Henze, Hans Werner: Brief an Auden, Wystan Hugh/Kallman, Chester. Castel Gandolfo (Roma), Donnerstag, 6. August 1964
author: Henze, Hans Werner
language: en
availability: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Hans Werner Henze-Stiftung (Dr. Michael Kerstan). (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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, [The first performance of The Young Lord took place on 7 April 1965 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which had also commissioned the work.] my thoughts are already pretty much involved with Becky. [The three authors often abbreviate the title of the work The Bassarids as Becky in their correspondence.]I have been reading it again and again [Henze had already received the libretto of The Bassarids last summer, see below.] 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, [These last three words are swear words.] 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[^1]. 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.

[^1: This is a neologism Henze coined using the title of Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods) and changing it to Menschendämmerung (The Twilight of Men). In his Autobiography, p. 206, Henze writes that Auden and Kallman posed a conditio sine qua non for Henze to begin composing The Bassarids: that is, the librettists wanted Henze to listen to Wagner's Götterdämmerung for the first time before writing their opera.]

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 [A letter dated 1962 in which Henze recounts his first ideas about the opera The Bassarids has yet to be located.] 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 –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[^2] 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.

[^2: The so-called Judenquintett in Richard Strauss’ opera Salome takes place in Scene IV: the religious quarrel between the five Jews, whose voices overlap in this scene of ensemble, leads to fortissimo passages, culminating before Salome's dance.]

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, transformation music, entrate and exits, and no change of speed whatsoever is taken into consideration.

You understand that you have to cut enormously.[^3] I take the liberty to ask you for these cuts remembering that you announced last year in your telegram [The telegram Henze is referring to has not been located.] that the first version of Rebecca[^4] 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 suggest in the text I’m sending you by the same mail. [It is likely that Henze attached the previously mentioned 55-page manuscript of the libretto, which is lost according to Schottler, to this letter.] 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. [The Bassarids is indeed constructed like a classical symphony in four movements and not in operatic numbers.] Your love for music and opera, I discover has in this case sometimes made you compose it already with the text, you occasionally seem to have forgotten to leave space for the music. If i would compose Becky as it is now and –3– follow exactly the images I have, the work would probably 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. [The opera in its final version (without the central Intermezzo) lasts a full 2 hours and 20 minutes.]

[^3: Concerning the cuts in the original libretto, see the chapter Kürzungen am Originalentwurf in: Wolfram Schottler, Die Bassariden von Hans Werner Henze , pp. 133-169. According to Schottler, the original 55-page libretto mentioned by Henze in this letter is lost, but a 44-page libretto and also a typewritten document entitled Anmerkungen zur Kürzung der Bassariden , which was probably written by Henze at the same time as his two letters of 6 August 1964 (this one and his letter to Kallman), are kept at the Paul Sacher Foundation.]

[^4: On the use of Rebecca as a pseudonym for The Bassarids there is an interesting anecdote in Wystan and Chester. A Personal Memoir of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman by Thekla Clark, p. 91: We were all slightly puzzled when Wystan received a letter from a friend in New York who was surprised to learn that they were working on a libretto based on Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca . Chester solved the puzzle. They were working on a libretto based on Euripides' play The Bacchae, which Chester called Becky. By the time the phrase got to New York it had evolved into Rebecca.]

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 lia r 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, ex conclusio il Salisburghesi, certamente disperati dal egregio Maestro von Einem mi vogliono rompere i coglioni. Non troveranno modo perchè 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. [The US premiere of Elegy for Young Lovers took place on 29 April 1965, conducted by Henze himself at The Juilliard Opera Theatre in New York.] 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 performances in Brussels,[^5] and one in a place as remote as Helsinki, [The performance in Helsinki took place on 30 April 1964.] 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, [Here, Henze is referring to the tenor Driscoll as Mrs., in the feminine. This is often the case in Henze's network of homosexual artists.] although she pretended that nothing was further from her ambitions than being coinvolved with them Finns. The production assistan t , 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 from downstairs, full of pimples. Elegy was a success all the same. Entire pages in the papers were filled

[^5: The dates of Henze's performances in Berlin of Elegy for Young Lovers could not be found, however, in 1964 the Radio-Symphony-Orchestra Berlin and the Deutsche Oper Orchestra Berlin released a recording of the opera conducted by Henze. The opera was performed on 24 February 1964 at the Opéra National in Brussels. The date of the second performance has yet to be determined.]

–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[^6] 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.

[^6: The soprano Evelyn Lear had played the role of Cherubino during performances of Le Nozze di Figaro at the Salzburger Festspiele in 1963 and 1964. Information about the Helsinki performance could not be traced.]

With this highly interesting narration I say goodbye to you for today. Please write to me quickly and help me to make Becky . . . Abbracci affettuosi,