Henze | 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

A special feature of this correspondence is the way in which it was delivered. Most of the correspondence between Cuba and Europe was not sent via an official postal service. For the most part, Barnet and Henze sent their letters via friends who travelled between Cuba and European cities, such as Ugné Karvelis, who worked at Editions Gallimard in Paris (see Barnet’s letter from summer 1970), or Vando Martinelli (see Barnet’s letter from summer 1982), to ensure that the letters reached their destination. This complicates the dating of some documents and can be misleading: a letter postmarked San Gimignano, 3 May 1982, for instance, was probably written by Barnet in Cuba at least a week earlier (see Barnet’s letter from April 1982) and someone Barnet had entrusted it to sent it from San Gimignano.