ON MUSIC
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Henze's Dance of Death By John Simon Over the years, my attitude toward Hans Werner Henze's music has fluctuated wildly. Henze and I were more or less coevals, which may have...
...But how about the music...
...More remarkably, it has no access points, a considerable nuisance...
...There is also a handsome captain of the guard, very close to Pentheus, and ogled by Agave and her sister, Autonoe...
...The god hypnotizes the king into submission in a puzzling scene, then persuades him to go spying on the revels of Mount Cytheron in female drag—wearing his mother's dress...
...Dionysus, though a valid representative of emotional release from excessive rationality, is also unforgiving and vindictive...
...The Koch version, with obviously better sound, and both the English and German texts parallelly presented, eliminates the Intermezzo...
...that my music sounded like 'Strauss turned sour.'" In the same passage, Henze calls himself a Mahlerian, and speaks of Gustav Mahler's great influence on The Bassarids...
...The libretto was by a woman friend of the composer and struck me as totally inept...
...Nor can I solve the meaning of the young slave girl and her small daughter who figure among the maenads, and, protected by Dionysus, are tortured in vain by Pentheus' men...
...presumably by some sort of kinship with the traditional Bacchic salutation "Evoe Bacche...
...But during a cab ride with Pierre Boulez I remember questioning him about whom he considered the major 20th-century composers...
...Karajan gave Henze the use of his private box, and the composer promised his librettists not to walk out in 10 minutes...
...Some of it has to do with masterly orchestration—as, for example, when Dionysus' initial lure is assigned to a guitar solo, producing the "captivating timbres" David Dubai has cited...
...I was indeed taken by a concert performance of it in Carnegie Hall with Cheryl Studer as Agave...
...the fourth, to quote Andrew Clements in the Grove, "is founded on a 43-note theme that flows into a final passacaglia...
...Of course, neither version can offer the Santa Fe Opera production's "spectacular fires lit on surrounding hillsides, marking a Bacchic solstice" (to quote Henze), or even a chorus made up of students able "to stand on their heads or clamber all over the sets...
...Then you can gorge yourself on gorgeous, more traditional, tunefulness...
...Thus there is a greater emphasis on the mother-son relations of Agave and Pentheus...
...Dionysos ist ein Schwein.' The journalists, opera lovers, and other interested parties...
...We woke made older, woke to toil's way, Thoughtful and naked In loud light, and watched the smooth Maggot hatch hungry, who waits us...
...Auden and Chester Kailman, at a dinnerparty...
...A major miscalculation was an Intermezzo: Pentheus, in an erotic fantasy, envisioned Agave, Autonoe, the seer Tiresias, and the handsome Captain, all attired in 18th-century costumes, playing out a pastoral charade—the myth of Calliope's Judgment—I need not bother you with...
...Still, each does nicely by what Henze asks for: the "two contrastive types of rhythm, one for Pentheus (associated with march music, with two and four beats in a bar) and the other for that swine Dionysus, whose rhythms are exclusively three in a bar—sicilianas, waltzes and sarabandes...
...He is shocked by the newfangled worship of a young god, Dionysus (Bacchus), said to be the son of Zeus and Pentheus' late aunt Semele...
...As he tells us in his well-written and fascinating autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, he received a commission from the Salzburg Festival for an opera suited to the vast expanse of their Grosses Festspielhaus stage...
...This I like very much...
...Worse, no text is provided for this standard German-language version, expertly rendered by Maria Bosse-Sporleder and Helmut Reinold, but still a translation...
...I am not sure that the work has—as Auden and Kallman probably, and Henze certainly, wanted—answers to the questions, What is freedom...
...Agave, in her frenzy, brings his head, believing it to be a young lion's, back to Thebes...
...To be sure, finding them may involve some serious searching...
...It does preserve the show-offy Intermezzo, later sensibly dropped, yet of scholarly interest...
...He offered Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, and Béla Bartók, period...
...What is revolt...
...More important, there is distinctly homoerotic coloring to the DionysusPentheus relationship...
...REGRETTABLY, Auden and Kallman had done better by Henze with their earlier libretto, and better yet by Stravinsky with The Rake's Progress...
...Since then, there have been Henze works that I liked, some that I merely admired, and quite a few I cordially disliked...
...Henze quotes, in that context, a remark of the young Mozart in a letter to his father: "If the speech of the Ghost in Hamlet were not so long, it would be far more effective...
...And it does provide access points, as it should in a long work...
...The idea was to make the story more modern by giving it a Freudian slant...
...He must have considered Debussy and a couple of others as belonging to an earlier age...
...Annoying, too, are the incessant outcries of the Bassands and other characters, "Ayayalya...
...were all as dumbstruck as I—I who had spent the last few years grappling with the god of pleasure and drugs and delving ever deeper into his musical world...
...Above all, as I could tell from a mere concert performance, there is something inherently theatrical—i.e...
...Koch has Kenneth Riegel, Andreas Schmidt, Michael Burt, Robert Tear, William B. Murray, Karan Armstrong, Celia Lindsley, and Ortrud Wenkel, whose Beroe I slightly prefer...
...The tragedy of Pentheus," writes Philip Vellacott, a translator of the Bacchae, "is not that he tried to do what was wrong, but that he was the wrong man to do it— he was, in fact, precisely the unbalanced, excitable type of person who most easily falls victim to the allurements of Donysiac indulgence...
...To put a stop to this irrational cult thriving on Mount Citheron, under the instigation of Dionysus posing as a mere priest of the god, Pentheus orders the orgiasts seized, but they escape...
...He concedes that Wagner's music "sounded wonderful—silky and heroic, ardent and full-throated, and extremely well written...
...Take this from a choric song of the Bassarids: Now night opens wide all day locks: Our deep-skied consolations...
...Our close walls burn...
...There was little real danger" that he would write a Wagnerian opera...
...It was even able to surprise its composer when at the postpremiere press conference in Salzburg, as Henze reports, "Auden got to his feet and, in a loud, firm voice, declared, in reply to a question...
...The Orfeo was—unaccountably, given its date—recorded in mono rather than stereo...
...To quote Boyden once more, "The cumulative impact is extraordinary...
...Auden and Kallman wanted the composer to overcome his "political and aesthetic aversions to Wagner's music," and experience some of it at a performance...
...Actually, both casts perform splendidly...
...In the case of his second opera, Boulevard Solitude (1952), I cared only for the very title that Henze came to regret as trendy...
...It is an updated version of the Manon story—from the tragic romantic 18th-century novel by the Abbé Prévost—with hardly any melody and little correspondence between words and music...
...there is a powerful contrapuntal density to Henze's score that's reminiscent of Mahler's late symphonies...
...The Orfeo has the extra thrill of being recorded at the premiere...
...Pentheus, grandson of Cadmus, has recently taken over the throne of Thebes and is trying to make it monotheistic...
...The tragedy in Euripides' drama and Henze's opera lies in the contest between king and god, both imperfect...
...There are two complete recordings available on CD...
...Orfeo has Loren Driscoll, Kostas Paskalis, Peter Lagger, Helmut Melchert, William Dooley, Kerstin Meyer, Ingeborg Hallstein, and Vera Little as the old nurse Beroe...
...The third is a slow movement that nevertheless builds to a climactic hunt for Pentheus...
...After commenting admiringly on Karajan's "superior manner and total control," Henze writes: "On stage it was so dark that only the spotlit figure of the conductor stood out from the all-pervading gloom...
...It should be remembered that the opera was created by three homosexuals, although Henze also had a long, close relationship with the highly neurotic poet and prosaist Ingeborg Bachmann whose exact nature remains a mystery...
...As for the respective artistic merits of the two recordings, both Dohnânyi and Albrecht do a fine job of conducting...
...The most original moment comes right at the end when, with disorder triumphant, Pentheus dead, Cadmus and his court banished, the music becomes subdued—a moment more dreadful in its calm acceptance of the new order than any Dionysian orgy...
...As Matthew Boyden puts it in The Rough Guide to Opera, "For all its angular atonality...
...Curious to observe their carryings-on, Pentheus hides in the woods of Citheron...
...What is unfreedom...
...One is on Orfeo 6050321, recorded at the Salzburg premiere, conducted by the young Christoph von Dohnânyi...
...But he could not abide "the silly and self-regarding emotionalism...
...Nevertheless, it does make a profound impression even on disc, and doubtless would make an even deeper one if, say, the Metropolitan Opera put it on...
...His description ofthat brilliant megalomaniac's performance is charming...
...You can get them on Deutsche Grammophon 449 869 with Dietrich FischerDieskau or, for less money but also without the text, on Arte Nova 894040 with Roland Hermann...
...It is this that has enabled audiences to sit through two-and-a-half hours' worth of intense, intermissionless demands on the attention without running for cover...
...Since ordinarily Henze prefers to write small-scale operas, why this very large-scale work...
...He is made to dance to the god's piping, and Dionysus, holding his hand, leads him to his doom, according to the stage direction "like a bridegroom...
...I had been won over by Henze's 1956 Five Neapolitan Songs, which I still enjoy...
...Since I don't care for Boulez' music, I figured I could ignore his judgment as well...
...Then I acquired The Bassarids (1966), created with the same librettists and repeatedly declared by Henze to be his "most important work for the theater...
...the sense of an imperialist threat, of something militantly nationalistic, something disagreeably heterosexual and Aryan in all these rampant horn calls, this pseudo-Germanic Stabreim [alliteration], these incessant chords of a seventh and all the insecure heroes and villains...
...He turned again to his American librettists, and Auden hit upon a retelling of Euripides' Bacchae, giving it the title of one of Aeschylus' lost plays, The Bassarids, meaning "wearers of fox skins...
...Discovered by the maenads, led by Agave herself in a trance, he is torn to pieces...
...Pentheus, however, has it...
...The music manages to sound archaic enough for ancient rituals, modern enough for psychological subtleties, like gradual seduction or the unmooring of one character by another...
...If you want more melody, let me suggest that you acquire Henze's full-length ballet Undine (Deutsche Grammophon 453467...
...Though included in the Salzburg premiere, it has since been excised with all three creators' blessings...
...And again the poet was right...
...I will list all the singers, because you are bound to recognize at least some of the names...
...That is an alternative designation for votaries of Dionysus, usually known as bacchantes or maenads, meaning "madwomen"—clearly a less flattering term, foxy ladies being preferable to space cadets...
...This somewhat resembles Henze's own self-imposed exile from Germany to Italy, in whose various parts he has been living, as perhaps reflected in a certain luminosity of some of his music...
...stageworthy—about the way Henze treats his material...
...Twelve-tone or atonal, patently angular or insidiously insinuating, the music does get disturbingly and excitingly under your skin...
...Henze himself writes in Bohemian Fifths: "I really do not know what [the distinguished music critic H. H.] Stuckenschmidt can have been thinking of when he wrote after the Salzburg premiere in 1966 that Strauss had finally found his true successor here___It was an English colleague of his who unwittingly came much closer to the truth when he wrote somewhere...
...Pentheus is a rational being who goes about persecuting the god and his followers in an irrational way...
...Those caught in the clash of these mighty opposites come to grief...
...Both have their advantages and disadvantages...
...What is revolution...
...Dionysus arrives from Asia with a retinue of riotous maenads, whom the women of Thebes, including Pentheus' mother, Agave, and her sisters are beginning to join...
...With the former, the Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Vienna Philharmonic offer superb musicmaking...
...He happened to be in Vienna when Götterdämmerung was directed and conducted by Herbert von Karajan at the State Opera...
...The opera, moreover, has the kind of richness that allows for new discoveries with each rehearing...
...Sobered up by Cadmus, she curses the god, who disperses Cadmus and his kin, and sends each into separate exile...
...He brushed him aside with a word or two...
...Henze and I were more or less coevals, which may have suggested a potential kinship...
...With the latter, so do the Südfunkchor Chorus and Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra...
...It is not, for the most part, what one would call melodious...
...Striving for an opera seria of mythic resonance, they fell into much opaque poeticism from which so much modern poetry unfortunately suffers...
...If these have a specific meaning, no one has said so...
...and "Unaya...
...The sound, despite its having been very well remastered, has a slightly unnatural reverberance...
...How about Henze...
...This is how the four-movement structure works: The first, as has been noted, is in sonata form, with a craggy Pentheus theme and the sensuous Bassarid music the two intermingling subjects...
...But it is sung in the original English...
...What is repression...
...A strange parallel to Pentheus, yet Euripides would have made a poor tragic hero, lacking the obligatory hamartia (tragic flaw...
...The next Henze opera I purchased was Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), after hearing it from a tape played by the librettists, W.H...
...He asked his librettists for something in four movements, rather like a symphony...
...The other, on Koch Schwann 314006, is from a successful 1986 concert performance under the baton of Gerd Albrecht...
...the Koch, of offering what Henze called the "performance that broke the oppressive spell on the score," whatever that may exactly mean beyond the evident relief of the henceforward regularly omitted Intermezzo, making the opera some 15 to 20 minutes shorter...
...The interesting genesis of The Bassarids, as reported by Henze, is worth considering...
...I ventured...
...you lose out with neither...
...The second is a sequence of dances amounting to a kind of scherzo...
...At this point, let us recall the myth of Pentheus, as elaborated in the last drama by Euripides, now in his 70s, and living in self-imposed exile at the court of King Archelaus of Macedon, who treated him with utmost respect...
...Curiously, Euripides is said to have died during a solitary walk in the woods, mistakenly torn to pieces by Archelaus' dogs...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
