Introduction to the correspondence of Hans Werner Henze and Miguel Barnet

Archives of the Original Documents

The correspondence between Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) and the Cuban writer, poet and ethnologist Miguel Barnet (*1940) is partly kept in the Hans Werner Henze Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel and partly in Barnet’s private archive in Havana. While the original postal documents held in Basel could be consulted in person, those held in Havana were only accessible in the form of reproductions, which provided the basis for the material description of the letters.

Scope and Content

The correspondence between Henze and Barnet includes 64 postal documents (including 30 letters, 14 postcards, 8 letter cards and 12 telegrams), 15 of which were written by Henze and 49 by Barnet. Some of the letters contain enclosures that are closely related to the respective letter, e.g. Henze’s Schedule in autumn 1982 or Barnet’s poem Sexta Sinfonía.

Period

The correspondence began immediately after Henze’s return from his first trip to Cuba from 21 March to 16 April 1969, during which the two men had met in person. In his autobiography (see Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 253), Henze reports that even before his arrival in Cuba he wanted to meet Miguel Barnet, the Cuban author of the documentary novel El Cimarrón. Biografia de un cimarrón, which he “wanted to try to set to music” (Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 254). Henze also travelled to Havana because he wanted to know the local artistic culture “in this spontaneous, vibrant, revolutionary world” and to search for answers to the questions like: “What sort of an approach did they have to art? What was expected of artists, what kind of involvement? Who or what was a revolutionary artist?” (Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 254). On his own initiative, Henze looked up Barnet’s number in the local telephone directory, called him and met him at the Hotel Riviera in Havana (see Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 254). This meeting marked the beginning of an intense intellectual and artistic friendship, which is documented in their twenty-year correspondence. Although several letters and postcards are undated, it has been possible to reconstruct that the first letter card from Barnet dates from late spring 1969 and the last from 8 September 1989. During this period, the two corresponded regularly, albeit not very frequently. The year in which Henze and Barnet exchanged the most letters was 1970, with a total of 12 postal documents, while only one letter per year has survived from the last years of their correspondence from 1982 to 1989.

Language

The correspondence is written in English and Spanish. The first three postal documents (two letter cards and one telegram) are written in English, then from 1970 to 1980 the correspondence is mainly in Spanish, and from 1981 to 1989 exclusively in English. The postcards are mainly written in English. However, as most of them are undated (of 14 postcards, only one is explicitly dated by Barnet and postmarks can be used to date two others – one post card of 31 May 1978 and one post card of 21 June 1975 – with certainty), it is not possible to determine with certainty whether they originate from the phase in which the two mainly wrote to each other in Spanish (1970-1980) or in English (1981-1989).

The use of both these languages means that Henze never writes in his mother tongue and Barnet only rarely. Henze has a strong command of English, while his knowledge of Spanish is significantly lower. This was due to the fact that Henze had only started to learn Spanish shortly before travelling to Cuba. Nevertheless, the letters he wrote in Spanish are legible and comprehensible. In a letter dated 21 May 1971, he states that he would like to write in English as his Spanish is not good enough. Nevertheless, he continued writing this and later letters to Barnet in Spanish - until 1980. In the same letter of 21 May 1971, Henze explains that English was the language of the enemy, i.e. the American blockade as opposed to the Soviet Union, Cuba’s ally in the Cold War, and therefore he tried not to use it. There are no indications in Henze’s letters as to why he wrote in English from 1981 onwards, but it is very likely that he preferred to use a language more familiar to him, as he no longer had the opportunity to practise his Spanish.

Henze’s Spanish is strongly influenced by his knowledge of the Italian language, with occasional grammatical or idiomatic influences from German. For example, in his letter of 21 July 1970 he uses the expression “la Revolución va adelante en su camino justo!”, which is not idiomatic in Spanish (in Spanish “va por (el) buen camino” is more common). Henze probably derived this expression from the Italian phrase “sulla giusta strada” and thus used the adjective “giusto” or “justo” in Spanish. The Italian influence is also noticeable in his grammar, e.g. Henze writes “quiero ver Rogelio y todos los ‘antiguos’ amigos” in his letter of 19 June 1979 and uses the object complement with the verb “ver”, which is correct in Italian but requires the particle “a” in Spanish. Sometimes Henze uses made-up words that sound Spanish, such as “batudo” instead of “aplaudido” in his letter of 12 October 1970, but do not exist in Spanish. In the same letter, the expression “hasta el verano” (in Spanish, “antes del verano” would be more correct) could be derived from the German expression “bis zum Sommer”. Henze sometimes makes grammatical errors (such as in the letter of 11 February 1974 “cuentar” instead of “contarte” or “llego” instead of “llegue”) and misses accents (Henze often does not use them in Spanish, e.g. in the same letter he writes “mas” instead of “más”, “como” instead of “cómo” or ‘mi’ instead of “mí”).

Although Barnet is a native Spanish speaker, like Henze, he often omits accents in words that would require them, e.g. “musica” and “hacia”. Barnet’s English is often influenced by his native Spanish. Sometimes he doesn’t use the first personal pronoun “I” (see, for example, his postcard on 31 May 1978), which is common practice in Spanish, but, strictly speaking, a mistake in English. Furthermore, Barnet sometimes translates Spanish expressions literally into English, for example he uses the expression “saltando de alegría” as a literal translation of “jumping of joy” (instead of “jumping for joy”) in his postcard from summer of 1979. In the salutations of his letters, Barnet uses both “Hans” and “Henze”, while Henze only addresses his friend by his first name “Miguel” or the diminutive form “Miguelito”. Barnet often uses a semicolon after the greeting, which is not correct in English.

Henze’s Writing Peculiarities

Apart from the 5 telegrams, all 10 of Henze’s extant letters in his correspondence with Barnet are handwritten. As in other correspondence from the same period, Henze’s handwriting is in the lowercase and - although very small - is clean and legible. Henze seems to have preferred to write with fine felt-tip pens in various colors (e.g. brown, blue, black and violet) instead of ballpoint pens. In his correspondence, he often used his own letterhead with a pre-printed letterhead including the address of his Villa La Leprara in Marino.

Barnet’s Writing Peculiarities

Of Barnet’s 20 letters, 12 are typewritten and 8 are handwritten. The latter were obviously written at times when Barnet did not have a typewriter at his disposal, e.g. at the airport (cf. the letter of 14 January 1982, where Barnet explicitly writes: “(This is a note at the airport of Havana, excuse me for the handwriting)” or during his stay in Europe (cf. the letter of 15 December 1984). The 14 postcards are handwritten, as are most of the 8 letter cards, with the exceptions of 3 typewritten letter cards. Barnet’s handwriting is not as neat as Henze’s, but it is legible. The letter cards are sometimes very creatively designed: For example, they contain some original tempera paintings (cf. the letter card from summer 1970 and the letter card of 12 August 1970). On postcards, he often disregards the classic division into two parts and also uses the address field for his message. Throughout the correspondence, Barnet adds a graphic signature to his signature, consisting of a circle crossed by two vertical arrows and small dashes and dots in the four segments of the circle (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Graphic signature by Barnet from his handwritten dedication to Henze in a copy of Alle träumten von Cuba, Henze 2 B 442, Henze’s Private Library, Hochschule für Musik, Detmold

How the letters were delivered

Much of the correspondence between Henze and Barnet is characterised by the hope and anticipation that they would meet again, as well as memories of happy encounters. Their twenty-year correspondence shows that they met in person several times in the following three periods:

1. during Henze’s first stay in Cuba from 21 March to 16 April 1969 (cf. Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 252 and p. 260);
2. during Henze’s second stay in Cuba from 8 November 1969 (he left for Cuba 6 November 1969) to 28/29 January 1970 (cf. Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 265);
3. during Barnet’s stay in Marino and Rostock in May 1982, where Barnet was able to hear Henze’s El Cimarrón and La Cubana live for the first time (cf. Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 395).

After Henze’s two stays in Cuba, he immediately planned further trips. Henze would have liked to have received an official invitation from Cuba as early as November 1970 (see Henze’s letter of 12 October 1970), but it never reached him. Barnet hoped that his friend would, at least, be able to travel to Cuba in February 1971 for the “Sono” festival (about which no further information could be found apart from the title), but once again this did not eventuate. After the “Padilla affair” in March 1971 and Henze’s signature on the open letter to Fidel Castro, in which he demanded the release of the poet Heberto Padilla and his wife Belikis Cuza Malé, Henze had become persona non grata in Cuba and a return was no longer possible (cf. Henze’s letter to Barnet dated 21 May 1971). In numerous letters from the period 1971-1981, Henze and Barnets’ desire to meet again and their regret at having to delay it again and again shine through. In a letter of 19 June 1979, Henze told Barnet of his wish to return to Cuba, preferably at the invitation of the government:

The planning of the third meeting between Barnet and Henze in May 1982 in Europe is documented in the correspondence (see e.g. Barnet’s letter between 15 January and 28 February 1982 and Barnet’s letter in April 1982). In addition, two letters in the summer of 1982 reflect Barnet’s gratitude (see Barnet’s letter, in which he writes “I cannot describe to you what I felt when I saw you at the Marino station waiting for me. It was a solid feeling of friendship and love”) and Henze’s memories of the time they spent together (see Henze’s letter of reply of 19 July 1982, in which he writes “[…] your stay in Marino was so wonderful that still now it seems you’ve left only yesterday”). It is very likely that Henze and Barnet met again after 1982, as Barnet was often invited to Europe, especially Germany, to present his books, and he was also a DAAD scholarship holder in 1989. After his correspondence with Henze had already stopped, he also received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2004 in recognition of his commitment to cultural exchange between Cuba and Germany. In a personal email communication with the editor of the correspondence on 4 April 2022, Barnet states that he visited Henze twice at his villa in Marino (see the quote below). However, this second visit is not mentioned in the correspondence located to date. It is likely that this and other meetings were arranged by telephone between the two friends and therefore there is no trace of them in the correspondence.

The friendship between Henze and Barnet stemmed from Henze’s desire to obtain ethnological information from Barnet (see Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 255) in order to begin composing El Cimarrón, his recital for four musicians based on Barnet’s homonymous documentary novel, and to deepen his knowledge of Cuban culture, politics and art. The ethnologist and writer received Henze in Havana with great hospitality and became an important mediator of Cuban culture for him. During his two stays in Cuba, Henze was able to establish a network of friends through Barnet, who are often mentioned in his correspondence (among the most important were Leo Brouwer and Rogelio Rodríguez). As he states in his autobiography (Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 255), Henze got to know “a whole series of younger and older writers and artists, as well as to songwriters and singers, all of them kindhearted souls, black and white alike, all animated and fired by optimism and by the experiments and endless imponderables of the revolutionary process”. In his letters, Barnet often informs Henze about the lives of their mutual friends. From time to time in his letters to Henze, Barnet explicitly addresses his partner Fausto Moroni, who had accompanied Henze on his trips to Cuba, so that Barnet had also got to know him personally. Barnet made several requests to Moroni to send him items such as glasses, dog vaccines and a pair of swimming trunks (see e.g. Barnet’s letter from February 1974). Barnet shared a passion for dogs with Moroni and Henze, and both often talk about their four-legged friends in their correspondence, cf. e.g. Barnet’s letter of 7 April 1973 and the last letter, in which Barnet asks Henze about the possibility of buying a short-haired Chihuahua. As the contact between Barnet and Henze had essentially begun through the use of Barnet’s documentary novel as a source for Henze’s music, the works El Cimarrón and La Cubana, both with libretti by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, feature strongly in the correspondence (see the explanation below). Henze also frequently reports to Barnet on his current musical projects, tours and success. Barnet also kept Henze informed about his new publications, the themes he was working on in his poems and novels and, from 1981 onwards, his travels and scholarships in Europe and America. At their meeting in May 1982, Barnet and Henze developed the idea of creating a musical work based on the Cuban fables of African Yoruba origin published by Barnet (Akeké y la jutía 1978, published in German in 1986) (see Barnet’s letter of summer 1982). This idea was pursued for some time, as Barnet announced in his letter of 15 December 1984 that he would be sending a copy of the German translation (Die stummen Hunde: kubanische Fabeln). The copy has been preserved in Henze’s private library and contains the following dedication:

Despite Barnet gifting him the book, Henze never made a musical version of Barnet’s African fables. In addition to their artistic projects and updating each other about their musical and literary activities, political themes take up a large space, especially after the Padilla affair. Both Henze and Barnet took an active stance on the controversy and exchanged their positions in letters that (as mentioned above) were most likely sent via trusted persons.

When Henze and Barnet met for the first time in March 1969, Henze was 43 years old and already an established and successful composer in Europe who had received important commissions. At 29 years old, Barnet was younger, but his ethnographic work on the escaped Cuban slave Esteban Montejo and the documentary novel El Cimarrón. Biografia de un cimarrón, published in 1966, had already attracted attention. Henze was familiar with Barnet’s book, which his friend Hans Magnus Enzensberger had recommended to him. Whether the younger Barnet already knew the composer Henze by name is uncertain. A close friendship soon developed between the two. It is clear from their correspondence that Barnet must have been extremely fascinated by Henze. He followed Henze’s artistic development with great interest. He either asked to hear recordings of his compositions or informed Henze that he had read reviews of his works in newspapers and magazines (see, for example, the letter of 3 January 1979. New York Times is often quoted in this context). Henze, for his part, was extremely grateful to Barnet for the intellectual and political exchange of ideas and for the reflections on art and literature. The early letters express a kind of brotherhood, political closeness and shared ideals. In this sense, Barnet often calls Henze “hermano” or “brother”, e.g. in the summer of 1969 Barnet writes in a letter card: “un saludo revolucionario, cubano, ecuménico y esencial de tu hermano cubano” (English translation by Yolanda Acker: “a revolutionary, Cuban, ecumenical and essential greeting from your Cuban brother, Miguel”).

It is clear from the correspondence that the friendship between Henze and Barnet deteriorated somewhat after their meeting in 1982 (apart from Barnet’s letter immediately after the meeting and Henze’s letter on 19 July 1982) and showed clear disturbances: In a letter dated 16 January 1985, Henze confronts Barnet about the fact that he had not really tried to see him in person during his travels. After this disappointment and the lack of an official invitation from the Cuban government following Barnet’s idea for a performance of El Cimarrón with Henze as conductor in 1986 on the occasion of the centenary of the abolition of slavery in Cuba, which never materialised (see Barnet’s letter of 1 December 1985), there is only one letter from Henze as well as five postcards and one letter from Barnet. In the last surviving letter from Henze to Barnet, dated 6 January 1986, Henze recalls the importance of his old friendship with Barnet, but nevertheless writes that he is “extremely hurt” to be ignored by the Cuban government, which had not officially invited him to Cuba since 1970:

Barnet’s last letter, dated 8 September 1989, makes it clear how much the friendship had suffered in recent years:

Despite Barnet’s intention to remedy the lack of communication, it is clear from their late correspondence that this did not happen, although it is conceivable that Henze and Barnet continued to speak by phone or met in person while Barnet was travelling in Europe. The memory of his friendship with Henze is still alive in Barnet. This is evident from the message he sent to the editor on 4 April 2022 after re-reading his correspondence with Henze:

The correspondence mentions 11 of Barnet’s literary works and 20 of Henze’s compositions.

Literary Works by Barnet:

• El Cimarrón. Biografia de un cimarrón
• La Canción de Rachel
• Claves por Rita Montaner
• La sagrada familia
• La vida real
• Akeké y la jutía: fábulas cubanas
• Oficio de ángel
• Fé de erratas
• Che
• Patria
• Sexta Sinfonía

Musical Works by Henze:

• El Cimarrón
• Compases para preguntas ensimismadas
• La Cubana oder Ein Leben für die Kunst
• Elegy for Young Lovers
• Das Floß der Medusa
• Heliogabalus Imperator
• Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer
• Le Miracle de la Rose
• Moralities
• Orpheus
• Prison Song
• Sinfonia N. 6
• The Bassarids
• The English Cat
• Tristan
• Undine
• Zweites Violinkonzert
• Il Vitalino raddoppiato
• Voices
• We Come to the River

El Cimarrón

Henze’s attention was drawn to Barnet’s book El Cimarrón. Biografía de un cimarrón, published in Spanish in 1966 and translated into German in 1968, at the suggestion of his friend, the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Enzensberger recommended this text to Henze as possible material for a musical work and prepared it for Henze’s purposes. (See the Correspondence between Henze and Enzensberger and the introductory text by Irmlind Capelle). As Barnet is neither a musician nor a librettist, the passages in the correspondence relating to El Cimarrón refer mainly to its importance in disseminating the history of Cuba, the work’s political message, and to the success of various performances. El Cimarrón was premiered in Aldeburgh on 22 June 1970 and was immediately performed on tour in Spoleto, München, Edinburgh, Berlin und Avignon (see Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, p. 296). Henze wrote to Barnet in a letter before the premiere of El Cimarrón of 20 July 1970 in Avignon:

El Cimarrón was performed on 3 October 1970 as part of the Berlin Festival. Henze once again wrote about his impressions to Barnet in a letter on 12 October 1970:

In a letter on 4 June 1971, after Barnet was finally able to hear the work and see the score, he reflects on what Henze’s El Cimarrón meant to him.

Even in the late 1970s, Barnet lamented (see, for example, Barnet’s Brief from autumn 1979) that he had not yet been able to hear El Cimarrón live. This did not occur until May 1982 in Rostock during his visit to Henze.

La Cubana

In the correspondence there are references to the television opera La Cubana, based on Barnet’s novel La Canción de Rachel, mainly in relation to Henze’s desire to return to Cuba to learn about the country’s music for the development of his work. A few months after returning from his second trip to Cuba, Henze wrote to Barnet in a letter on 21 July 1970 that he had to travel to Cuba again in order to learn more about Cuban music and use its style in his work:

In his letter of 12 October 1970, the composer repeats the same motivation for wanting to return to Cuba:

After the “Padilla affair” and the resulting impossibility of returning to Cuba, Henze nevertheless informed Barnet about the progress of the work, although he regretted not being able to continue his musical research on Cuban music directly in Barnet’s country, see Henze’s letter to Barnet on 21 May 1971:

A letter from Henze to Barnet dated 11 February 1974 shows that the composer very much hoped that his friend would be able to attend the work’s first staged performance at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich on 28 May 1975. Barnet was unable to travel to Munich, however, as he was in hospital with hepatitis (see the postcard from June 1975) and possibly also because the Cuban government had still not allowed him to travel due to his support for Padilla. However, he wanted Henze to inform him about La Cubana, asking for recordings of the work and thanking him with a postcard for receiving the score published by Schott. He described the work as “a delicate piece, a unique music”. It was not until May 1982 that Barnet was able to experience La Cubana live on stage in Rostock, on the same occasion that he heard El Cimarrón with Henze.

By the end of the 1960s, Henze had already been following the history of Cuba closely for several years. In his autobiography, he reports that he had “read Ernesto (’Ché’) Guevara’s essay, ‘Socialism and the New Man in Cuba’, and his diaries from the years in 1958/9, when he was fighting in the Sierra Maestra” and was deeply impressed by their “humanitarian, almost religious social commitment” (see Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 229). Several books by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (some of them in Italian translation, such as Il socialismo e l’uomo a Cuba, Milan 1967) were actually in Henze’s private library, which is now kept in the library of the Detmold/Paderborn Musicology Seminar.

Henze’s political fascination with Cuba is an explicit theme of his correspondence with Barnet. The letters are characterised by their shared political ideals and a vision for the importance of art in revolutionary society. For example, Barnet sends his poem Che to Henze on a letter card with a portrait of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Henze, for his part, supported the revolution in his letters as well as the government of Fidel Castro (prior to the “Padilla affair”). In his letter of 21 July 1970, for example, he writes: “La importancia es que la Revolución va adelante en su camino justo! Viva Fidel!” (English translation by Yolanda Acker: “The important thing is that the Revolution is moving forward along the right path! Long live Fidel!”).

The arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla and his wife Belkis Cuza Malé on 20 March 1971 for criticising Castro’s government marked a turning point for both Henze and Barnet; from then on, disillusionment and mistrust of the Castro government are traceable in their correspondence. In protest against this arrest and in the name of freedom of expression, which was of fundamental importance to the ideals of the Cuban revolution, numerous intellectuals (including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luigi Nono, Hans Magnus Enzensberger und Elsa Morante) signed a petition supported by Le Monde in Paris calling for the release of Padilla and his wife. As Henze had signed the open letter to Castro (published in Le Monde on 9 April 1971 with the title “De nombreuses personnalités s’émeuvent de l’arrestation du poète cubain Heberto Padilla”, p. 32) he was unable to return to Cuba. Barnet also sided with his friend Padilla, i.e. against the Cuban government. His kind gesture of picking up his friend after his release from prison meant, as Henze recounts in his autobiography, that Barnet “was ostracized and that for the next seven years not a single one of his books or a line of his poetry appeared in print in Cuba.” (Henze, Bohemian Fifths. An Autobiography, p. 300). The “Padilla affair” is explicitly mentioned in the correspondence: in a letter dated 21 May 1971, Henze comments on the suicide of Yolanda Brito, wife of guitarist Leo Brouwer, and his frustration at the violation of fundamental freedoms in the revolutionary process, which even Fidel Castro had initially supported:

In the 1980s, Barnet began to inform Henze that he had recommenced his trips to Europe, but it is often clear from his expressions that he was controlled by the Cuban government, which, for example, did not authorise his participation in an event in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). In a letter to Henze at the beginning of 1982, Barnet wrote explicitly: “We might not be able to go to [the] Horizonte Festival for political reasons” and in a letter on 11 December 1983:

Details were mostly given verbally, but even if they were not explicitly mentioned, it can be assumed that the tense political situation of the 1980s had a negative impact on Barnet’s ability to travel his and international contacts, including his meetings with Henze.