Henze | Auden | Kallman
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Basic data
- Time period:
- 1. December 1958–11. November 1967
- Correspondence partner:
- Auden, Wystan Hugh
- Eisermann, Wolfgang
- Henze, Hans Werner
- Kallman, Chester
- Praetorius, Renate
- Editor(s):
- Minetti, Elena
Documents
Introduction to the Correspondence between Hans Werner Henze, Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman
General Information about the Correspondence
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.
Writing Peculiarities of the Correspondence Partners
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.
