Introduction to the correspondence of Hans Werner Henze, Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman

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Introduction to the Correspondence between Hans Werner Henze, Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman

Archive of the Original Documents

The correspondence between Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) and the librettists Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) and Chester Kallman (1921-1975) are kept in two separate folders at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel under the Correspondence section of the Hans Werner Henze Collection.

Auden and Kallman were a couple from 1932 until Auden’s death and worked closely on many artistic projects as a team. Together, they wrote the libretti for Igor Stravinskys’s opera The Rake’s Progress (1951), Henze’s operas Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1966), and Nicolas Nabokov Love’s Labour’s Lost (1973). In the summer of 1951, Henze met both of them for the first time in Forio (a small town situated along the west coast of the island of Ischia). From 1948 to 1958, Auden and Kallman, who lived in New York, regularly spent summer vacations there.

Since Auden and Kallman lived together, Henze often addressed his letters to both librettists. Both of them usually signed their own letters to Henze, which may have been sent individually. Thematically, all three were closely involved in the process of creating the operas Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), The Bassarids (1966) and Moralities (1967). The letters from Auden and Kallman to Henze are ordered chronologically but are considered a unit in order to clarify their contribution to the creation of works.

Scope and Content

The correspondence between Henze, Auden and Kallman includes 61 postal documents (53 letters and 8 telegrams), 20 of which are from Henze (including 2 from Henze’s collaborators, Renate Praetorius and Wolfgang Eisermann), 22 from Auden, 12 from Kallman, and 7 from both Auden and Kallman. Sometimes, the existence of some letters, which have yet to be located, is established by other (postal) documents. In these cases, the edition has nonetheless created a file related to the letter, such as in the case of the first letter Henze sent to Auden in December 1958, which is recorded in his Autobiography. The correspondence includes a total of 62 postal documents, including this letter. Some of the letters also contain other documents that were enclosed with the letter in question and closely related to it, e.g., a sketch for a scene from an opera or poems.

Period

The correspondence commenced in January 1959 with Auden/Kallmans’ positive response to Henze’s request to write an opera together, the subject of which was still to be defined. Henze himself noted on this letter (6 January 1959): “1st letter from Auden - Kallman ever”. The first part of the correspondence (from 1959 to 1961) focuses on the opera Elegy for Young Lovers, which was premiered on 20 May 1961 at the Schlosstheater Schwetzingen in Baden-Württemberg. On the occasion of the first performance in English at Glyndebourne, England, Auden suggested to Henze that he compose a grand opera based on Euripides’ Bacchae. Two years later, Henze recalled this proposal when the Salzburg Festival offered him the opportunity to compose an opera for the Großes Festspielhaus (see Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 206). In the summer of 1964, he began work on The Bassarids, which took him two years to complete, and this constitutes the focal point of the second part of the correspondence between the three authors (from 1964 to 1966) after a break between 1961 and 1964.

After the premiere of The Bassarids on 6 August 1966 in Salzburg, Henze, Auden and Kallman remained in contact, joining forces to create Moralities, three ‘scenic plays’ by Auden based on fables by Aesop. The plays were premiered at the May Festival in Cincinnati on 18 May 1968. The last letter in which Auden sends Henze some corrections to the libretto of Moralities is dated 11 November 1967.

Language

The main language of the correspondence is English, but the three authors occasionally use expressions in other languages, including German, Italian and Greek. In addition, 3 telegrams were fully written in Italian and 2 letters from Henze’s collaborators were written in German. In this bilingual (English and German) digital edition, words and expressions in languages other than English and German have been translated into English.

The correspondence between Auden/Kallman and Henze is known to us only from Henze’s estate (not from the estate of Auden/Kallman), so the only copies of Henze’s letters that have survived are the typewritten ones. Why Henze types these letters - he actually preferred to write by hand - is unknown: perhaps he deliberately wanted to keep a copy for himself. This was only possible in typewritten form at the time, as photocopies did not become established in the private sphere until the 1970s. On one of the typewriters used by Auden and Kallman, the number “1” does not seem to have been present, because it was replaced by a capital “I” (see, for example, this letter). In addition, one of their typewriters did not have umlaut letters available, which is therefore the two dots are missing in some words and the word is not marked here with [sic] (see for example Kallman’s letter to Henze dated 6 July 1963). Both Auden and Kallman often do not include the apostrophe in words like “doesn’t”, “it’s”, “won’t”, “person’s”. Both librettists often corrected the typewritten letters by hand and added explanations, probably while reading them before sending them to Henze. In contrast, Henze’s carbon copies are not annotated, as they served as copies for Henze himself.

Henze’s Writing Peculiarities

All 18 of Henze’s letters that have survived in the Auden-Kallman-Henze correspondence are preserved as carbon copies, so they are typewritten. These letters have holes punched in them, which indicates that they may have been intended for collection and storage. Henze uses indented paragraphs and places double quotation marks at the top. In general, Henze uses many more hyphens than is usual in English. Occasionally, due to the influence of his native language, Henze sometimes misspells English words: for example, he spells the word “program” with two “m” instead of just one.

Auden’s Writing Peculiarities

Auden’s handwriting is not precise and it is difficult to decipher. His signature is characterised by a horizontal line from the bottom to top under his name. The layout of Auden’s letters, both in manuscript and typescript, is distinguished by the greeting formula (e.g., “Dear Hans”) and the closing formula (e.g., “love”) being strongly indented, almost central. From 1964 onwards, Auden frequently used personal stationery from Kirchstetten with the watermark Martle Myll.

Kallman’s Writing Peculiarities

Most of Kallman’s letters are typewritten. In his 2 handwritten letters, a handwritten table and the various inscriptions on typewritten letters, Kallman’s handwriting is extremely small and dense (especially when there was little space left on the page), but precise and easy to read. The letter “t” always seems to be capitalised, even when it should be lower case. Kallman uses double quotation marks in his handwritten letters, whereas he uses single quotation marks when typing. In Kallman’s typewritten letters, there are always two spaces after a full stop and, in the majority of cases, after a semicolon. Subordinate clauses are often separated by a double hyphen “--”. Kallman’s signature is also underscored. From 1964 onwards, Kallman often uses the same Auden stationery with a watermark by Martle Myll.

Common Projects

Works Mentioned in the Correspondence

Works by Henze

Works by Auden

Works by Auden and Kallman

The Relationship between Auden, Kallman and Henze

The correspondence shows that Henze’s relationship with the Anglo-American couple (he was 19 years younger than Auden and 5 years younger than Kallman) was characterised by great respect and esteem from the very beginning: the two librettists had achieved great success with Stravinskys’s The Rake’s Progress at its premiere in Venice on 11 September 1951. In addition, Auden’s “long poem” The Age of Anxiety (1947) made “an enormous impression” on Henze (Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 98-99). In his autobiography, the composer describes his first encounter with his librettists in Forio as follows:

I can no longer remember how we got to know each other - ambitious as I was, I no doubt overcame my shyness and simply introduced myself. But I do recall that in 1951 I was once or twice granted the honour of sitting at Auden’s regular table at the Café Maria Internazionale and listening to him expatiate on his favourite subject, opera…
Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 99.

He also describes here how the librettist team functioned:

We had become friends during our years together on Ischia, when I had been able to gain a certain insight into the way in which he [Auden] and Kallman functioned as librettists. In writing their librettos, they would discuss everything as intellectual equals, a discussion that lasted all day, in the course of which they would jot down odd words and phrases. It was fascinating to be present on such occasions and listen to them at work.
Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 163.

In a letter to Auden dated 27 August 1964 (after three years of close collaboration already), Henze wrote: “First of all I was very proud to have a letter by the master himself”. Nevertheless, they maintained open contact with each other in their correspondence as soon as they discussed their works. For their part, the two librettists joyfully congratulated Henze on his music and their joint achievements (cf. e.g., these letters). Thus, in a short period of time, a friendship developed that was based on equality and characterised by genuine interest in the opinion of the other person.

Collaborative Works

Elegy for Young Lovers

The place of the first encounter between Henze, Auden and Kallman, the town of Forio on Ischia, was mentioned in the first letter from the librettists to the composer. Forio then became the imaginary town in the early 20th century in which the plot of an opera to be developed together would be set. Although the letter is not preserved, Henze recounts in his autobiography that in December 1958 he wrote to Auden in New York “asking him in all humility” whether he would like to work with him on an opera, with or without Kallman (Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 162). Henze also informed his friend Ingeborg Bachmann about the positive response from the librettists, to whom he wrote: “Auden has also offered me his librettist skills” Bachmann and Henze, Briefe einer Freundschaft, p. 215, translation by the author.

After these first letters, intensive work began that led to their first joint opera: Elegy for Young Lovers, the subject of which, however, was not that Auden and Kallman had proposed in their first letter to Henze. In the Summer of 1959 Auden, Kallman and Henze met at Auden and Kallman’s house in Kirchstetten, Austria, which they had both visited every year since 1959. There, Henze told them both about his musical idea for Elegy for Young Lovers: as Auden and Kallman report, Henze wanted to write a chamber opera for a small cast and ensemble and without chorus (see Auden and Kallman, “Genesis of a Libretto”, in: Elegy for Young Lovers, pp. 61-64). Instruments were to accompany the characters of the opera and characterize them with their timbres, while some realistic sound elements - such as the chimes of a large grandfather clock or train whistle - were to mark the significant moments in the dramaturgy. In Kirchstetten, there was a continuous exchange of musical suggestions, literary additions, and cuts to the libretto, which functioned in an equal and open manner. In retrospect, Henze perceived this as “an extended game of ping-pong for three” (Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 164), with discussions ranging from the choice of names of characters and places of action to musical tempo and the mood of scenes. The development of the libretto for Elegy for Young Lovers was accompanied by Henze’s suggestions, documented in letters (see, for example, this letter) and by Henze’s memories of personal meetings in his autobiography. There, he reports, for example: “I was pleased to see how seriously they took my requirements and the description of the music that I could hear in my own mind’s ear…” (Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 164).

A draft of the libretto must have reached Henze by August 1959, because in a letter to Bachmann dated 27 August 1959, after their meeting in Ascona, Henze writes that she should send him the “Auden poem” as soon as possible. Henze later recalled this “Auden poem” to be a first, lost version of the libretto. This “Auden poem” was then identified, according to Henze’s recollection, as a first, lost version of the libretto (Bachmann and Henze, Briefe einer Freundschaft, p. 226 and p. 502). In his autobiography, Henze also mentions that he received a synopsis very soon after his first meeting with Auden and Kallman, but that it was lost (Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 164-165). As for the promptness of Auden’s and Kallman’s responses and willingness to listen, Henze writes again to the friend Bachmann on 20 December 1959:

The Anglo-Americans are diligent people: Auden-Kallman have already delivered two acts of the ‘elegy’, the first one already changed according to my wishes, completely according to plan. e.g. I write in the margin ‘instead of this cabaletta I would rather have a Ninna-Nanna of approx. 2 min.’ and soon a Lullaby came back from your Oxford colleague [Auden] by return post, which goes like this: My own, my own, the little planet flies,The snow-flake falls through ever colder years:My own, upon a human cheek it diesNot in its own but in another’s tear. look, what a beautiful thing! and how well it fits the situation of the signed author of this letter! Jesus and Mary!

Bachmann und Henze, Briefe einer Freundschaft, p. 231, translation by the author.

The correspondence shows that the librettists also had an influence on the musical character of certain passages, as in the case of the duet between the secretary, Countess Carolina von Kirchstetten, and Dr. Reischmann, for which the two librettists suggest a duet in the style of Rossini (see this letter). Henze indeed transforms the text into a duet explicitly inspired by the formal conventions of early 19th-century Italian melodrama through the triple repetition of Reischmann’s verse, followed by Carolina’s verse, and the clustering of the two at the end; it culminates, supported by the full ensemble of winds and percussion, in a Man mano accelerando e crescendo. In the same letter, the librettists made a suggestion regarding the Act 3 epilogue that was not taken up by the composer.

Henze, for his part, often demanded textual abridgements and changes, which the librettists did not always comply with: for example, Henze preferred to replace the edelweiss, the flower that was to be picked by the two young lovers, with another rarer alpine plant, flower, or root (see this letter). Finally, Henze, horrified by the cruel personality of the main character Gregor Mittenhofer, suggests softening the terrible impact of the tragic ending (see this letter).

The correspondence also addresses who should be entrusted with the translation of the libretto of Elegy for Young Lovers from the English original into German for the premiere at the Schlosstheater in Schwetzingen on 20 May 20 1961 (see this letter). All three think of Bachmann, however, Auden is not convinced, suggesting his brother-in-law Michael Mann. The German version was finally completed by Ludwig Landgraf with the collaboration of Werner Schachteli and the composer.

Another subject of the correspondence is the performance of Elegy for Young Lovers at Glyndebourne on 13 July 1961. The director Günther Rennert expressed some of his wishes to Henze concerning the staging and the position of the long pause in the middle of the opera, which the two librettists did not want to accept (see this letter).

The Bassarids

The trio’s written correspondence, which had been interrupted for several years, was resumed on 27 July 1964 with a letter from Kallman to Henze. Pleased with his news, Henze wrote two important letters from Castel Gandolfo on 6 August about The Bassarids, the opera premiered exactly two years later. In the first, addressed only to Kallman, he informs him that he has almost completed the composition of Der junge Lord (1964) and has already sketched out the planning for The Bassarids. Then, in the second letter - four pages addressed to his “divinities Wystan and Chester” - he wrote that he now wanted to begin composing the opera, which he affectionately referred to as “Becky”, having been greatly impressed by the manuscript of the libretto that they had sent or personally given him in the summer of 1963. He feared that he would hardly be able to cope with such a “twilight of the human being”, clearly alluding to Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, which he had seen in Vienna the year before - on the advice of the librettists. In his autobiography, Henze also mentions that both Auden and Kallman encouraged him to overcome his aesthetic aversion to Wagner (see Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, pp. 206-207). The final scene of The Bassarids, in which the city of Thebes bursts into flames, is considered an allusion to the end of Götterdämmerung.

Henze expresses concerns about the length of the text in the same letter. He was aware of how difficult it can be for librettists to shorten verses and entire sections of text. Therefore, using the most precise mathematical calculations, he endeavoured to make the librettists understand how unbearably long their text could become with music. In a letter from Kirchstetten dated 16 August and referring directly to this subject, Auden asks Henze about the possibility of publishing the original libretto with the parts not set to music and to highlight them graphically. Auden’s request was granted: in the first printed edition of 1966, the verses that were not set to music were included in parenthesis so that readers could recognise the metrical scheme and the alternation of arias, dialogue in a quasi-recitative, choral voices, etc.

Another often-discussed topic in this correspondence concerns the title of the opera: “Bassarides” is the title of a lost tragedy by Aeschylus about another Dionysian victory, but is also a term that generally referred to the male and female participants in the procession of the god. On the advice of Erich Robertson Dodds, a philologist and friend of the librettists, the three authors chose “Bassarids” or “Bassarides” as the title, perhaps to distance themselves from Euripides’ tragedy and to make it clear from the outset that this was a reinterpretation of Euripides’ Bacchae, according to Franco Serpa (interview with Serpa, quoted in Minetti, Euripide rivisitato, p. 32). Henze was not immediately convinced by the choice: he had not been able to find anyone in his friendship circle who had ever heard this name. Later, however, Henze was also convinced of the choice and wrote to Bachmann: “Oh, yes: “Bassariden” exists in German, it’s in the Konversations-Lexikon (Knaur), just so you know. And maenads are just the females. I know all about these things now because I have many books, especially the indispensable Dodds” (Bachmann and Henze, Briefe einer Freundschaft, p. 254, translation by the author). Finally, in his letter of 23 November 1964, Auden noted the final title and names of the play’s characters and also suggested their exact accentuation.

Ten months before the Salzburg premiere of The Bassarids on 6 October 1965, Henze announced that he had completed its composition: he was not in a position to judge it, but was happy to have completed a demanding work for which he could only thank God (see this letter). In this letter, Henze complained about the opening motto of the opera “Die Mythe log...”, which is taken from a poem by the German poet Gottfried Benn (1886-1956). It is the last line of a stanza from the poem Verlorenes Ich: “The world dismantled. And space and time | and what mankind wove and surged, | function only of infinities – | the mythe lied” (see Benn, Static Poems, p. 47). Henze explains that it was not pleasant for an anti-fascist like himself to associate his own name in any way with that of Benn, who, although a great poet, supported Hitler’s rise and became president of the Prussian Academy of Arts. He therefore asked, albeit in vain, to be allowed to add another quotation, to the enigmatic three words “the mythe lied”, to which only three points of omission were added right next to them.

When the libretto and music were finished, the three authors began to discuss the German translation of the libretto, which Helmut Reinold was initially commissioned to do (these letters). The letters reveal a certain dissatisfaction with Reinold’s work, and the score states that Reinold ‘arranged’ the text, but that the ‘German text version’ was by Maria Bosse-Sporleder.

The Solitudes

In the summer of 1964, Kallman suggested Henze compose a cantata for the Swedish singers Elisabeth Söderström (soprano) and Kerstin Meyer (mezzo-soprano), entitled The Solitudes: a short cycle of four poems, for soprano, mezzo-soprano with one or two pianos as accompaniment or string quartet, “as a kind of relaxation before ‘Becky’” (see this letter). Although Kallman had written the text in full, Henze “never found time to set it to music”, as he writes in his autobiography (see Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 172). A letter reproduce some of Kallman’s stanzas (quatrains) from this unfinished project (see A04145A2). There is also a brief extract (two stanzas) in Henze’s autobiography (see Henze, Bohemian fifths: An Autobiography, p. 172).

Moralities

Between 1966 and 1967 Henze and Auden also worked on the school opera Moralities based on Aesop’s fables. The correspondence also reveals that Kallman was originally going to take part in the project however, Auden became the sole author of the libretto. They did not settle on the subject of the opera until the autumn of 1966 (perhaps because they were still busy with The Bassarids, which was premiered on 6 August 1966). The school opera is mentioned for the first time in the correspondence in a letter from Auden to Henze dated 14 July 1966, in which he tells the composer that he was rather startled by the idea of a school children’s choir. In this statement, Auden was probably already alluding to the school opera as part of the Cincinnati May Festival, which was later to become Moralities. Still in the summer, on 27 August 1966, Henze made it clear in a letter to the two librettists that he had to talk to them about the school opera because he had reserved October 1966 for the composition of this work, which was to last a maximum of 30 minutes. It was not until 8 September 1966 that Henze received a letter from the two librettists in which they wrote that they had found the idea for a school opera for the Cincinnati May Festival, namely “a suite of dramatised fables by Aesop”.

The letter of 11 November 1967 with Auden’s corrections to the text of Moralities printed by Schott (on 3 July 1967 Henze wrote that he thought it was a beautiful work) is the last surviving postal document of the correspondence between Henze and the two librettists; Auden died on 29 September 1973, Kallman on 18 January 1975.

“The World of Art”

In their correspondence, Auden, Kallman and Henze mainly report on their own artistic projects, but also on their experiences as frequent visitors to opera performances, concerts and premieres. The description of their visits, especially to Central Europe, the “world of art”, to use Henze’s expression (see this letter), formulates interesting critiques as retrospectives on the musical life of the time (see, for example, their comments on Igor Stravinsky in this letter; on Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss in this letter; on Arnold Schönberg in this letter, on Bedřich Smetana, Leoš Janáček and Franz Joseph Haydn in this letter).

Travel

The correspondence documents the many trips of the three correspondents between Europe and New York - the main residence of the two librettists (by plane or by ship, e.g., on the Hanseatic Transatlantic) - as well as within Europe. Cities such as Berlin and Salzburg, where the three attended performances of their works, or Oxford, where Auden taught (see these letters), or Athens (vgl. this letter), where Kallman had a love affair with some members of the Evzones (soldiers of the former Royal Greek Life Guard), or Kirchstetten, where Auden and Kallman had their summer home and Henze often visited them, are mentioned in the correspondence. The postal addresses of the documents also reveal, for example, that although Auden was living in Berlin in the winter of 1964-1965 as artist-in-residence of the Ford Foundation, he was in New York in Dezember.

Homosexuality and Private Life

In this correspondence, Henze, Auden and Kallman address their homosexuality in different ways. Kallman is the only one who openly and repeatedly discusses his homosexuality, for example, in jokes or reports of flirtations and dates. Auden, on the other hand, always remains very reserved on the subject, rarely making remarks about homosexuality, e.g. in a letter to Henze he writes: “A “queer” reputation provides some people with a motive for malice and ill-will, but is something we all have to put up with”. Henze hardly reports any affairs (with exception in two letters to Kallman). An exchange of letters with Kallman reveals that Folker Bohnet was Henze’s lover in the mid-1960s. In addition, Auden and Kallman mention Giulio Di Majo, with whom Henze had a relationship in the early 1960s, in a final sentence before signing off. Surprisingly, the surviving documents of the correspondence do not mention Fausto Ubaldo Moroni, who became Henze’s partner from the mid-1960s. The letters reveal that there were love affairs in Kallman’s life that overlapped with his relationship with Auden, in particular one with a young Greek named Kosta - a friend of Yannis with whom Kallman also had a love affair. The three sometimes address each other in the feminine form: For example, Kallman greets Henze at the end of a letter with “sisterly love and kisses”, or he signs a letter as “Penelope”. Auden is sometimes referred to by Henze as “Miss Master” (see this letter) or he refers to himself as “mother” (see this letter) or as “olle Tante” (old aunty) (see this letter).

The edition was able to build upon preparatory work (transcription of all documents) by Dr. Philipp Heitmann, to whom we extend our heartfelt thanks for the work done. We also thank Prof. Dr. Joachim Veit, who actively supported us in the autopsy of the sources at the Paul Sacher Foundation. Special thanks are also due to the curator of the Hans Werner Henze Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Dr. Simon Obert, who helped clarify uncertainties and was always willing to help.

We express our sincere thanks to Dr. Yolanda Acker for the linguistic review of the English comments and for advice on language-related questions.

A big thank you goes to the project team of the Auden Musulin Papers , who helped to explore open questions in Auden’s biography.

Dr. Irmlind Capelle is also warmly thanked for assistance in deepening the Critical Commentary and in bibliographic research. In addition, we thank our student assistant, Sophie Stremel, for her diligent support.

Finally, our thanks go to the Hans Werner Henze Foundation, namely Dr. Michael Kerstan and to the Literary Executor of the Estate of Auden and Kallman, Edward Mendelson, for permission to publish the documents.

Elena Minetti
Detmold, February 2024

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