Letter [Carbon copy] from H. W. Henze to W. H. Auden/C. Kallman, August 6, 1964

[Typescript]

Hans Werner Henze

Castel Gandolfo (Rom)
Via dei Laghi 18

August 6, 1964 Divinities Wystan and Chester,

After having almost finished the buffa on the
Bachmann libretto which will be premiered in Berlin
next April, and I hope you will be there,* my thoughts
are already pretty much involved with "Becky." *I
have been reading it again and again* and more and more
I see this will be a great opera provided that I will
have the force, vigor, and virtue necessary to reply
to the challenge you have no doubt bestowed upon me.
Like in the case of "Elegy," but with more understanding
and I hope more maturity, this libretto is a love letter
and I tremble before the amount of love you are giving
me in this text. While in "Elegy" you wanted just
sweetness, fun, and some more tragical moments, here
you really want my intestine, coglioni, il cazzo, il
culo,* e tutta l’anima intera più un senso di greatness.
I honestly do not know whether I have it in me or not
to live up to the immensity of this Menschendämmerung *.
But even if I’m dead, dumb, crazy, harlot or a monk
after having written this work, I will not care. I
shall start to write it in the beginning of September
and I’ve already made plans how to, and have collected
almost entirely the musical modi d’espressione for it.

You remember perhaps that I wrote you two years ago
when I had my first musical visions of the work and you
had not yet started to write the libretto. I said
in that letter * I wanted a text in which more
often than usual and more than in any opera written
before, the music would be allowed to carry along
the text. In other words, that a phrase of the text
would inspire the music to fly up like an eagle: what
I really meant was in practical terms, that the music
would continue to say things the text had started to
say. This sounds perhaps a bit odd now, but you will
understand what I mean when I go on now. There is an
example for what I mean: Alban Berg’s most beautiful
"Altenberg Songs." The text is nothing to write home
about, but the music makes it okay by giving all
possible profundity and background and inkling to what
the composer must have sensed when he decided to make
music out of those words.

Last summer when I received your manuscript. I
was shaken with emotion and you know the rest. Now
that I’m starting to compose the work I have to utter
some requests I beg of you humbly and with all my

HWH‡
–2–
adoration to understand and to consent to.

You are craftsmen enough to understand that an
opera in one act cannot be longer than ninety minutes.
Not only that people might have the wish to go out and
pee or to have an ice cream soda after a while, but
also because the attack of fury, hatred, desperation,
and scorn I want to deliver on this occasion would not
be tolerable for a longer time. Not even by the most
patient friends of my music. It also would make it
impossible to sustain the kind of tension for more than
one and a half hours and were it to last longer, I would
have to become either repetitious or less concentrated.
I would have to change the whole plan and I would have
to compose a kind of perpetual Judenquintett from Salome *
sort of thing to bring home the whole lot of text, and
the music would never have time to have her say without
the singers because I want the singers to keep quiet
here and there.

The manuscript has fifty-five typewritten pages
of which fifteen are stage directions. The remaining
forty pages include 1,620 verses. If you speak this
text, one spoken line would take three seconds. The
whole work, if spoken, would last 4,860 seconds, that
is to say eighty-one minutes. If you consider the
whole work written allegro vivace, a‡nd consider the
sung line one and a half times longer than it was when
spoken, the whole thing would last 120 minutes. In
the latter calculation no time for preludes, transform-
ation music, entrate and exits, and no change of speed
whatsoever is taken into consideration.

You understand that you have to cut enormously.*
I take the liberty to ask you for these cuts remembering
that you announced last year in your telegram * that the
first version of 'Rebecca *' had just been finished and
that must have implied somehow that you considered it
not an unchangeable, definite version yet. Please help
me and do cut even more than I allowed myself to sug-
gest in the text I’m sending you by the same mail.* I
indicated moments in the text where I felt that this
could have been omitted because it made things more
direct or concentrated or was not absolutely necessary
for the understanding of the happenings. Please don’t
be cross with me, but after all we are friends and it’s
much too hard to compose music for to see it cut down
later and also it would hurt the planned, symphonic
forms of the piece more than can ever happen in a
Nummernoper if you have to take things out.* Your love
for music and opera, I discover has in this case some-
times made you compose it already with the text, you
occasionally seem to have forgotten to leave space for
the music. If i[sic]‡ would compose "Becky" as it is now and

HWH‡
–3–
follow exactly the images I have, the work would pro-
bably last four hours, the opera house would be floating
on pee, singers would faint, piles would grow, trombone
players die of burst blood vessels, and last but not
least, we would have a failure which would be too sad.*

Pleeeeeeeeze be good to me and return the libretto
to me with either accepting the cuts I propose and magari
adding some more, or give me another reduced version.
Please do it quickly because I want to start soon. And
Wystan, please pray for me when you go to the messa in
the morning.

Although the Salzburg bunch of liar‡s and hypocrites
have told the press they accepted Becky for ’66, I
have not yet heard from them directly, and a rumor came
to my ear that they will not do it there. Also, the
grosses Festspielhaus will be occupied entirely in ‘66
because Mr. von Karajan will then evoke the spiritus
loci of Salzburg by presenting "Carmen." It is all
very difficult, but I do not want to be bothered
with those impossible creatures. There are more opera
houses to perform this work in, e.c.‡ il Salisburghesi[sic]‡,
certamente dispirati‡dal egregio[sic]‡ Maestro von Einem mi
vogliono rompere i coglioni. Non troveranno modo
perchè[sic]‡ mi frego di loro.

"Elegy" in its third year now is going to reach a
number of performances almost equal to "The Rake’s
Progress." Even in the U.S. they’re going to have it
now since Mr. Bing has not dropped dead yet and since
everybody warns me to try the City Center Opera where
it would be performed unrehearsed, I allowed the
Juilliard School of Music to do it in April 1965, telling
them to contact you both this coming winter for instructions.*
And they will also present it in Washington. Lauren
Driscoll told me they were the best thing one could
get nowadays in America. There will also be a production
of it in Santa Fe, but who wants to go there. I conducted
"Energy" various times in Berlin last winter, two perform-
ances in Brussels,* and one in a place as remote as
Helsinki,* the only place I went during the last season
in which I really did not find anything to fuck. Here
we were, an almost entirely gay opera ensemble and
nothing to fuck! Mr. Dooley almost died of frustration
and so did Mrs. Driscoll,* although she pretended that
nothing was further from her ambitions than being co-
involved with "them Finns". The production assistant‡,
darling Winnie Bauenfeind, whom you must have met, told
everybody that life in Helsinki was hell and that he
longed for Berlin, but was then found out to have it
night after night with the little squealing barman
form‡ downstairs, full of pimples. "Elegy" was a success
all the same. Entire pages in the papers were filled

HWH‡
–4–

with raves, but we all were, although we didn’t admit it,
of the same opinion. Evelyn Lear uttered at the morning
of our departure (she was the only lady in "Nozze di
Figaro" * who had not received applausi a scena aperta):
"You can have those Finns. I’ll wrap them in paper and
give them all to you. You can have them."

With this highly interesting narration I say good-
bye to you for today. Please write to me quickly and
help me to make 'Becky' . . .
Abracci‡af‡fetuosi‡,

Letter [Carbon copy] from H. W. Henze to W. H. Auden/C. Kallman, August 6, 1964

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Letter [Carbon copy] from H. W. Henze to W. H. Auden/C. Kallman, August 6, 1964

Absolute Chronology

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Letter [Carbon copy] from H. W. Henze to W. H. Auden/C. Kallman, August 6, 1964