Hans Werner Henze

Hans Werner Henze (1 July 1926 – 27 October 2012) was a German composer.

His large oeuvre is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition.

In particular, his stage works reflect "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life".

Henze was also known for his political convictions.

He worked as a teacher in a school at Bielefeld, formed on progressive lines, but it was closed in 1933 by government order because its progressive style was out of step with official views.

Franz Henze then moved to Dünne, a small village near Bünde, where he fell under the spell of Nazi propaganda.

Books by Jewish and Christian authors were replaced in the Henze household by literature reflecting Nazi views; the whole family was expected to fall into line with Franz's new thinking.

The older boys, including Hans, were enrolled in the Hitler Youth.

Although the Henze household was filled with talk of current affairs, Hans was also able to hear broadcasts of classical music (especially Mozart) and eventually his father realized that his son had a vocation as a musician.

Henze began studies at the state music school of Braunschweig in 1942, where he studied piano, percussion, and theory.

Franz Henze rejoined the army in 1943 and he was sent to the Eastern front, where he died.

Henze had to break off his studies after being conscripted into the army in 1944, towards the end of the Second World War.

He was trained as a radio operator.

He was soon captured by the British and held in a prisoner-of-war camp for the remainder of the war.

In 1945 he became an accompanist in the Bielefeld City Theatre, and continued his studies under Wolfgang Fortner at Heidelberg University in 1946.

Henze had some successful performances at Darmstadt, including an immediate success in 1946 with a neo-baroque work for piano, flute and strings, that brought him to the attention of Schott's, the music publishers.

He also took part in the famous Darmstadt New Music Summer School, a key vehicle for the propagation of avant-garde techniques.

At the 1947 summer school, Henze turned to serial technique.

In his early years he worked with twelve-tone technique, for example in his First Symphony and First Violin Concerto of 1947.

Sadler's Wells Ballet visited Hamburg in 1948; this inspired Henze to write a choreographic poem, Ballett-Variationen, which he completed in 1949.

The first ballet he saw was Frederick Ashton's Scènes de Ballet.

He wrote a letter of appreciation to Ashton, introducing himself as a 22-year-old composer.

The next time he wrote to Ashton he enclosed the score of his Ballett-Variationen, which he hoped Ashton might find of interest.

In 1948 he became musical assistant at the Deutscher Theater in Konstanz, where his first opera , based on the work of Cervantes, was created.

This work was first performed in Düsseldorf in September 1949 and staged for the first time in Wuppertal in 1958.

In 1950 he became ballet conductor at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden in Wiesbaden, where he composed two operas for radio, his First Piano Concerto, as well as his first stage work of real note, the jazz-influenced opera Boulevard Solitude, a modern recasting of the traditional Manon Lescaut story.

He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality.

Late in life he lived in the village of Marino in the central Italian region of Lazio, and in his final years still travelled extensively, in particular to Britain and Germany, as part of his work.

An avowed Marxist and member of the Italian Communist Party, Henze produced compositions honoring Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara.

Henze left Germany in 1953, in reaction to homophobia and the country's general political climate.

His publisher, Schott's, had also offered Henze an advance on royalties, on condition that he leave his conducting posts to focus on composition.

This financial incentive allowed Henze to move to Italy, where he remained for most of his life.

He settled on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples.

Also residents on the island were the composer William Walton and his wife Susana, who took a great interest in the young German composer.

His ballet Ondine was composed for the English Royal Ballet and choreographed by Ashton, for production in 1958.

At the 1968 Hamburg premiere of his requiem for Che Guevara, titled Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of Medusa), the placing of a red flag on the stage sparked a riot and the arrest of several people, including the librettist.

Henze spent a year from 1969 to 1970 teaching in Cuba.

Henze was born in Gütersloh, Westphalia, the eldest of six children of a teacher, and showed an early interest in art and music.

That and his political views led to conflict with his conservative father.

Henze's father, Franz, had served in the First World War and was wounded at Verdun.