite provides a Freudian preface: "Nicht allein die Liebe führt Fleisch und Fleisch zusammen: Habt Geduld mit dem Tod" (Not only love may unite flesh with flesh: have patience with death). In the second act, set on the shores of Lake Nemi (where Henze has lived since 1966), it emer-ges that Hippolytus's body has been rescued by Artemis, stitched back together and placed in a cage. Phaedra, now a shade in the form of a bird, mocks him as she might a pet but still tries to Iure him into underworldly com-munion: Dein Körper und mein Schatten suchen sich" (Your body and my shade seek each other). Finally, after an carthquake, Hip-polytus is resurrected a second time, this time in bliss as the King of the Forest. Henze's inquiry into the mutable nature of identity concentrates on Hippolytus - but Phaedra' s is still the title role; she is the psychological catalyst for her stepson's metamorphoses.
Henze became ill while working on the opera in 2005, falling into a coma that lasted nearly two months. Friends and colleagues assumed he would die, but one day he got up and, almost without delay, went back to work, completing the opera in time for its pre-miere in Berlin in 2007. Was this, in some way, Henze's own field trip to the under-world? Certainly the circumstances of the composer's illness and the various stages of reincamation and apotheosis undergone by the opera's main character appear to be entwined. Musically, though, Henze is his usual mercurial seif, sweeping through various twentieth-century musical idioms as if contemporary musical history were a kind of theatrical clothes rack or effects box. The
opening is a representation of the labyrinth from the point of view of Hippolytus, Phaedra, Aphrodite and Artemis (die huntress's role here given to the countertenor Axel Köhler); together they sing of the mystery that binds them together. A nagging rhythm from the timpani and subtle electro-acoustic Iraek rise gradually to form a snaking mel-ody, charming the rest of the orchestra.
Phaedra, sung by the Swiss mezzo Maria Riccarda Wesseling, who created the role in Berlin, has the stature of a Straussian heroine, her lyricism at once a sign of her psychological power over others and her deep self-loathing. Tt's a vocal style that rather swamps the Stravinskian profile of the other major characters, but creates a truly tan-talizing tension with Hippolytus, sung with measured intensity by John Mark Ainsley (also in Berlin). The orchestral score, distrib-uted among a mere twenty-three players trom

Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern, guided clearly and unfussily by Michael ßoder, is busy, colourful, always precise in its intendcd musical and dramatic effect. Driven by clear but fluid rhythmic struetures, every so often erupting in an Expressionist frenzy, the music has moments of great tendemess, and moments of orchestral ecstasy, such as the Mahlerian whirl that launches Hippolytus on the sylvan chapter of his career. The pre-recorded track, put together by Henze's assist-ant Francesco Antonioni, adds an extra dimension to Ihe transition scenes. The carthquake is no simple metallic rumbling, but a cotnplex, dynamic episode which envelops the listener with seduetive force.
The communicative fluency that has won Henze many friends in opera houses around the world has often been viewed with suspi-cion in other circles. Although one of the first composers in Germany to embrace serialism after the war, Henze soon found himself out of step with the militant Modernism of the Darmstadt summer schools, which he
attended from 1946. Schoenberg, it should be remembered, saw his twelve-tone method not as apurge, but as a means of preserving some kind of authentic continuity witli musical history; likewise, Henze never shared Stockhausen's, or Boulez's, view of "total" serialism as a clean and necessary break with a con-taminated past. Henze s position may have had something to do with his intense dislike of being told what to think (a consequence, perhaps, of his father's Nazi proselytizing); it is at any rate striking that his first successful twelve-tone piece - Apollo et Hyazinthus, for harpsichord and eight instruments - followcd an entirely extra-musical Schema. Dannstadt never forgave him. Even today, there are many who view Henze as a kind of traitor, someone who turned down the chance to effect a deep cullural eleansing in music in favour of more immediate political and alle-gorical gams. But one of the advantages of tening in the twenty-first, as opposed to the twentieth, Century is that fhese old antago-n i sms nave largeiy oispcrsco. L^ur ears are less self-consciously attuned to the exagger-atetl uemanus or nistory ; we are free simply to listen to music that rewards attention.
Themes of revolution and renewal in fact run through most of Henze's works, from The Raft oj the Medusa (1968), dedicated to the memory of Che Guevara, to Phaedra, in which the harmony between mind and body is re-cstablished by violence. His most overtly political piece, Voices (1973), was given a superbly committed Performance by the Guildhali New Music Ensemble (con-dueted by Ryan Wigglesworth) as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's "Total Immersion" day of concerts. It's a ninety-minute set-ting of poems chosen by the composer to reflect the spirit of post-Vietnam dissent, in which populär genres co-exist with a restrained classicism and Heine's soldier shares the stage with Brecht's showgirl, offloading her mundane inner thoughts ("It's nearly 12. I'm going to miss my bus") to a caustic cabaret number. The sarcasm of Voices has little in common with the more general irony of leftist sensibilities today, which may be why the Barbican audience found it somewhat difficult to take scriously.
Henze's recent essays in musical politics are more digestible. Fraternite, commis-sioned by the New York Philharmonie and Kurt Masur as one of their "messages for the millennium", and subtitled "aria per orchestra", is less a song than an attempt to forge the musical conditions in which a song of hope might be sung. From the glittering harp oscillations of the opening, the piece unfolds as a kind of breathless relay of melodic frag-ments which appear to point collectively towards some blissful cadence without ever quite reaching it. A blistering Performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra was one of the highlights of the evening concert superbly condueted by Oliver Knussen. We heard, too, an interesling selection of solo piano works - including the humorous Mozar-tian fantasy Cherubino (1980-81), played by Huw Watkins - as well as the Fourth Symphony, an interesting choiee for the way it foreshadows, though with vastly different orchestral forces, the music of Phaedra. The concert was also the occasion for the UK pre-miere of Elogium musicum, Henze' s requiem for his lover of forty years, Fausto Moroni, who died unexpcctcdly in 2007. The text is a quartet of ncwly comrnissioned poems in Latin by Franco Serpa. The result, for choir and orchestra but without soloists, is a restrained work in which extremes of emotion are avoided. The Choral setting is remi-msceni or ine sacreu cantata styie, anowing the audience — which included the composer - to conjure their own private images of loss. In the final adagio, the ritual of mouming is absorbcd with unforced grace by the benevolent movements of the earth.