Hans Werner Henze : Orpheus Behind the Wire SWR Vokalensemble

Hans Werner Henze works for mixed voice and chamber orchestra with SWR Vokalensemble and Ensemble Modern, conducted by Marcus Creed. Welcome new recordings of important pieces like Lieder von einer Insel (1964), Orpheus Behind the Wire (1984) plus Fünf Madrigale (1947).  Calling these "choral" works is a misnomer, since Henze writes so well for vocal ensemble that the voices move as a unity and as individuals, like a parallel orchestra, voices interacting with instruments.
Such are the densities of vocal interaction in Orpheus Behind the Wire that Henze can dispense with orchestra altogether.  SATB form is stretched with such refinement that the voices are almost microparted, in 12 part a capella. The voices of the SWR Vokalensemble are so perfectly balanced that the singing seems to flow seamlessly,  the rich textures, enhanced with great depth. 

That sense of flowing movement is significant, for Orpheus Behind the Wire was created to be danced to.  Fluid movements, subtle changes which suggest constant evolution. This is music as Greek sculpture, form as clearly defined as muscles carved in marble, or the folds of garments on statues frozen mid-flow.  The progress across the five songs is formal, yet elegant and deliberate, as stylized as Greek art.  The text was written in 1978 by Edward Bond, and re-tells the story of Orpheus's journey to the Underworld in search of Eurydice with a modern twist : the idea of individuals caught up in situations beyond human control. Orpheus can never unite with Eurydice, but will forever remain alone and alienated from the world around him.  When Henze splits the four vocal groups into twelve individual voices, he unites meaning with musical form.

An otherworldy hum underpins the first song, What was hell like?, the vocal line shimmering on several levels. "No echo came from my music". The words “silence, silence" repeated like an echo spreading into empty distance.  Orpheus and Eurydice cannot travel together, but the physical death of one means the spiritual death of the other. Thus the long lines reaching out, but not connecting.  Undulating lines, where words are broken into particles and scattered, like dust in the wind, "silenced, silenced". This is deliberate irony.  The singing is pitch perfect and beautifully modulated but the sentences are hard to make out, for  this is the Underworld, where shadows deceive.  In Hades, meaning is shrouded. By breaking up the vocal line, Henze is using sound to capture the ambiguity. Like orpheus we must pay attention and feel our way.   Orpheus growsold, "more strings on this lyre than hairs on my head", but he is not free. Occasionally the men's voices dominate, but the mood is troubled.  At last, something stirs. "Pressed" the voices sing on an upbeat, "by the weight of the world".  Now tense, more anguished figures, a multiplicity of voices, their lines wavering in tumult.  The text draws hope that "somewhere the starving have taken bread/from those who argue the moral of guns/ in assemblies guarded by guns".  When the poor no longer shiver in rags, "Then I hear music of Orpheus, of Triumph ! of Freedom!". In the dense layers of texture, the exact words aren't easy to make out, but that might be for the reason that freedom is not yet at hand, meaning must remain occluded, secretive, literally "Behind the Wire".

In Lieder von einer Insel, Henze recalled his close friendship with Ingeborg Bachmann.  She wriote the poems in the summer of 1953, when the pair had escaped to Italy, symbol of the "golden South" celebrated by Goethe and so many other northerners before and since.   Bachmann's poems are sunlit, but haunted : "Schattenfrüchte fallen von der Wanden". Henze's setting is dominated by celli, trombone and double bass, long, keening lines that suggest darkness. The voices sing in unison, the range of timbres creating a rich lustre.  The double bass leads the celli into a solemn dance.  The central song, Einmal muss das Fest ja kommen, resembles a festive procession, led by trombone and portative, a small portable organ with connotations of the Middle Ages, extended by simple percussion.  The male and female voices separate, singing alternate lines, the vocal parts then alternating with instrumental. The effect of a medieval celebration. But what celebration ? perhaps a brief Carneval before a period of mourning. ?  "...die Krater nicht rühn!"    Henze sets the men’s voices in the fourth song almost as plainchant, the women's voice high and piping like choirboys. Whoever leaves the island cannot return unless rituals are performed. The mood is sinister : the trombone wails, the portative groans.  The final song is deceptively simple, though the images are apocalyptic. "es ist ein Strom unter der Erde, der sengt das Gebein". And we shall bear witness.  When Henze set Bachmann's poems, she still had ten years to live, but he knew the dreams they'd had were doomed.
Based on translations of early French poetry, Henze's Fünf Madrigales is a lively mix of mock medievalism and modernism. He was only 21, just emerging from a youth in which music had to conform to Nazi taste.  Although it's an early work, we can already hear Henze's distinctive personality in embryo. 

Henze - Der junge Lord DVD

Just released - Hans Werner Henze's Der Junge Lord. It's the 1968 production that's been around on audio forever but now on DVD.

The visuals are good for setting context - small town, small minds, stiff cardboard scenery, characters strutting about presenting a public front.

Suddenly an English Lord materializes in this milieu where they're always slipping into French. Foreign means good unless it's "too" foreign". The Lord has black servants! The Lord does everything differently. The locals veer from hate to servility.

Then one day the Lord's nephew appears and there's an elaborate ball. The young lord is a boorish lout but the locals ape everything he does thinking it's fashion. Note verb. Local beauty is engaged to marry him, thanks to the machinations of her wealthy aunt. As they dance, the young lord gradually goes nuts, rips off his fancy clothes and reveals himself - an ape !

The visuals add a lot. The young lord, the Old Lord's secretary and the beauty's real boyfriend all have grotesque sideburns and hair dyed vile shades of apricot. A hint ? The glory of this opera though is the way Henze writes music in cross currents that cut diagonally across each other - not layers but disturbing, unsettling counterpoint. Yet it's so well woven it's not jagged until the end when pretence can no longer be sustained. The chorus are particularly well written, many voices blending, individuals lost in a mass, but not an organized mob. There's a lot of Henze himself in the English (old) Lord but he doesn't despise the townsfolk, despite their credulity.

It's a lovely mixture of ham and high drama. Edith Mathis glows as Luise, her Barbie doll helmet of a hairdo. Donald Grobe is Wilhelm, her worthy lover. They are so sweet, you could squeak ! This is Young Frankenstein long before Mel Brooks. And Frankenstein is perhaps the apt image. The ape sings divine high tenor, almost as angelic as a counter tenor. What has the English Lord been up to ? and for how long ? Libretto by Ingeborg Bachmann.

Goerne - Larcher Die Nacht der Verlorenen

Thomas Larcher's Die Nacht der Velorenen really is an interesting work, which we'll probably hear more of. His publishers are Schott, though this piece isn't available yet. However, his 2002 song cycle for soprano, violin, cello and piano, My illness is the Medicine I need is available. In fact it's being performed at the Wigmore Hall on 24 November with Claire Booth, who's very good indeed – another must-go concert. Böse Zellen, also premiered by the London Sinfonietta this week, will be on at Zankel Hall in May (piano and orchestra).

The texts used are recently published fragments from Ingeborg Bachmann, the poet who fascinated Paul Celan and Hans Werner Henze. These aren't formal poems, but fragments, but it was this very brittleness that attracted the composer, "to transcend their rawness by compositional means". So, not conventional word painting but the opposite. It's as if the music expresses what's beyond the text. The singer listens a lot, the words singing like a commentary on the music. This was written for Matthias Goerne, and it sounds as if it was written "with" him, too, for there's a lot of "listening", dialogue between voice and orchestra, as if they are bouncing ideas off each other. Larcher uses an interesting sub group of piano, double bass and, of all things, an accordion, whose dark timbre reflects the baritone's voice.

The introduction is fairly long - fast, rustling figures shrill but clear, then gently deflating diminuendo that becomes softly pounding ostinato. I thought at the time of a clear stream, like a brook in Schubert churning along, entering a deep, still pool. The "pounding" of piano, accordion and double bass made me think of rocks on riverbeds. So what a surprise to read Larcher's note in the programme later: "Here I was encountering not polished surfaces but instead rough stones, on to which I could hold and claw my way forward." It's certainly not literal, descriptive music, so it's uncanny that such images jumped into my imagination.

The poems blend into the music, and sometimes elide into one another. "Ich habe die Wahrheit gesehen .......verschlungen von einer Riesenschlange die in ihren Bauch sie aufbläht..." the piano beats crazy staccato, the winds swirling, circular figures. The dark centre of the cycle is a simple 6 line poem "Im Lot" It's numb, beyond pain "Du sollst ja nicht weinen". Instead of crying, the sense of tight chested breathing, impassive yet unpeaceful, watching, listening, tense. Suddenly tubular bells from the percussion lifting out of the misery, yet distant, and the "riverbed" ostinato returns – this is literally "rock bottom ".

What';s also striking about this piece is the physicality, the sense of "breathing", up and down cadences like exhalation and inhalation. It gives an eerie sense of presence, like there's someone unseen hidden in the music. So all that listening has a very natural, organic feel, the idea of dialogue again. The final song "So stürben wir um getrennt zu sein" is tantalisingly inconclusive, opening outwards yet again. The clear Schubertian brook, but deceptively so. The poet is trying to sound confident but it's illusion, and she knows it.

An absolutely magnificent performance by Matthias Goerne. Of the three concerts he sang in six days, this was the finest, exceptional, perhaps closest to his heart. Audience ecstatic – a wonderful piece of music, so original and distinctive.