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Volume 5, Number 3 May, 1999
Copyright � 1999 Society for Music Theory
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography
Hans Werner Henze
Translated by Stewart Spencer
"Hans Werner Henze is one of the most important composers of the twentieth
century, and these are his extensive, detailed memoirs. For that reason alone, they should
be read. I found the book highly interesting and highly readable."
--John Rockwell, Editor, Arts and Leisure, The New York Times
Hans Werner Henze is one of the world's leading composers. His autobiography is frank, impassioned, and alive with memorable images and characters and graphic accounts of the creative process and performances of his music.
Henze's unhappy childhood during the onset of Fascism found release in music, which, in spite of the disruption of the war, became the center of his life. He studied composition but began to make a career as a ballet conductor, until his creativity found expression in music that, by the early 1950s, had begun to distance itself from the fashionable but dogmatic rules of serialism in favor of his own individualistic conception of beauty. In both the political and sexual spheres, Hans Werner Henze is an outsider whose utopian dreams of a humane communism have always had to contend with reality. In musical and cultural matters, however, he is one of the best-connected and most influential figures of the postwar era and his autobiography brims with personal stories and observations of such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ingeborg Bachmann, Luchino Visconti, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. A true cosmopolitan, he is happiest living in Italy, where his innate lyricism has found a natural home.
"Bohemian fifths" are intervals that were played by Bohemian horn players, and which, according to Baroque and Classical rules, were proscribed. Henze's writing protests the lack of freedom that such a prohibition implies, both in music and in life.
Hans Werner Henze was born on July 1, 1926, in Gutersloh, Germany. Since the 1970s, he has lived in Marino, near Rome. His creative output covers all musical genres, including operas (Boulevard Solitude, Konig Hirsch, Der Prinz von Homburg, Elegy for Young Lovers, Der junge Lord, We Come to the River, The English Cat, Das verratne Meer, Venus und Adonis), ballets (Ondine, Orpheus, Le disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella, Labyrinth, Le fils de l'air), oratorios such as Das Floss der Medusa, nine symphonies, the instrumental Requiem, and many concertos. Stewart Spencer is the editor, with Barry Millington, of Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, Wagner in Performance, and Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion. He has also translated books on Wagner and Liszt.
0-691-00683-0 Cloth $35.00 US
520 pages, 5 x 8, 23 photographs.
For sale only in the U.S.
Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera
Gary Tomlinson
In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes.
Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, Metaphysical Song details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner.
Gary Tomlinson is Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and has held Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. His books include Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance and Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others.
Princeton Studies in Opera
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, Editors
0-691-00409-9 Paper $18.95 US and �11.50 UK and Europe
0-691-00408-0 Cloth $49.50 US and �29.95 UK and Europe
192 pages, 6 x 9, 7 halftones, 12 music examples.
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This page prepared by
Michael Toler, Editorial Assistant
31 May 1999