HANS WERNER HENZE: TRISTAN (1973) for Thomas Christopher Downes Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

HANS WERNER HENZE: TRISTAN (1973) For Thomas Christopher Downes Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

STEPHEN DOWNES University of Surrey, UK First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Downes, Stephen C., 1962– Hans Werner Henze – Tristan (1973). – (Landmarks in music since 1950) 1. Henze, Hans Werner, 1926– Tristan. 2. Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883–Influence. I. Title II. Series 780.9’2-dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Downes, Stephen C., 1962– Hans Werner Henze : Tristan (1973) / Stephen Downes. p. cm. – (Landmarks in music since 1950) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6655-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Henze, Hans Werner,1926- Tristan. 2. Tristan (Legendary character) I. Title. ML410.H483D69 2011 784.2’62–dc22 2011003882

ISBN 9780754666554 (hbk)

Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita Contents

List of Figures and Music Examples vii General Editor’s Preface ix Preface xi Acknowledgements and Permissions xiii

1 Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 1

2 Texts: Composition, Genre, Form, Theatre 53

3 Interpretations: Expression, Beauty, Mourning and Meaning 85

4 Epilogue: Two Works after Tristan 121

Bibliography 127 CD Track List 137 Index 139

List of Figures and Music Examples

Figures

2.1 Henze, Tristan: preludes for piano, electronic tapes and orchestra; summary of form and content 78

Music Examples

1.1 Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, Prelude to Act 1; opening 7 1.2 Arnold Schoenberg, Piano Piece, Op.11 No.1; opening 21 1.3 Schoenberg, Herzgewächse (Maurice Maeterlinck); opening 22 1.4 Claude Debussy, ‘Placet futile’ (Stéphane Mallarmé); introduction 25 1.5 Alban Berg, Piano Sonata, Op.1; opening 27 1.6 Kurt Weill, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra of Wind Instruments, Op.12; opening 31 1.7 Hans Werne Henze, Being Beauteous (Arthur Rimbaud); bars 187–92 47

2.1 Henze, Tristan; note row chart 62 2.2a Henze, Tristan; ‘melodic patterns’ and inversions 63 2.2b Henze, Tristan; ‘2nd melodic patterns’ 64 2.2c Henze, Tristan; ‘3rd melodic patterns’ 65 2.3 Henze, Tristan; ‘minor elements’ 65 2.4 Henze, Tristan; Epilogue, ‘melodic patterns’ 66 2.5 Henze, Tristan; motivic derivations (after Fürst) 68 2.6 Henze, Tristan; first prelude, opening 69 2.7 Henze, Tristan; piano cadenza, sketch version (opening) 72

3.1 Henze, Tristan; first prelude, closing chords 87 3.2 Schoenberg, The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op.15 No.10 (Stefan Georg); opening 91 3.3 Henze, Sechs Stücke fur Junge Pianisten, No.1 ‘Ballade’; opening 102 3.4 Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, Act 3; closing bars 113 3.5 Henze, Tristan, fifth prelude (bar 455) 118

General Editor’s Preface

Several recent volumes in this series, devoted to in-depth studies of landmark compositions, have borne titles suggestive of an historical or inter-disciplinary nature. RobertAdlington’s account of Louis Andriessen’s setting of Plato in De Staat, Kenneth Gloag’s exploration of Nicholas Maw’s epic score, Odyssey, and Jonathan Cross’ commentary on Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus are now joined by a fourth such book – this time on the theme of Tristan, probably best known to musicians via Wagner’s monumental music-drama Tristan and Isolde, which was itself based on the medieval romance by Gottfried von Strassburg (c.1210). Stephen Downes’ masterly analysis of Henze’s Tristan (subtitled ‘Preludes for piano, electronic tapes and orchestra’) deals with the origins and often traumatic gestation of a work that exploits many emotive quotations and re-workings of material from Wagner (notably the famous/eponymous chords that open Act I and Birgit Nilsson’s (much distorted) rendition of the climax of Isolde’s Liebestöd) and from other sources, such as the medieval instrumental dance Lamento di Tristano, and sentences from Thomas d’Angleterre’s Tristan (spoken by a five-year-old child). Coincidentally, the electronic tapes that form such an important ingredient in Henze’s complex score were created by Peter Zinovieff (founder of the influential EMS studio) who had also collaborated with Birtwistle (as librettist) and whose son, Kolinka, recited the lines mentioned above. However, it is beyond the scope of this general preface to list or attempt to describe the multitude of inter-textual references that are identified and explored by the author. Downes guides the reader elegantly through this potential minefield of pluralism and allusion towards a summary of the work’s reception and a scholarly consideration of its psychological and aesthetic significance. Central to his commentary is an assured and insightful discussion of Henze’s musical language and the structural evolution of this remarkable fusion of concertante, symphonic and programmatic elements. Although, initially, Henze’s Tristan might disturb (even confuse) the listener, Stephen Downes’ revealing introduction cannot fail to enrich the experience and to inform further hearings with his enlightening study of the work’s detailed construction, its context, and its place in the composer’s output.

Wyndham Thomas University of Bristol

Preface

Hans Werner Henze (b.1926) is one of the most prolific and internationally famous composers of the period following the Second World War. He is amongst the most frequently performed and recorded composers of his generation, and has been the subject of numerous festivals in several continents. But he is also a composer of controversial and disputed status. His music has stimulated a critical polemic of notable vigour. His compositional career has been highly eclectic, touching many of the main developments in European concert music in the second half of the twentieth century: early involvement at Darmstadt, an apparently conflicting interest in post- Stravinskian neoclassicism, a subsequent (apparently anachronistic, frequently ambivalent) engagement with the Austro-German romantic tradition (especially Wagner and Mahler) and ‘Italianate’ lyricism, and artistic projects reflecting political radicalism in the 1960s and 70s. Together, these diverse enthusiasms have led to a provocative stylistic pluralism and overt intertextuality, an ‘impure’ music, as the composer often liked to call it, after Pablo Neruda’s concept of impure poetry – passionate and daring in its flirtations with the commonplace and kitsch as well as the transcendent and esoteric. Henze’s high profile has been reflected in recent musicology by his prominent position in John Bokina’s ambitious Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), Arnold Whittall’s survey Exploring Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and in Lawrence Kramer’s exercise in hermeneutics, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Henze’s autobiography has been published in English translation – Bohemian Fifths, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber 1998), and the same year saw a small collection of essays and interviews Henze at the RNCM: A Symposium, ed. Douglas Jarman (Todmorden: Arc, 1998). Two celebratory collections of essays in German appeared, to commemorate the composer’s eightieth birthday: ‘Hans Werner Henze: Musik und Sprache’, a Festschrift edition of Musik-Konzepte (April 2006) and Michael Kerstan and Clemens Wolken (eds), Hans Werner Henze: Komponist der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Henschel, 2006). The work of the German scholar Peter Petersen has been especially important. A monograph in English devoted to Henze has, however, yet to appear. This contribution to the ‘Landmark’ series therefore represents a significant step towards filling a notable empty space. Amongst Henze’s diverse and manifold works there are many excellent candidates for a focused and representative study. Tristan (1973) has been selected because it directly invokes the majority of the contexts and styles most characteristic of the composer, and does so in an impressive and grand manner. Stephen Walsh, xii Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) for example, considers it to be ‘one of the most ambitious and complex of all Henze’s concert works without voices’.1 A large-scale work for piano, orchestra and electronic tape, it explicitly explores Henze’s creative and wider psychological stance with regard to Wagner. Thus the work represents a powerful contribution to that ‘tradition’ of Tristan-alluding twentieth-century works. A work of multiple generic characteristics, it evokes and critiques romantic and modernist narratives while also suggesting the intertextuality characteristic of much so-called ‘postmodernist’ art. Thus the work is a fine example of how a single piece can interrogate the styles, expressions, genres and aesthetics of major conflicting trends in European culture. Marion Fürst’s monograph, a book version of her 1998 Hamburg University dissertation, offers a German-language companion to this project.2 But while there is overlap (in particular when she considers the reports of the compositional process and the materials in the Paul Sacher Archive, and offers analytical observations of row manipulations), the current book differs from hers in offering a wider contextual discussion of compositional precedents of dealing with the legacy of Wagner’s Tristan, has a broader view of aesthetic and syntactical issues, and leads to an interpretation radically distant from her (equally viable and valuable) approach. The book is organized into four sections. The first has three functions: to outline the legacy of interpretations of the Tristan and Isolde myth in Western culture; to describe compositional strategies manifest by twentieth-century works which allude to, derive from, or resist the influence of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in ways particularly relevant to Henze’s work; and to outline Henze’s ambivalent relationship to German cultural traditions, and to Wagnerism in particular. The second section describes and analyses the source texts (the sketches now collected in the Paul Sacher Institute in Basel; the recollections of the compositional process by both Henze and his collaborators, principally Peter Zinovieff), the main musical materials (note rows, allusions and quotations), and issues in the formal and dramatic structure. The third section builds towards an interpretation of the work’s potential meaning. Three topics are explored to contextualize the interpretation: the issue of tonality, and foreground and background unity; the aesthetics of the beautiful; and the work of mourning in an age of horror. The interpretation which ends this section takes, amongst other things, a Lacanian approach to the work’s ‘post-Wagnerian’ eroticism. The final section of the book offers comments on the sustaining of the Tristan legacy in two later symphonic works, the Seventh Symphony and Requiem.

1 Sleeve notes to Hans Werne Henze, Piano Concerto No.2; Tristan;Two Ballet Variations; Three Tientos for Guitar [The Henze Collection vol.4] (DG 449 866-2, 1996). 2 Marion Fürst, Hans Werner Henzes ‘Tristan’: Eine Werkmonographie (Neckargemünd: Männeles-Verlag, 2000). Acknowledgements and Permissions

Acknowledgements

A grant from the British Academy supported the costs of producing music examples, translating German texts, and of travel to the Paul Sacher Archive in Basel in September 2009. Archive staff were always extremely attentive and efficient. David Beard helped me untangle the microfilms on more than one occasion, and showed me some of Basel’s best drinking establishments. Neil Luck produced the music examples with exemplary skill and patience. Material in the final section of this book was presented as a paper at the Music and Emotion conference (University of Durham, August 2009) and I am grateful to Michael Spitzer for providing the opportunity to air some of my more speculative ideas before a wise audience. My work on Henze began with the preparation of a paper for the conference Gustav Mahler and the Twentieth Century, which I convened at the University of Surrey in 2001. I was then, and remain, extremely grateful for Henze’s generous, if cryptic, response to my ideas about his music.

Permissions

I am grateful for permission to reproduce the copyright musical material listed below:

Arnold Schoenberg: PianoPiece, Op.11 No. 1; © Copyright 1910 by Universal Edition AG, Wien/UE 18382 Copyright renewed 1938. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. xiv Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Arnold Schoenberg: The Book of the Hanging Gardens,Op. 15 No. 10; © Copyright 1914 by Universal Edition. Renewed copyright 1941 by Arnold Schoenberg/UE5338. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.

Kurt Weill: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra of Wind Instruments Op. 12; © Copyright 1925 by Universal Edition AG, Wien/UE 8339. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies

The good singers of old time … told this tale for lovers and none other, and by my pen, they beg you for your prayers. They greet those who are cast down, and those in heart, those troubled and those filled with desire. May all herein find strength against inconstancy and despite and loss and pain and all the bitterness of loving. Joseph Bédier, 19001

I still today seek a work of a dangerous fascination, of a sweet and shuddery infinity equal to that of [Wagner’s] Tristan – I seek in all the arts in vain. Friedrich Nietzsche, 18882

Wagner’s Tristan is a thoroughly obscene work. Thomas Mann, 19203

Tristan and Isolde are dead; they died in Buchenwald. Halldór Laxness, cited by Theodor Adorno, 19554

There would be no miracle today. Eyes still shut, Isabel could hear people resuming conversations and drifting off; a distant ambulance, like an evil clown … pierced the hum of humankind to come for Tristão, the piece of litter he had become. John Updike, 19945

The Impact of the Tristan Myth

The story of Tristan and Isolde has, through centuries of retelling, become a central myth of Western culture. This mythic status has been achieved because its drama

1 Joseph Bédier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult [1902], trans. Hilaire Belloc [1913] (New York: Dover, 2005), 89. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo [1888], trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 61. 3 Thomas Mann, Letter to Paul Steegemann, 18 August 1920; trans. in Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden, with an introduction by Erich Heller (London: Faber, 1985), 67. 4 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘New Music Today’ [1955], in Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Wieland Hoban (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 400. 5 John Updike, Brazil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 260. 2 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) powerfully exposes what seem to be ‘Universal’ truths about the human condition. Its fame is based to large degree on the subversive, all-consuming passion of its central lovers, who have been identified as embodying, as archetypes, the apparently endlessly and seductively fascinating conjunction of love and great suffering. The lovers’ ill-fated predicament and the forbidden, anti-social, taboo nature of their passion was to make them especially attractive models for romanticism’s central notions of erotic yearning and transfiguring love. Neglected for centuries after the writing of seminal versions in the medieval period, the story was therefore resurrected by the romantic generation as a central aspect of their nostalgic turn to the Middle Ages. New versions were written throughout the nineteenth century, with a particular zenith in the late romanticism and decadence of the fin de siècle. In the retellings made in the twentieth century the romantic idealism of redemption from unfulfilled desire in death was characteristically displaced by explorations of various liberating sexual politics or post-Freudian notions of the destructive nature of basic psychological drives.6 Tristan and Isolde have become lovers for all seasons. The oldest extant fragments of the tale date from the late twelfth century, but there were certainly earlier versions amongst lost oral traditions, especially from Celtic lands. French and German versions emerged in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, many of which include new revisions in the spirit of the culture of courtly love. That written by Thomas d’Angleterre (c.1170–75) was a model for Gottfried von Strassburg’s Middle High German version (c.1210), widely viewed as the classic medieval version and a crucial source for Richard Wagner. Many new German versions appeared in the nineteenth century, including famous Tristan poems by August von Platen (1825, 1830, 1834, and a drama too in 1827), and incomplete retellings by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1800), Friedrich Rückert, who tried to start from where Schlegel had left off (1839), and Karl Immermann (1841), who left his effort unfinished on his death and which Ludwig Tieck once contemplated completing. These romantic versions, especially Immermann’s, were important precedents for Wagner’s radical transformation of the tone and meaning of the myth, a version which was also heavily indebted to the nocturnal imagery of Novalis’s Hymns to the Night (1800) and the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1819). Wagner’s music drama (completed in 1859) immediately overshadowed all previous versions. It quickly became the standard modern telling of the myth. But it attracted as many detractors as disciples. Its sensuous, voluptuous musical beauty and overwhelming dramatic and poetic rhetoric repulsed as often as it seduced. Indeed, many of the work’s most important critics displayed remarkably intense and extreme ambivalence. Hans Werne Henze’s Tristan is a late twentieth-century manifestation of this artistic, psychological and philosophical struggle with the Tristan myth in a post- (or anti-) Wagnerian age.

6 For an oveview of the retellings of the story from the Middle Ages to modern times see Joan Tasker Grimbert, ‘Introduction’, to Tasker Grimbert (ed.), Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook (London: Routledge, 2002), xiii–ci. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 3

Among the contexts and precedents for Henze’s work, Friedrich Nietzsche’s fascination with Wagner’s version is especially crucial. He considered Tristan to be Wagner’s non plus ultra.7 The power of the music – which he heard as the fullest revelation of the ‘Dionysian’ character of music – sent him into states of rapture, but also into words of caution. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), a book whose first edition was dedicated to Wagner, he famously described the music’s intoxicating and overwhelming qualities. He asked whether it was possible to

imagine a man who could perceive the third act of Tristan and Isolde, unaided by word and image, simply as a tremendous symphonic movement, without expiring at the convulsive spreading of their souls’ wings? How could such a man, having laid his ear against the heart of the world will and felt the tumultuous lust for life as a thundering torrent or as a tiny, misty brook flowing into all the world’s veins, fail to shatter into pieces all of a sudden?8

In these dangers of Dionysian intoxication raised by the music of Tristan lie the seeds of Nietzsche’s later reaction against Wagner.9 This foreshadows his diagnosis in The Case of Wagner (1888) of the music of Tristan as a dangerous narcotic, as an expression of neurosis, and his identification of Wagner as the most ‘decadent’ of all modern artists. Nonetheless, Wagner – and Tristan especially – remained a necessary, vital experience for Nietzsche. But he repeatedly warns that ‘one pays heavily for being one of Wagner’s disciples’, principally in the ‘corruption’ of one’s taste and nerves. Wagner, the ‘greatest name’ in the spread of European decadence, produces art of sickness, miniaturism, artifice, sensuousness and of the ‘histrionics’ which are ‘an expression of physiological degeneration’. In all this, Nietzsche concludes, ‘Wagner sums up modernity’.10 As Nietzsche turned in his later writings to a critique of the ‘decadent’ Wagner so his view of the effects created by the surging chromatic harmonies of Tristan shifted. In Nietzsche contra Wagner he writes of the effect of ‘endless melody’: ‘One walks into the sea, gradually loses one’s secure footing, and finally surrenders oneself to the elements without reservation: one must swim.’ In the kind of movement evoked by these musical waves, Nietzsche argued, Wagner ‘overthrew the physiological presupposition of previous music. Swimming, floating

7 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 61. 8 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 101. 9 This is noted by Peter Franklin, ‘A Farewell, a Femme Fatale, and a Film’, in Keith Chapin and Lawrence Kramer (eds), Musical Meaning and Human Values (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 150–69 (165). 10 Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 155–6, 165, 169. 4 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

– no longer walking and dancing.’11 Nonetheless, he saw the experience of Tristan as a kind of perilous rite of passage towards an understanding of the suffering of the modern world and an emergence as a strong creative and analytical force. In summary, he famously declared the crucial role of Wagner’s Tristan decadence in modernity and its central significance in his own development: ‘I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this time; that is, a decadent.’ Nietzsche highlights the quality that has become the most common focus of the ambivalent reaction to the music of Wagner’s Tristan, its heightened sensuality. Somehow this musical love potion is also potentially poisonous. In his great essay ‘The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner’ (1933) Thomas Mann commented that ‘Nietzsche said he would not touch the score of Tristan unless he was wearing gloves’. In its sensuality lay the toxic, infectious quality of the work, for this, Mann argued, was an ‘unbounded, spiritualized sensuality, raised to a mystical order of magnitude and portrayed with the utmost naturalism, sensuality that will not be appeased by any gratification’.12 Tristan is potentially addictive. Mann cites Nietzsche’s pungent description of the effect of ‘the voluptuousness of hell’13 and declares that Wagner’s Tristan is ‘thoroughly obscene’ because, alongside the nocturnal world of Novalis, it drew upon the ‘lascivious areas’ of romanticism; for example, Friedrich von Schlegel’s ‘notorious’ Lucinde (1799).14 Mann’s is the most important critical response to Wagner’s Tristan and its decadence after Nietzsche. Wagner’s music drama also overtly infuses much of Mann’s fictional work. In the short story Tristan (1902) Mann tells how a copy of the score is discovered amongst ‘black-bound volumes’ in a sanatorium. One of the residents, Herr Spinell, shows it to a young pianist: ‘mutely he showed her the title page. He was quite pale; he let the book sink and looked at her, his lips trembling.’ The association of the work with sickness marks Mann’s story as a classic example of how the Tristan theme had, by the turn of the century, become central to the aesthetics and styles of decadence. Mann describes the girl’s performance: ‘She played the beginning with exaggerated and tormenting slowness, with painfully long pauses between the single figures. The Sehnsuchtsmotiv, roving, lost and folorn like a voice in the night, lifted its trembling question.’ It was all too much for the overhearing Frau Spatz, whose features Mann describes as developing ‘a corpse-like and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack.’15 This is a typically stylish expression of staple images of post-Wagnerian decadence,

11 Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1959), 666. 12 Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, 130. 13 From Nietzsche, Ecce homo, 61. 14 Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, 67–8. 15 Thomas Mann, ‘Tristan’, in Death in Venice / Tristan / Tonio Kröger, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 111. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 5 also found, in different stylistic terms, in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il trionfo della morte (1894).16 D’Annunzio’s novel is perhaps the perverse pinnacle of decadent ‘Tristanising’. The descriptive phrases used to recollect a performance of Wagner’s Tristan are typical: ‘a sigh arose from the “mystical abyss”, a moan which rose and fell, a subdued voice which brought the first mournful appeal of solitary desire, the first indistinct forebodings of future anguish.’ Typical, too, of Tristan decadence is the ‘perfect fusion of the frenzied fever of the music of Tristan and the infected waters of Venice’ described in Maurice Barré’s Amori et dolori sacrum: La Mort de Venise (1902).17 This is not the place to offer a thorough discussion of the decadent legacy of Wagner’s Tristan.18 One more famous example of an analysis of the decadent character of Wagner’s Tristan will suffice. In the first part of his The Decline of the West (1918) Oswald Spengler identified Wagner as culmination but also as marking the initiating moment of decadence, manifest in Wagner’s taste for the ‘gigantic’ as the ‘dissimulation’ of the ‘absence’ of ‘inward greatness’, and also for the miniature colouristic effect. Inspired by Baudelaire, Spengler makes a comparison with Manet to argue that ‘the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour’. Wagner achieved this in the concentrated symbolic tone ‘painting’ exemplified by the first three bars of Tristan (see Example 1.1):

A whole world of soul could crowd into these three bars. Colours of starry midnight, of sweeping clouds, of autumn, of the day dawning in fear and sorrow, sudden glimpses of sunlit distances, world-fear, impending doom, despair and its fierce effort, hopeless hope – all these impressions which no composer before him had thought it possible to catch, he could paint with entire distinctness in the few

16 For a comparison see Nachum Schoffman, ‘D’Annunzio and Mann: Antithetical Wagnerians’, Journal of Musicology 11 (1993), 499–524. 17 See Raymond Furness, Wagner and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982). 18 See Erwin Koppen’s classic Dekadenter Wagnerismus: Studien zur europäischen Literatur des Fin de Siecle (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973); my Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Marc A. Weiner; ‘Opera and the Discourse of Decadence: From Wagner to AIDS’, in Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff and Matthew Potolsky (eds), Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 119–41; and Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), chapter 5 ‘Icons of Degeneration’, 307–347. Thomas Grey, ‘Wagner the Degenerate: Fin de Siècle Cultural “Pathology” and the Anxiety of Modernism’, Nineteenth Century Studies 16 (2002), 73–92; Mitchell Morris, ‘Tristan’s Wounds: On Homosexual Wagnerians at the Fin de Siècle’, in Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (eds), Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 271–91. 6 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

tones of a motive … Everything emerges in bodiless infinity, no longer even does a linear melody wrestle itself clear of the vague tone-masses that in strange surgings challenge an imaginary space. The motive comes up out of dark terrible deeps. It is flooded for an instant by a flash of hard bright sun. Then, suddenly, it is so close upon us that we shrink. It laughs, it coaxes, it threatens, and anon it vanishes into the domain of the strings, only to return again out of endless distances, faintly modified in the voice of a single oboe, to pour out a fresh cornucopia of spiritual colours.

Spengler’s indulgently poetic description evokes a decadent density of symbolic resonance in miniature forms and ephemeral figures. Spengler’s concluding opinion of the art of Wagner and Manet is further replete with key themes of decadence: ‘As a step, it is necessarily the last step’; it is ‘an artificial art’, it ‘has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end’. Thus, music practised ‘after Wagner’ is marked by ‘impotence and falsehood’. What ‘died’ in Tristan according to Spengler was ‘Faustian’ art, the dynamic work produced by the ‘Faustian man’ who ‘sees in a history a tense unfolding towards an aim’. The illusion or ‘lie’ that this dynamism is not ‘exhausted’ is for Spengler the very ‘foundation of Bayreuth’.19 Spengler’s analysis was published at an auspicious moment. The cataclysmic destruction of the First World War inevitably demanded a reassessment of the legacy of Wagner’s Tristan. In the bleak pessimism of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) the quote from the text of Act 3 (‘Oed’ und leer das Meer’) evokes the waste and empty sea, a desolate silence and inability to speak; it is a poetic marker of the failure of love in the modern world. When Mann devised a film scenario based on von Strassburg’s medieval version in 1924 he wanted to make it clear that Wagner was not the source.20 A year later, on the publication of a facsimile score of Wagner’s Tristan, Mann wrote that holding it made him feel ‘bewilderingly in the possession of something holy. These scattered groups of precise Gothic notes signify something ultimate, supreme, profoundly precious – something to which Nietzsche bade for us a final farewell, a farewell unto death: they signify a world which, for reasons of conscience, we Germans of the present are forbidden to love over much.’ It is the heretical musical bible of a defunct and debunked religion of art. After the defeat of the Third Reich this seemed even more urgently apparent. Mann wrote a telling letter to Emil Preatorius, an artist and designer who had worked at Bayreuth in the 1930s and whose essay, Wagner: Bild und Vision (1949) addressed the problem of Wagner’s continuing validity and influence. Mann emphasized how Tristan expressed a hazardous combination of clever bullying and the pornographic, ‘that characteristically German blend of barbarism and cunning with which Bismarck, too, subdued Europe – plus an eroticism such as had never before been exhibited in society’. For Mann, Tristan, with the rest of Wagner’s output, was now badly tainted

19 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West [Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918, 1922], trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1932), 291–3, 364. 20 Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, 76–7. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 7

Example 1.1 Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, Prelude to Act 1; opening

continued 8 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Example 1.1 continued Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 9

continued 10 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Example 1.1 concluded Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 11 goods: ‘oh yes, there’s a good deal of “Hitler” in Wagner’. Finally he confessed, ‘I couldn’t take the whole of Tristan any more’, and condemned the second act as best suited for sexually confused youth.21 Wagner appears centrally in the controversial work of the Swiss writer Denis de Rougement, who built upon post-Freudian psychoanalytical ideas to consider the Tristan myth as the culmination of the process of raising courtly love to universal significance. The first part of L’Amour et l’occident (1939) is a long consideration of the Tristan story as the ‘one great European myth of adultery’, the symbolic structuring and expression of ‘destructive instincts’.22 Later, in Comme toi-même (1961), translated as The Myths of Love (1963), de Rougemont considered how Western eroticism, ‘a lyrical or reflective transcendence of biological sexuality’, was secretly announced in twelfth-century symbols of myth but only rediscovered by the romantics and fully exposed by Kierkegaard, Baudelaire and Wagner. Rougemont here turned to Don Juan and Tristan as the ‘extreme myths of Western eroticism’.23 His ‘mythanalysis of culture’ had two principal aims: first, ‘to seek out the religious and philosophical equivalents of the attitudes described or extolled by contemporary literature dealing with love’, and, second, ‘to learn how to read in filigree the play of the myths in the obscure complexities and the apparently insane involvements of contemporary eroticism’.24 De Rougemont then identified modern metamorphoses of the Tristan myth in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. His readings were, however, notoriously idiosyncratic (John Updike wrote a famous critical response).25 Updike later declared that the ‘tone and basic situation’ of his own ‘Tristan’ novel,

21 Mann, letter of 6 December 1949, trans. in Pro and Contra Wagner, 208–211.The connections between Wagner’s music and family with the Nazis are the subject of both unfounded myth and intense scholarly scrutiny, though the erotic-metaphysics of Tristan and Isolde seemed more immune than the Ring cycle, Mastersinger and Parsifal to propagandist appropriation and distortion. It is perhaps telling that Pamela Potter’s useful recent discussion of the Third Reich co-option of Wagner does not once mention Tristan;Pamela M. Potter, ‘Wagner and the Third Reich: Myths and Realities’, in Thomas S. Grey (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 235–45. 22 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 18. 23 Denis de Rougemont, The Myths of Love, trans. Richard Howard (London: Faber, 1963), 13–15. In a startling footnote, he writes ‘Classical music, from Mozart to our day, is erotic; it heralds the very rare revolutions and in particular the fashions of love. It is all the more remarkable that starting from the middle of the twentieth century, experimental music abandons the realm of the animalistic for that of physics and calculus, and becomes a subject for philosophical engineers.’ This amounts to a ‘puritanical’ denial of the soul (fn. to p.23). 24 Rougemont, The Myths of Love, 35–6. 25 John Updike, ‘More Love in the Western World’ (1963), in Assorted Prose (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965), 183–200. 12 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Brazil (1994), was provided by Bédier’s version.26 Updike’s retelling evokes the anxieties and trangressions of racial boundaries and identities in symbolic locations (Copacabana, the bourgeois São Paulo and the magical Brazilian wilderness) and with graphic depictions of the lovers in many and varied sexual couplings. De Rougement’s studies are part of a large body of work which has turned to the Tristan myth as a source of psychoanalytical truth. In this pursuit Wagner’s music drama inevitably has often loomed large. For example, the post-Freudian Helen Gediman starts from the Updike/de Rougemont controversy to explore ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ narcissism, taking in recent psychoanalytic work from the 1960s and 1970s, Freud’s famous 1914 essay, and even Lou Andreas-Salomé’s essay on narcissism from 1922, to develop ideas of Oedipal, sado-masochistic and suicidal aspects of the ‘Liebestod fantasy’.27 In recent musicology psychoanalytical themes have provoked a number of influential readings of Wagner’s Tristan: for example, Lawrence Kramer’s essay ‘Musical Form and Fin-de-Siècle Sexuality’,28 and the Hutcheons on Wagner’s music drama and the death drive,29 both of which draw heavily on Freudian theory. Tristan and Isolde have even entered the pages of the British Medical Journal with Gunther Weitz’s comparison of Wagner’s descriptions of the symptoms generated by taking the love potion with medical conditions of intoxication, and observation that Wagner’s musical treatment of variants of the Tristan chord at the mention of the potion or its effect can ‘shed light on the toxicology of the active agent’.30 The Tristan myth’s popularity and its manner of being told did not escape being embroiled in overtly ideological agendas. While there was a decline in interest in the myth in Nazi Germany (there were other, more immediately attractive and more singularly ‘German’ myths for the National Socialists to adopt and pervert), it was revived in the late 1960s, in particular as part of a discourse driven by a desire to

26 Updike, ‘Afterword’, Brazil, 261. 27 Helen K. Gediman, Fantasies of Love and Death in Life and Art: A Psychoanalytical Study of the Normal and the Pathological (New York: New York University Press, 1995). See Isolde Vetter, ‘Wagner in the History of Psychology’, in Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski (eds), Wagner Handbook, trans. and ed. John Deathridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 118–55. 28 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 135–75. 29 Linda and Michael Hutcheon, ‘Death Drive: Eros and Thanatos in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde’, Cambridge Opera Journal 11 (1999), 267–93. The Hutcheons explore the central importance of Tristan in the Schopenhauer–Wagner–Nietzsche–Freud connection through a consideration of Freud’s notion of the death drive as a continuation of important themes from the German romantic tradition which Wagner’s music drama brings to an artistic ‘climax’ – the obsession with the relationship of sex and death, of ecstasy and expiration, the night, and the compulsion to tell repeatedly of traumatic experience in dreams and stories. 30 Gunther Weitz, ‘Love and Death in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: An Epic Anticholinergic Crisis’, British Medical Journal 327 (2003), 1469–71. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 13 reconstruct national identity as the ‘Iron Curtain’ divided German territory on the Cold War map of Europe. An example is Gunter de Bruyn’s 1975 version of the Gottfried von Strassburg version, written, the author said, in the spirit of ‘einfach die Freude daran’ – a dream, a pure joy. A cultural aim of politicians in 1970s GDR was to appropriate the cultural inheritance to support their brand of communist ideology (as evinced by retellings of the Nibelungen myths by Franz Fuhmann in 1971 and of Parzival by Werner Heiduczek in 1974). De Bruyn’s rather stripped-down version was interpreted in the later 1970s as reflecting the author’s commitment to the GDR aesthetics and social programme – the titular lovers seemed to become unambiguously positive figures, in particular through de Bruyn’s cutting of the fatal and destructive elements of their passion. But the validity of this reading is questionable. That the cuts were motivated by overtly politicized motives is doubtful, and careful reading suggests that de Bruyn’s text is actually more ambiguous than superficially appears, and the lovers are not one-dimensional models of ‘good’ lovers. The best verdict is that this East German version is a ‘skilful if cautious course between conformity and subversion’.31 The debate over de Bruyn’s Tristan inevitably recalls Nietzsche’s cry of ‘all too German’. In his youth he declared that it was only intoxication with Wagner’s Tristan that allowed him to endure his ‘Germanness’; he needed Wagner as ‘the counter-poison to everything German par excellence … from the moment there was a piano score of Tristan … I was a Wagnerian. The earliest works of Wagner I saw as beneath me – still too common, too “German”.’ ‘What have I never forgiven Wagner? That he condescended to the Germans – that he became reichsdeutsch … As far as Germany extends it ruins culture.’32 Tristan’s role in the narrative of music and German identity, and the ‘myth’ of their inextricable union of music and ‘Germannness’, is of course a central one. Celia Applegate has argued that ‘music is indeed the key to something in modern German history’, that in this special context music may suggest some kind of ‘continuity, that is, the very human search for things that persist in the face of fragmentation, integration, disintegration, catastrophe and starting over’. The German ascendancy that Schoenberg notoriously once believed his serialism would secure for the future is just one part of this discourse, a stage in the post-Schopenhauerian raising of music to noumenal, ‘absolute’ status. The ‘eternal recurrence of Wagnerian controversy’, as Applegate nicely terms it, reveals how the German investment in its musical history and identity remains, and indeed after 1945 may be heightened, even in ‘a disturbing juxtaposition of beauty and atrocity, music and murder’. Applegate identifies Mann as the founder of this twentieth-century discourse, and reveals his legacy ‘in a sense of unease attendant

31 Nigel Harris, ‘“Noch im Untergang triumphiert die Liebe” – Or Does It? Günter de Bruyn’s Neuerzählung of the Medieval Tristan Legend’, in Dennis Tate (ed.), Günther de Bruyn in Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 53–64. 32 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 60–61. 14 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) on every emotional experience of German music, not just the Tristan experience of sinking deep into the oblivion of Wagner’s night’.33 At this point it should, of course, be recognized that the history of twentieth- century Tristan retellings is not an exclusively post-Wagnerian one. Joseph Bédier’s Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900) was hugely influential – for example, on Jean Cocteau’s film L’Éternal Retour (1942).34 Bédier was a medievalist who also reconstructed the version by Thomas (which he published as Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas in 1902). He aimed to retell the medieval sources in modern prose, and his work spawned many successors, stimulating a rich modern French Tristan tradition, of which Cocteau’s cinematic version is one of the most beguiling. And there are, of course, musical explorations of the Tristan myth in the twentieth century which bear little direct relationship to Wagner’s, not least a triptych of ‘Tristan’ works by Olivier Messiaen including the famous Turangalîla-symphonie of 1948.35 These are major works and they would form an essential part of a wider study of modern musical Tristans, but they are not closely related to Henze’s strategy. It is Wagner’s Tristan – and its eroticism, sensuality, madness, monumentalism, decadence and iconic Germanness – that forms the most powerful background to Henze’s version. And in this, of course, he is far from alone. In the next section a range of tactical and stylistic compositional responses to Wagner’s Tristan will be discussed. Each of them provides an important precedent for Henze’s work.

Compositional and Aesthetic Strategies in Response to Wagner’s Tristan

After hearing Tristan and Isolde Emmanuel Chabrier famously wrote: ‘there is enough music for a century in this work – the man has left us nothing to do.’36 More recently, the opera critic Peter Conrad commented: ‘Writing what he called the music of the future, Wagner pre-empts that future. Everything after him risks seeming an unworthy epilogue. Like the myths they are, his operas are rewritten by his successors, who justify their own existence by extending or contradicting Wagner’s meaning.’37 Wagner’s Tristan represents what Leonard B. Meyer calls an

33 Celia Applegate, ‘Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture’, History and Memory 17 (2005), 217–37. 34 See Stephen Maddux, ‘Cocteau’s Tristan and Iseut: A Case of Overmuch Respect’, in Tasker Grimbert (ed.), Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook (London: Routledge, 2002), 473–504. 35 See Siglind Bruhn, Messiaen’s Explorations of Love and Death: Musico-Poetic Signification in the ‘Tristan Trilogy’ and Three Related Song Cycles (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2008); Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, Olivier Messiaen and the Tristan Myth (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2001). 36 Quoted in Robin Holloway, Debussy and Wagner (London: Eulenberg, 1979), 12. 37 Peter Conrad, ASong of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera (London: Hogarth, 1989), 102. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 15

‘exemplary work’ – a work embodying a ‘strategy’ so forceful that it could ‘scarcely fail to become an exemplar for later composers’.38 Carl Dahlhaus characterized the fin de siècle and the early twentieth century as ‘an age virtually held in thrall to the harmonic consequences of Tristan’.39 This is broadly true, but these consequences, as we shall see, continued to reverberate throughout the century. Mann provides a famous literary example of how a young composer, infatuated with Wagner’s work, sought to reproduce its hypnotic, intoxicating effect. As told in Buddenbrooks (1901), the young Hanno tacitly, but obviously, models his composition on the conclusion of Tristan. It is severely criticized by his teacher: ‘why do you suddenly fall from B major into the six-four chord on the fourth note with a minor third? These are tricks; and you tremolo here, too – where did you pick that up? I know, of course: you have been listening when I played certain things for your mother. Change the end, child: then it will be quite a clean little piece of work.’40 In spite of his teacher’s dissatisfaction with this artifice, its closing formula was the boy’s favourite effect. On playing it again, with his mother joining on the violin, its stimulation on the boy, as Hermann Danuser notes in a study of Wagnerian endings, is described ‘in scarcely veiled terms as an orgasm’.41 Hanno’s obsession with the Tristan formula continues in a later performance: ‘Then he went to the piano. He stood for a while, and his gaze, directed fixed and unseeing upon a distant point, altered slowly, grew blurred and vague and shadowy. He sat down at the instrument and began to improvise.’ The improvisation’s ending was based on the working over of a motivic particle ‘of a bar and half in length’. Mann then describes Hanno’s fervent focus on a Wagnerian miniature formula:

There was a quality of the perverse in the insatiability with which it was produced and reveled in: there was a sort of cynical despair; there was a longing for joy a yielding to desire, in the way the last drop of sweetness was, as it were, extracted from the melody, till exhaustion, disgust, and satiety supervened. Then, at last; at last, in the weariness after excess, a long, soft arpeggio in the minor trickled through, mounted a tone, resolved itself in the major, and died in mournful lingering away.42

The repetition ‘at last; at last…’ expresses the gasping relief at reaching the desired expression, the magical formula of the end, after the exhaustions of squeezing

38 Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 23. 39 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 315. 40 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London, Vintage, 1999), 412. 41 Hermann Danuser, ‘Musical Manifestations of the End in Wagner and in Post- Wagnerian “Weltanschauungsmusik”’, 19th-Century Music 18 (1994), 64–82. 42 Mann, Buddenbrooks, 595, 597. 16 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) the ‘last drops’ of exquisite effect from the musical particles. But the hyperbole of the repetition of ‘at last’ speaks not only of the great expressive burdens invested in that ending, but also reveals its mannered, overwrought character. The ironic use of a tawdry expression speaks of Hanno’s post-Wagnerian musical artifice. The question, what is possible ‘after Wagner’?, vexed many composers in this period. Mann’s Hanno suggests that within the decadent German culture there is no healthy or vigorous life in this Wagnerian future. Given Wagner’s widely held cultural status as the composer representing the zenith of the German romantic world-view, his music inevitably became the source of allusions and quotations in post- or anti-romantic aesthetics in which romantic meanings are stripped away, parodied, or in some instances restored or revitalized. Music of this kind plays most deliberately and provocatively with Wagnerian contradiction, where a composer employs allusion or quotation apparently only to problematize, undermine or even annihilate its meaning through resistance, distortion, juxtaposing a conflicting style, allusion or through the evocation of opposing, ‘polar’ sources. From the Wagnerian rubble new musical edifices are constructed which retain the imprint of their symbolic foundation. Iconoclasm is a necessary cultural stage on the way to reformation. In Lawrence Kramer’s terms, Wagner functions in the twentieth century as a ‘cultural trope’, as an authoritative, symbolic figure which assumes, in certain modern works a ‘disconcerting ambiguity’: Wagner ‘represents not the continuing power of symbolic investiture but its recession into the dead past. Yet at the same time he also represents the uncanny persistence of investiture, its return to life in inverted form.’ Thus ‘Wagner’s symbolic effectiveness both intrudes on modernity as a relic and haunts it with a piercing, even dangerous, nostalgia.’ Kramer is interested in the symbolic function of ‘the actual sound of Wagner’s music … regarded not as a model or influence, but as acoustic object, a symbolic presence realized by quotation’, in ‘how Wagnerian modes of investiture are cited, troped, adapted, and travestied’, in how Wagner ‘becomes a symptom of modernity under the sign of negation’.43 As we shall see, Kramer’s terms are especially useful for describing the Wagner–Henze relationship. But before we can understand and analyse the case of Henze, important ‘post-Tristan’ examples from the first half of the century need to be outlined. Particularly crucial for an understanding of Henze’s creative approach to Wagner are compositional responses involving some form of critical deconstruction or distancing, a creative attempt to reconfigure the style and message of Tristan through tactics of comic deflation, inversion of meaning, structural subversion, or suppression and uncanny return. Two familiar passages from the tone poems of Richard Strauss provide contrasting preliminary examples of this ambiguous resistance to Tristan.The B major section towards the end of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (1895–6) evokes the ‘impossible’ redemption or transfiguration of Wagner’sTristan but only, through

43 Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 110–12. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 17 the turn B minor and its unresolved dissonant relationship with C, to affirm the Nietzschean, all-too-human revolt, the disgust at humanity’s metaphysical yearnings, and to proclaim the struggles of a ‘post-metaphysical worldview’.44 Recent Strauss scholarship has highlighted Strauss’s enthusiasm for anarchistic, individual liberalism in the 1890s and Nietzsche’s brand of radical, anti-metaphysical revaluation of values was central to this intellectual climate. Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel (1894–5) is a fine example of the anti-Wagnerian, anti-metaphysical turn in the mid-1890s. It is a work encapsulating Strauss’s shift of philosophical allegiance from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, reflected in musical-structural deformations whose effect is turned to ‘avant-garde’, anti-Wagnerian ends. The targets here are the yearnings and idealism of romantic metaphysics. Through emphasis on surface material sensation and the deformations of intensifying [Steigerung] processes (which in romantic form is the intensification generated through the struggle from polar opposition towards a higher synthesis) the music of Till is turned against the Wagnerian metaphysical aspiration, with the orchestra now celebrated as visible musical machine rather than as a hidden, other-worldly ideal source, as the producer of sensual effects and noise, and emphatically not some metaphysically symbolic Ton. It poses the continuous excitement (and threat) of immediate material stimulus. Endless colour replaces endless melody, as Julius Korngold said of Salome.45 At the close of Till’s opening paragraph, the Steigerung process, which in Wagnerian style would lead to some clinching, transporting Höhepunkt, leads, as James Hepokoski describes it, to ‘sudden sonorous deflation, effected by the instant shift of timbre, the unexpected isolation of a single, squeaky voice, mezzo forte, and the chuckling, lustig impudence of the motive itself. Hurled out once the prank is underway or completed the Kobold (sprite) idea typically suggests Till’s eagerness to sound forth with a finger- pointing jeer, ridiculing those that he has just taken in: “Gotcha!”’46 Furthermore, the treatment and character of the chromatic chord of the Kobold idea generates a ‘derisive distortion’ of the musical icon of Tristanesque yearning for redemption or erotic fulfilment. It is a mocking appropriation of Wagner’s ‘Tristan’ chord, the most revered harmonic mark of Germanic musical, metaphysical modernity. The sections which follow identify five responses to Wagner’s Tristan which, as the interpretation in Chapter 3 will reveal, illustrate strategies of engagement crucial in Henze’s piece: ambivalence, beauty, elegy, disenchantment, dark humour.

44 See Charles Youmens, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 194. 45 Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 28 May 1907, trans. Susan Gillespie in Bryan Gilliam (ed.) Richard Strauss and His World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 349. 46 James Hepokoski, ‘Framing Till Eulenspiegel’, 19th-Century Music 30 (2006), 22. 18 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Ambivalence

In his Wagner-Probleme und andere Studien (Vienna, 1900) Max Graf wrote: ‘With deep emotion and awe, we, the avant-garde of a new generation, turned away from Wagner’s picture and after moments of fear and trembling stepped out together and with head held high towards our own world, our own sun.’47 Graf’s declaration of purpose is symptomatic of the dread of compositional impotency in the face of Wagner’s immense achievements – especially in Tristan and Isolde – in turn-of- the-century Austria. The new musical avant-garde sought emancipation from the grip of Wagner’s ‘music of the future’. Eight years later, in one of the most famous avant-garde leaps in music history, Schoenberg began to produce a series of works in which the Wagnerian past seemed to be irrevocably jettisoned. Schoenberg’s breach into apparent atonality, John Deathridge notes, was strongly motivated by the need to ‘escape the sensual and intellectual force of Tristan’.48 In the years from 1908 Schoenberg seemed to make the apparently decisive breakthrough, tearing apart the superficial wrappings and emotional trappings of post-Wagnerian chromaticism and rejecting its sensuous extravagance and voluptuous excess. The post-Wagnerian style of Dehmel-inspired works such as Transfigured Night (1899) seems to be abandoned in an avant-gardist rupture. It is a famous moment of white-hot compositional innovation. The score of Tristan is not just smeared; it is seared in the incineration of the icon of Wagnerian eroticism.49 Adorno identified profound syntactical ramifications. He asserted that though the chromatic extremes of Tristan played a vital role in the ‘elimination of the leading tone’, and though the weakened force of its drive towards resolution continued into ‘atonality as a tonal residue’ (an aspect of continuity and transition which coexisted with the radical breakthrough), triadic harmony became taboo, and the leading note, deprived of force and function, became a dying remnant as ‘free atonality spread dissonance universally across music’.50 If the cinders of the score of Tristan remained aglow then they were soon to be finally extinguished. Such is the tenet of emancipated dissonance. In the brave new atonal world where tonal residues remain they become weak, enfeebled and even abject. Adorno’s argument was strongly motivated by his desire to clear Schoenberg of any possible condemnation as a post- Wagnerian mannerist. To this end he heard the atonal works as a ‘breach’ into a form of expression ‘qualitively different’ from the ‘Wagnerian espressivo’ of the early

47 Translation in Amanda Glauert, Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9. 48 John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 114–15. 49 The following paragraphs are a condensed version of an argument I present more fully in my Music and Decadence in European Modernism. 50 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans., ed. and with new introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 66–7. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 19 works. This was a break made ‘precisely through the “exaggeration” that thinks this espressivo through to its conclusion’.51 But a one-directional narrative trajectory of Schoenberg reaching a creative escape velocity to leave nostalgia for the Wagnerian expressive world of chromatic tonality behind would be obfuscatory. There is seepage of the chromatic style of Tristan into Schoenberg’s vanguard vessel. It oozes into cracks in the new, supposedly atonal edifices which he built employing the techniques of ‘intensification’ and ‘condensation’. Schoenberg himself did not always seem to wish to hide this Wagnerian aftertaste. In the January 1910 performance of the radical breakthrough works The Book of the Hanging Gardens,Op.15 and Three Piano Pieces, Op.11 he also included the overtly post-Wagnerian first part of Gurrelieder. This may indicate that Schoenberg wished publicly to declare that his ‘avant-garde’ project was indebted to the ‘spiritual legacy of Wagner’s Zukunftsmusik’, that ‘the step into atonality was a response to the revolutionary artist’s Wagnerian call to duty.’52 Opus 15 is one of several works in which Schoenberg stylistically swerves between ‘Tristanesque’ decadence and an ‘anti-Tristan’ avant-garde. In these shifts those remnants of an old language which cling adhesively to the new figures need to be seen not as debilitating nor as hindrance to future ‘progress’ (to which Schoenberg felt such a burden of responsibility), but rather as a stimulating presence which is far from silenced or suppressed by apparently more radical voices. In the final bars of the cycle the chromatic counterpoint reeks of Tristanesque yearning. Some of the triads in this music are enfeebled echoes of a dead language, the dissolutions and decays of decadence, but others signal breakthrough into radical newness in avant-gardist emancipation from old Wagner’s music of the future. The endless melody of musical prose, which derives its expressive intensity from a compulsive postponement of cadence which only perpetuates the impending sense of an approaching yet distant end, is brought to a full stop by close position triads in thunderously low registers. To Adorno’s ears the avant-garde credentials of Schoenberg’s Op.11 were indisputable. He identifies them in their ‘unadorned, naked expression’ and ‘hostility to art’.53 In Schoenberg’s ‘revolutionary’, non-Wagnerian espressivo Adorno celebrates the absence of decoration or ‘simulation’ of passions and the undisguised registering of ‘shock’ and ‘trauma’. This raw truth is wounding. For Adorno, the pieces exhibit the ‘scars’ and ‘disfiguring stains’ as ‘emissaries of the Id, distressing the decorative surface’.54 In a tactical hearing designed to highlight the piece’s radicalism, the ‘Tristanesque’ echoes in the chromaticisms of the first piece have

51 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 34–5. 52 See Julie Brown, ‘Schoenberg’s Early Wagnerisms: Atonality and the Redemption of Ahasuerus’, Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994), 51–80. 53 ‘Arnold Schoenberg, 1874–1951’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Spearman, 1967), 161. 54 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 35. 20 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) been interpreted as parodic.55 But the sense of cool, distanced objectivity required to support such a hearing seems absent. Michael Cherlin is nearer the mark when, invoking Freud’s well-known elaboration of the concept of das Unheimlich, he hears the tonal home made uncanny. In Op.11 No.1, in a return of the repressed, tonality emerges as ‘estranged, evanescent spectres’: Schoenberg ‘usurps Wagner’s language … yet the spectre of Tristan remains’.56 The opening (Example 1.2) suggests that the ‘scars’ of Tristan’s wounds remain a source of agony. There is no closure, only a sense of a limping waltz moving through chromatic motions which rise and droop in counterpoint of overtly post-Wagnerian provenance. The more fragmentary textures and gestures in the second half of the middle section (which take their cue from the fleeting fragment of bars 12–14) evoke a contrastingly ‘extensive’, free-floating or fleet-of-foot eschatology. But this flight, escape, or leaving behind is then denied by the return of the opening material, at the original pitch, in accordance with the obligations of traditional ternary design (bar 53). This material, as one would expect from Schoenberg, is a condensed return, but the main effect is one of decay and decline. The crescendo and rising bass motive of bars 54–6 cannot counteract the melancholic effect produced by the falling character of the upper parts, which are based on the extension of the F–E motive originally exposed in bar 3 to produce a line which descends chromatically from F to C over five bars. The cadential effect is confirmed by the return to prominence of augmented triad chords, whichhad dominated the cadential bars of the A section (bars 19–24). The texture returns to the overtly Wagnerian chromatic counterpoint of the opening bars. This suggests the return of the familiar voice of Wagner the father, if now in more aged and weakened form. It calls forth the return of Tristanesque yearning, but also marks its decline in a musical variety of the law of diminishing returns. The apparently paradoxical coexistence of decadent and avant-garde reactions to Tristan is sustained in Schoenberg’s Maurice Maeterlinck setting, Herzgewächse. As Deathridge states, the music is ‘clearly indebted to the radically modern aspect of Tristan: not only does the vegetal imagery of Maeterlinck’s poem Feuillages du coeur (1889) resemble Mathilde Wesendonck’s Im Treibhaus, which Wagner described as a “study” for Tristan after he had set it to music; but each strand of musical material also grows forward without insisting on closure and remains, so to speak, ecstatically deaf to the past.’57 However, what was ‘radically modern’, or avant-garde, in Wagner is now heard as decadent expiration of the last breaths of a Tristan on life-support in a modern hothouse. In the German version which Schoenberg set, Maeterlinck’s

55 Thomas Christensen, ‘Schoenberg’s Opus 11, No.1: A Parody of Pitch Cells from Tristan’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10 (1987), 38–44. 56 Michael Cherlin, ‘Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche:Spectres of Tonality’, The Journal of Musicology 11 (1993), 362–3. 57 Deathridge, Wagner, 224. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 21

Example 1.2 Arnold Schoenberg, Piano Piece, Op.11 No.1; opening

second line, ‘De mes lasses mélancholies’58 is shifted to open the poem and rendered as ‘Meiner müden Sehnsucht’, a poetic line encapsulating the sense of Wagnerian yearning now exhausted. Schoenberg’s introductory gesture suggests a remnant D minor through the initial melodic shape G–A–D–E–D and the bass motive, D–F– D (Example 1.3). But it also alludes to elements of Wagner’s Tristan opening: the first two notes of the upper line (G–A) echo the same pitches at the start Wagner’s upper rising chromatic motive, they sound over an A–C minor third which (very briefly) suggests the tonic A minor of the Tristan Prelude, andtheE–D which ends Schoenberg’s opening motive echoes the D–D natural motion in the ‘alto’ of Wagner’s chromatic counterpoint. With the appearance of Pierrot lunaire,Op.21 several critics accused Schoenberg of perverting the Wagnerian inheritance. Thus, James Huneker writing in the New York Times (19 January 1913) declared: ‘It was new music (or new exquisitely horrible sounds) with a vengeance. The very ecstasy of the hideous! I say “exquisitely horrible” for pain can be at once exquisite and horrible … And the border-land between pain and pleasure is a territory hitherto unexplored by musical composers. Wagner suggests poetic anguish; Schoenberg not only arouses the image of anguish, but he brings it home to his auditory in the most subjective way. You suffer the anguish with the fictitious character in the poem.’ Paul Rosenfeld

58 See Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses: Poems 1889, trans. Richard Howard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 20–21. 22 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Example 1.3 Schoenberg, Herzgewächse (Maurice Maeterlinck); opening

in The Dial (April 1923) noted the cycle’s rapidity and abbreviation, which chimes with the ‘condensation’ noted by Adorno as part of Schoenberg’s escape plan from Wagnerian emotionalism, but also heard these as violations of Wagner’s style: ‘In narrow spaces of time he achieves searing, fiery summits of tone. The ecstatically heaving violin-music of the few measures of ‘Heimwah’ in Pierrot … is like an oceanic Tristan-climax concentrated in tabloid form.’ For Rosenfeld, Schoenberg evokes Wagner’s ‘swooning sensuousness’ and ‘ecstatic voluptuousness’ but the desire is ‘smothered’. Rosenfeld then becomes gruesomely anatomical, describing the music as the ‘human torso’ of the disfigured man in the machine age: ‘He is the thing without arms, without legs, without organs of communication, without a phallus. He is the helpless, quivering pulp; blindly stirring, groping, stretching’. This mutilated body is fatally sick: ‘Wagner’s will, undercut as it was, seems free and direct by the side of this mortally wounded will. In these works, the cry of Amfortas and of the sick Tristan is become shrill, piping, broken’: even those ‘moments of health are only moments of lessened sickness’.59 It is a grim, grisly verdict. Adorno, inevitably, saw the ‘hothouse’ return in Pierrot to a ‘denatured’ paradis artificiel, and the miniaturism of the musical idiom (‘isolated flowing and flashy pointes’) as producing a ‘masterwork in paradoxical proximity to kitsch’, as a ‘retreat’ from the expressionistic aesthetic of the monodrama Erwartung. Adorno asserts that while there is no ‘decline’ in Schoenberg’s ‘compositional power’, he has however become ‘entangled’ in empty, mendacious transitions and the figured ornament of the ‘arabesque’.60 There are several places where a decadent tone indebted to Tristan assumes a prominent position amongst the cycle’s stylistic diversity: for example, the opening and closing ‘cadences’, which set the final text, ‘O alter Duft aus Märchenzeit’. Here, instead of breathing the new, enrapturing air of some far-flung planet, Pierrot is

59 Francois Lesure (ed.), Dossier de Presse de Pierrot Lunaire d’Arnold Schoenberg (Geneva: Editions Minkoff, 1985), 147–9. 60 Adorno, Prisms, 163–4. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 23 enveloped by the old perfumes of a strangely familiar fairy-tale world. But this aged scent of the dream’s imagination retains the power to ‘intoxicate’ (‘berauschen’). The overall effect is to generate tonal allusion, ambiguity and subversion – raising the old tones only to deform them – through chromatic alterations which allude to late romantic techniques found in Wagner, but which seem to be on the brink of liberation from such modes. Given the tone of many of the preceding songs of Pierrot lunaire one might call this parodic. Alternatively, one might suggest that the ‘old’ ‘intensive alteration style’ of Wagner’s Tristan has leached through, to emerge not as a parody, but as a crucial force, feeding on or clinging to the ‘new’ apparently atonal forms.

Beauty

The intoxicating sensuousness of Wagner’s Tristan music, combined with the tendency towards ‘miniaturism’ (the concentration of exquisite effect in tiny motives, orchestral texture or complex chromatic sonorities to generate moments of heightened beauty), allows Nietzsche to proclaim Wagner as the greatest of modern decadent artists. Baudelaire, too, famously described the sensual, voluptuous delights of Wagner’s music, and the influence of his writing on the Wagnerites who were so prominent amongst the Symbolists of 1880s Paris was profound. Wagner’s music – especially the chromatic style of Tristan and Parsifal – became the great model of enigmatic, inscrutable artistic beauty. This beautiful quality was attractive because it seemed so ‘absolute’ and thus at best only partially describable. Stéphane Mallarmé sought to steal this musical effect back into poetic forms. An important musical experience for Mallarmé was an 1885 orchestral concert which included extracts from Tristan and Parsifal.The concert-hall rather than opera-house setting enhanced the sense that Wagner’s music represented the ‘epitome’ of the ‘paradox that although music is non-referential, it is nonetheless also highly meaningful’.61 Debussy’s admiration for these aspects of Wagner’s late style is well known. In a lengthy analysis of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1892–4) David J. Code argues that the piece’s location on the cusp of modernity can be precisely identified in Debussy’s historically self-conscious use of Wagnerian materials (a position not ‘d’après Wagner’, but ‘après Wagner’), and in the coincidence of seductive pleasure and esoteric syntax. In Debussy’s piece Code hears romantic lyrical expression momentarily recovered but only to be ‘incurably broken into syntactical and sensuous components’: a loss of the immediacy of sound and expression leads to an elegiac tone.62 The exquisite yet so poignantly ephemeral beauties of the piece and the fastidious control of microscopic detail which produces these effects has been

61 Heath Lees, ‘Mallarmé’s Good Friday Music: Conversion or Confirmation?’, 19th- Century French Studies 23 (1995), 430–40 (p.434). 62 David J. Code, ‘Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé: Music après Wagner in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001), 493–554. 24 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) widely acknowledged and analysed. Though on the surface Debussy’s gossamer orchestral textures sound far removed from Wagner’s Tristan the legacy becomes clear when the opening bars of both works are compared. In both the beauty of tiny chromatic motives and carefully placed chromatic chords is central to the technique and aesthetic. Debussy is indebted here to the ‘individualization of harmony’ in Wagner’s chromatic idiom where, as Dahlhaus explains, the ‘accent falls on harmonic details’, on the ‘momentary effect’, which may be ‘relieved of the responsibility for the large-scale formal structures’, so that the harmony ‘serves instead to establish the unique identity of one instant in the music’.63 And the structure of the opening phrases of Tristan and Debussy’s work bear remarkably close comparison.64 Both Wagner’s prelude and Debussy’s fawn Prélude begin with an unaccompanied, chromatic melodic line which leads into a sensuously marked, complex dissonant chord (both are ‘Tristan’ chords) which resolves onto an altered dominant harmony. They even share the pregnant silence which follows.65 Thus, though the Prélude is often heard as stylistically distant from the partially yet overtly Wagnerian tone of Debussy’s earlier Baudelaire songs (1888–90), it in fact subtly sustains echoes of the beauties of Wagner’s Tristan style. In such beautiful effects lie the work’s importance as a document of post-Wagnerian modernism. Debussy’s subsequent ambivalence towards the Wagnerian idiom has been well charted. Hertz believes that the evolution of Debussy’s compositional style from the early Baudelaire songs to the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913) represents ‘the gradual purging of Wagnerism from Debussy’s music’, so that in the Mallarmé settings Debussy ‘completely sheds … languid Wagnerism’.66 Robin Holloway similarly argues that Debussy’s song output ‘form(s) one of the paths by which Debussy became non-Wagnerian and eventually in practice anti-Wagnerian’ through a ‘gradual sublimation from melancholy voluptuousness to fastidious austerity’. Holloway concludes that by the composition of the three Mallarmé songs ‘the Wagnerian context in Debussy disappears’.67 As I have shown elsewhere, however, in Debussy’s setting of Mallarmé’s ‘Placet futile’, the second of the 1913 triptych, Wagner remains a powerful if latent cipher.68 Debussy sets the opening invocation ‘Princesse!’ at the end of a three-bar piano phrase ending on the dominant of

63 Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 73–4. 64 See James Hepokoski, ‘Formulaic Openings in Debussy’, 19th-Century Music 8 (1984), 44–59. 65 David Michael Hertz makes this comparison; The Tuning of the Word: The Musico- Literary Poetics of the Symbolist Movement (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 68. 66 Hertz, The Tuning of the Word, 92, 113. 67 Holloway, Debussy and Wagner, 47, 209, 224. 68 See my The Muse as Eros: Music, Erotic Fantasy and Male Creativity in the Romantic and Modern Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 168–93. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 25

G minor, thus harmonically raising the desire for a response. As Example 1.4 shows, the opening begins with a melodic line notably lacking full accompaniment. This leads in bar 2 to a rising bass melody and an unexpected, ambiguous chord on D which resolves by semitone part movement to a chromatically altered and rhythmically halting dominant seventh. The sensuous Db chord is momentarily revealed and then concealed by the cadential gesture which follows it. This is how desire is aroused through harmonic construction of the phrase. The Db chord is beautiful moment of delay and disruption: it is transgressive and transporting, potentially both transfiguring and chaotic. Debussy’s opening is clearly another variant of theTristan Prelude archetype – melodic incipit, striking chromatic chord, balance of rising and falling melodic lines, an altered dominant and ensuing silence.69 The song’s faux eighteenth-century garb – the minuet is posed as a dancing ‘hommage à Rameau’ – is an artifice which only partially conceals the taboo source of its erotic allure, namely, Wagner’s Tristan.

Example 1.4 Claude Debussy, ‘Placet futile’ (Stéphane Mallarmé); introduction

The beauty of these passages lies in their transformation of the full-blooded voluptuousness of Tristan into diaphanous delicacies. The mythic embodiment of this fragile beauty for Debussy was the ‘pale princess’. This figure became an idée fixe in Debussy’s erotic and creative imagination. The greatest of these figures, Mélisande, is a figure of ‘pure beauty’. In part she embodies a return to the principle of clarity which Debussy heard in the ‘French’ idiom of Rameau.70 But she also echoes the mythic beauty of the ‘white’ Isolde. In Pelléas et Mélisande allusions to

69 There is a further similarity in that the resolution of both the ‘Tristan chord’ and Debussy’s D chord to an altered dominant involves motion from one whole-tone collection to another. 70 Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth- Century Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 202–210. 26 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Tristan – especially of course to the ‘Tristan chord’ itself – are often motivated by the pun on ‘triste’, an emotional quality closely associated with Mélisande. Examination of Debussy’s sketch materials has shown how the Tristan debt is ‘disguised’ or ‘obscured’, how it is transformed through the deliberations and manipulations of compositional process: ‘mimicry’ of the Wagner model ‘has been tested and rejected’.71 Her beauty – symbolic of the ‘purely musical’; Mélisande as mélodie – is disconcerting. It strikes men dumb. As Lydia Goehr says, it is inexpressible, ineffable, leaving communication and representation impotent as it arouses the desire to do so. Mélisande epitomizes a negative aesthetic prevalent within modernism – the modern failure of style to reach the Idea, to represent the absolute beautful form. This is manifest in the characteristic traits of absence, loss, enigma and aporia. As Goehr says, a characteristic of modernist music-dramas is that too many questions are asked of seductive beauty.72 ‘Her’ silent response means opens a void, a gap: the most beautiful figure of desire lies beyond the threshold of the known.

Elegy

Tristan and Isolde haunts many of Alban Berg’s works. The allusions in the Op.2 songs are subtle and disguised;73 the Tristan quotation in the Lyric Suite is direct and has been widely discussed.74 Especially bleak are the implications at the allusion to Tristan in Lulu Act 2 Scene 1, the quote of the ‘Tristan chord’ at Alwa’s exhortation ‘Mignon, I love you!’, as his head is buried in Lulu’s lap (bb.335–6). This forms part of a complex web of symbolic musical elements confirming Alwa’s delirium and that his unfortunate fate is already assured. With her hands in his hair Lulu declaims, ‘Ich habe Deine Mutter vergiftet’ [‘I was the one who poisoned your mother’]. The cruel twisting of the Wagnerian love potion/poison association is obvious. There are deathly, muted trombones. At this moment Lulu’s ‘coquetry and heedless manipulation’ becomes mercilessly sadistic.75 She is an anti-Isolde to her hapless lover. Berg’s music is a crucial precedent for Henze, for both its expressive character and tonal–atonal ambiguities. Especially important is the tone of decay and pessimism which Berg often generates from an overtly post-Wagnerian chromatic idiom.

71 Carolyn Abbate, ‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas’, 19th-Century Music 5 (1981), 118, 139. 72 Lydia Goehr, ‘Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style: Philosophical Reflections on Maeterlinck-Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande’, Representations 74 (2001), 55–82. 73 See Robert Gauldin, ‘Reference and Association in the Vier Lieder,Op.2, of Alban Berg’, Music Theory Spectrum 21 (1999), 32–42. 74 See, for example, Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 144–9. 75 Gerald N. Izenberg, Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky through World War 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 68. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 27

Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op.1 (1908) is a classic musical essay in post-Tristan pessimism in which the surging, intoxicating eroticism of Wagner’s Tristan coexists with pervasive processes of dissolution or liquidation. Max Paddison has related Berg’s dissolutions to Tristan’s model of transition, dissolution, and motivic remnants – a model acknowledged in the work’s climactic allusions to the ‘Tristan chord’ and also revealed by the peak of the development being overtly modelled on the Tristan Prelude’s waves of libidinal desire.76 However, by contrast with Isolde’s B major Verklärung, the Sonata closes with a long elegiac decline in B minor. Unlike Tristan’s open-ended basic shape, which in the opening paragraph rises in waves to peak at the well-known interrupted cadence, Berg’s opening Grundgestalt outlines the decline or dissolution of a wave, with the initial ascent or Ursprung proto-expressionistically compressed (see Example 1.5). Within this opening shape the accelerando, marked to begin at the melodic highpoint (G) can be heard energetically to counteract the melodic wave’s descent, but it only serves to speed up the plunge, with the ensuing rit. poignantly positioned to emphasize the reversal of the ascendant F–G semitone motive into the grief-ridden descending 6–5 (G–F) at the cadence. There is much complexity in a dialectic between declining and intensifying forces within the overall shape of decay. Berg controls the dissonance–consonance relationship with great precision to produce a sort of evolutionary regression. The peak of the wave is coincident with the most dissonant chord; the less characteristic or ‘advanced’ passing seventh chord on C is the first to be subject to acceleration, to move the passage quickly to the locally embellished whole-tone harmony (there is a move between the two whole-tone collections generated by the inner-part dotted articulation of the resolution of G to G). Thus the tension at the peak is discharged through the acceleration into and through the whole-tone harmony. The rit. and motivic inversion/reversal coincides with diatonic clarification, which is heard as a decline into the moribund, into old and tired harmonic forms. The bass ascending B–F–B at the close of the cadence is a formulaic echo of the initial motivic Ursprung.

Example 1.5 Alban Berg, Piano Sonata, Op.1; opening

76 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 171–3. 28 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Harmonically, then, Berg’s opening phrase moves from complex to simple, from the highest, most advanced form to the lowest. The opening of Wagner’s Tristan Prelude is similar in its control and disposition of dissonance. Like Berg’s phrase, the first chord is the most advanced and dissonant; it is discharged through ‘less advanced’ whole-tone harmonies to move to a chromatically altered dominant, the least ‘advanced’ species. But in the Wagner this process of dissonant regression is counterpointed by melodic intensification generated by the rising chromatic motive. Berg’s chromatic counterpoint contains no such ‘aspiration’, only a sense of expiration. Dissonance is not emancipated – it is emaciated in a creeping motion which slides down from under the peak of the wave. Berg’s opening can also be heard as a negation of Wagnerian unendlich melodisch, the principle of ‘eloquence’ (das redende Prinzip), which Carl Dahlhaus summarizes thus: ‘the primary meaning … is not that the parts of a work flow into each other without caesuras but that every note has meaning, that the melody is language and not empty sound. The technical characteristic, the absence of formal cadences, is merely a consequence of the aesthetic factor: cadences are to be regarded as formulas, syntactic but not semantic components – in short, they express nothing and are therefore to be avoided or concealed.’77 Berg’s negation of this aesthetic principle is itself profoundly eloquent: placing the ‘old’, outworn, supposedly empty melodic close four bars after an initial three-note motivic particle of intensely condensed expressive content is a tactic that speaks of pessimism and decay. It is not restorative, nor is it primarily nostalgic (though the end of the phrase has elements of that tone). It is a sonorous image of the approach to nihilism. As Adorno argued, by contrast with Wagnerian ‘highest joy’ (höchste Lust) there is in Berg no ecstatic, glorifying self-extinction, only self-negation.78

Disenchantment

Paul Hindemith’s Three Songs for Soprano and Large Orchestra, Op.9 (1917) represent the composer at his most overtly and loyally Wagnerian. By the time of their completion, however, the brutal carnage of the First World War had destroyed virtually all hope in the metaphysical idealism and romantic posturing which still often prevailed in the pre-war years. With Germany heading towards devastating defeat and the death-toll reaching millions, the tone of post-Wagnerian hyper- expressive search for redemption was sounding hollow. As Joel Haney points out, ‘just as [Hindemith] was discovering its expressive and technical means … the high artistic seriousness with which those means had been invested was losing credibility

77 Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, 55–6. 78 Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 29 by the hour’.79 In such a climate the songs can sound awkwardly anachronistic. Indeed, in the work of some artists the parodic deconstruction of late romantic style and aesthetics had begun some years before military hostilities broke out. Just four years after the Op.9 songs Hindemith composed the burlesque Das Nusch-Nuschi (June 1921), whose story has its source in a pre-war stage work ‘A Play for Burmese Marionettes’ (1904) by the Munich writer Franz Blei, in which the King Mark– Isolde–Tristan love triangle reappears grotesquely and comically distorted. Blei deflates Wagnerian pretensions in a cabaret of comic puppetry. Wartime Wagner satirist Friedrich Huch sustained this dismantling of Wagner’s prophetic aura and his music’s seductive allure through cruel travesty and grotesque humour, pricking the pomposity of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian metaphysics. Hindemith read Huch’s Tristan parody for shadow puppets and in 1916 composed incidental music for Huch’s parody of Lohengrin. In this work he developed the beginnings of the ludic, irreverent musical style of allusion and quotation later exploited in Nusch-Nuschi. Hindemith’s opera aroused controversy mostly because of the parody of music from Act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan in the figure of the cuckolded Emperor, which ends with a flagrant trombone rendition of the opening motive of Wagner’s Act 1 prelude. But this is just a single example within a wide network of cheeky and provocative Wagner allusions. Hindemith turned to Stravinsky’s Petrushka as a model of how to deploy repetition, montage and juxtaposition to generate procedures deliberately oppositional to the technical and expressive aims of Wagner’s art of transition and endless melody. ‘The real sin of Das Nusch-Nuschi’, Haney writes, was to strip away the ‘seductive aura of transcendence and expansive subjectivity’ which had attached to Wagner’s music. The humour of Hindemith’s music is heard ‘to ring with disillusionment and loss’.80 The Wagner parodies in Nusch-Nuschi are part of Hindemith’s dalliance with the debunking aims shared by Dada and surrealism. Walter Benjamin famously declared that surrealism was ‘born in an arcade’, where the soiled treasures of the bourgeoisie, the shattered ‘wish symbols’ of the nineteenth century, are ‘on the point of entering the market as commodities’. But they ‘linger on the threshhold’ of the magical and the mercantile. The ‘true fairies of the arcades’ are the dolls, ‘playthings’ garbed in ‘fashionable dress’, and the street ‘gutter’ is a portal to the underworld. Under the acquisitive collector’s gaze the interpretation of the detritus of the urban marketplace gives it an ‘afterlife’ in the ‘now of the moment’.81 Three central terms have become familiar from Benjamin’s writing: aura, allegory and constellation. Benjamin’s concept of aura is dependent upon the work of art’s ‘unique existence at the place where it happens to be’. This authenticity requires the presence of the

79 Joel Haney, ‘Slaying the Wagnerian Monster: Hindemith, Das Nusch-Nuschi, and Musical Germanness after the Great War’, The Journal of Musicology 25 (2008), 339–93 (p.356). 80 Haney, ‘Slaying the Wagnerian Monster’, 371, 391. 81 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univerisity Press, 1999), xii, 13, 82, 693. 30 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) original and is therefore jeopardized by mechanical reproduction which ‘reactivates the object’ in new contexts and shatters tradition.82 In ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939) Benjamin defined ‘allegorical’ art as that fashioned out of the loss of this aura, where ‘the ruins of the bourgeoisie’ are juxtaposed in ‘elements of dream, memory and fantasy stimulated by shock but recalling or anticipating a different, collective character of experience’.83 Constellation, the key to Benjamin’s theory of knowledge, is a regrouping of concrete materials so that the ‘Idea’ might emerge, and the phenomena or objects themselves are redeemed. There is a focus on the particular, the micrological, and no imposition of a universal system. Its aim is a ‘momentary epiphany’ which ‘bear(s) affinities with the surrealist search for transcendence’. In surrealist collage the rearrangement of broken shards produces a ‘profane illumination’. As such it ‘would release the utopian wish images from their reified imprisonment in the fetishistic world of bourgeois cultural consumption’. The ‘allegorist’, according to Peter Bürger, pulls element out of the ‘totality of the life context’; the fragment, deprived of original function, is petrified, leading to an expression of melancholy, and montage which is avant-gardiste and anti-classicist. This, however, does not demand a rejection of hermeneutics, as the avant-gardiste work is still to be understood as a ‘total meaning’; instead a new hermeneutics must deal with contradiction and heterogeneity.84 The allegorical musical idioms developed in their differing ways by Hindemith and Kurt Weill, in which broken gestures of romantic bourgeois expression are anachronistically reproduced in new structural contexts undermining or even eschewing organic unity, represent just such a challenge. And in Weill, as in Hindemith, Wagner is a none-too-secret target. Hinton has revealed that while Weill described Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) as ‘the strongest displacement of Wagner so far’, and as ‘the most thoroughgoing reaction to Wagner’, there is a notable element of ambivalence in Weill’s relationship to the composer of Tristan – that ‘displacement’, as Weill himself confessed, is ‘by no means, however, a rejection’. Weill’s anti-Wagnerian stance in the 1920s was indebted to the ‘new classicism’ of his teacher Busoni, but there are clear, if unexpected, parallels between Weill and Nietzsche’s ambivalent, late polemical rejection of Wagner. Hinton argues that Weill’s development is based not so much on an Hegelian ‘overcoming’ of Wagner, but (with certain caveats) better understood as an Oedipal struggle in the Freudian manner, since during his early musical education Weill had been steeped in Wagnerism, as had most of his generation. The frequent, overtly parodic allusions to Tristan are surface disavowals of Wagner’s erotic romanticism chiming with the anti-romantic spirit of the decade. In print, as an essayist, Weill also publicly espoused an anti-Wagner posture. But,

82 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 214–15. 83 Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, 152–96 84 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 69–70, 84. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 31

Hinton concludes, Wagner was ‘far from fully exorcised’ in the 1920s and Wagner remains a haunting presence right to the end of Weill’s career in America.85 The opening of Weill’s Violin Concerto (1925) is a fine example of Tristan allusion in a work which sounds anti-Wagnerian in a ‘post-Busonian’ manner. A melodic line’s rise and fall, followed by silence, is accompanied by a complex chord. Militarized or dehumanized by the drum roll, this chord is then repeated, immediately and exactly (Example 1.6). The gesture smacks of a mechanization of the motive and chord of erotic yearning from the opening of Tristan.The cold reproductions of a chromatic entity simultaneously invoke and thwart the ‘individualization of harmony’ in Wagner’s chromatic idiom. Weill’s chord is denied the uniqueness of identity in an invariant doubling which is insistent, a reproduction which preserves the ephemeral object but in doing so leads to deprivation of its original quality. By the end of the movement the repeated chordal signature of Weill’s Concerto seems deathly and soulless. The Wagnerian musical symbol of throbbing eroticism has been turned into thumping lumps of recalcitrant inorganic material. The chord’s recurrences are increasingly marked, apart from the very end, as a return to sameness, not part of organic development. Out of place and time, they represent a loss of aura. They bring a brutal end to phrases, and yet also a remembrance, through denial,

Example 1.6 Kurt Weill, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra of Wind Instruments, Op.12; opening

85 Stephen Hinton, ‘Weill Contra Wagner: Aspects of Ambivalence’, in Susanne Schaal- Gotthardt, Luitgard Schader and Heinz-Jürgen Winkler (eds), ‘… dass alles auch hätte anders kommen können’: Beiträge zur Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: Schott, 2009), 155–74. Weill’s comments on Dreigroschenoper are from 1929 (trans. Hinton, 155). 32 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) of lost beautiful moments in romantic expression, which in this piece arouses no expressionistic scream, just cool counterpoint. Shuhei Hosokawa, amongst many, has identified allusion to the opening of Tristan and Isolde in the first number of the Weill–Brecht collaboration The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). She argues that here ‘the impoverished Wagner on the syntactical level causes ironic inversion on the semantic one. Here there is implicit parody on the sublime love of Tristan and Isolde.’86 Bertolt Brecht’s notes to Mahagonny famously pointed to the ‘culinary character’ of opera and its roots as a hedonistic means of gaining pleasurable experience. ‘Those composers who stem from Wagner’, Brecht argued, ‘still insist on posing as philosophers.’ But this is a philosophy ‘which is of no use to man or beast, and can only be disposed of as a means of sensual satisfaction’. Everything of opera’s content is ‘absorbed’ into this sensuous pleasure, and this is confirmed by composers’ ‘desperate’, futile attempts to give opera ‘posthumous’ sense through new musical ‘titillations’. The key idea for Brecht is that although Mahagonny is ‘culinary through and through’ – it is opera – it brings this principle under critical scrutiny.87 Adorno, who famously identified Mahagonny as ‘the first surrealist opera’, similarly saw the ‘culinary’ or sensuous element of art becoming self-serving, as an element producing illusory effects without functional or structural purpose. The question that arose for Adorno, as for Brecht, was how pleasures of the sensuous might remain part of a socially ‘truthful’ artwork.88 The self-conscious irony of Mahagonny is one answer, manifest in techniques of montage and ludic allusions to the illusions of operatic seduction, desire and satisfaction. Thus Mahagonny produces a sort of meta-pleasure, one refusing the resolution or solution of a happy ending. Intoxications are revealed as addictions; Wagner’s music is parodied as narcotic effect. Mahagonny, Goehr argues, presents a refutation of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and the decadent illusory appearance of wholeness.89 Goehr has also demonstrated how surrealism focuses on unfulfilled desire, and how surrealist art rejects or refuses art’s traditional promise of satisfaction. Self-conscious, tantalizing and teasing, Mahagonny surrealistically ruminates on the ruination of bourgeois cultural edifices. The result is a liberating, fantastic polemic on intoxicating excess (Benjamin’s ‘profane illumination’), desire and satisfaction, romantic longing and union. As a new art of seduction, Goehr has compared Mahagonny with Bohuslav Martinů’s Julietta, a 1938 operatic setting

86 Shuhei Hosokawa, ‘Distance, Gestus, Quotation: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny of Brecht and Weill’, International Review of Aesthetics and the Sociology of Music 16 (1985), 187. 87 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’ (Notes to the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) [1930], trans. in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 33–41. 88 Adorno, ‘Mahagonny’ (1930), trans. in Night Music, 186–99. 89 Lydia Goehr, ‘Hardboiled Disillusionment: Mahagonny as the last Culinary Opera’, Cultural Critique 68 (2008), 3–37. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 33 of Georges Neveux’s play Juliette, ou La Clé des songes (1927). Both operas share techniques of structural rupture, fragmentation and juxtaposition in collage or montage. Neveux’s play nonetheless has a traditional romantic narrative of desire and of a union ‘made possible’, Goehr points out, ‘by a song uncannily approximating Isolde’s Liebestod’. Martinů similarly employs strategies to evoke Wagner’s Tristan (amongst other precedents, also including Debussy’s ambivalently Wagnerian Pelléas et Mélisande). Tellingly, in 1933 Martinů wrote ‘Wagner’s work bore heavily on us, because we loved and hated it in equal measure. We had to overcome Wagner’s work in a struggle, without ceasing to love it; one could not delete it from memory … even today, even at a time when skepticism is expressed against Wagner, one cannot pass over this work.’90 Forty years later, with the rise and fall of the citadel of Nazism still casting a dark shadow, Henze would have agreed.

Humour

Humour is a central part of the surrealist antidote to Wagner’s ‘poisonous’ music. Francis Poulenc’s 1944 setting of Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1917 surrealistic play Les Mamelles de Tirésias generates a crazy, polysemantic, shape-shifting musical world. Its Prologue is delivered by an artist–dramatist who, as a magician capable (in the image of the surrealist artist) of assembling and animating disparate objects and moods, has the universe as his playground. The world is at his ludic fingertips. He can, he proclaims, create truthful likeness, but it is up to the audience to sustain the creative spark, the magical fire. Poulenc sets this passage to a series of fluid tonal shifts based on chains of half-diminished chords moving to unresolved dominants. These successions lead to a climax which purports to be a revelation of ‘truth’ on E minor, a semitone above the opening D minor. Tonally it is paradoxical: it is a rise of a semitone into an even darker key. It is also, as we shall see, tonally prophetic of the opera’s darkest moment. There then follows a call to make as many babies as possible (during the war, of course, the French suffered terrible loss of life) before a ‘magical’ allusion to exotic, ‘Balinese’ figures which bear close resemblance to the opening figures of Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos (1932). This recalled musical object is, however, brusquely brushed aside by the perfunctory closing gesture of the Prologue. But its symbolic status as a figure of (pro)creative import is assured, for in its ‘original’ context in the Concerto this exotic figure can be heard as a source of many of the apparently disparate materials which follow. In the Concerto these opening figurations provide the spark which ignites the generative processes lying beneath the surface stylistic contradictions and gestural incongruities. This magical quality is transplanted into the Prologue of Les Mamelles. But in the opera their future role is limited to one moment only, when they return after the opera’s single overt Wagner allusion. In this moment, comic though it is, they are darkened and

90 Lydia Goehr, ‘Juliette fährt nach Mahagonny or a Critical Reading of Surrealist Opera’, The Opera Quarterly 21 (2006), 647–74; Martinů’s comments are in footnote 19, p.672. 34 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) debased. The passage in question occurs in the entr’acte – in the stuff between acts, during the mulling over of action between the sheets (if you will), the rest between the play’s ridiculous call for thousands of copulations, the time after the little death, during the temporary loss of desire. An instrumental chorale in E minor (key of ‘truth’ in the Prologue), performed Très lent, exudes an elegiac tone of mourning. The choir enters and requests that those who are weeping at the events just occurred (the deaths of Presto and Lacouf) should weep no more and wish instead for victorious children. They hear a ‘strange noise in the pit’ (fig. 6). Over sustained, low G dominant-type chord figurations (whose instrumentation and repetitiveness mark them as a dark recollection of the magical music from the Concerto) a gaggle of new babies cry ‘Papa’ in falsetto tenor voices. In ‘astonishment’ the chorus on stage lean over and sing a cooing ‘Ah’ on F–B–E–A harmony, the infamous ‘Tristan chord’. The allusion marks the étonnement of the love-death, the pit as the womb of musical surrealism. This sound emerges from the underworld into which the magical director had descended in the Prologue. If those on stage perform comic antics like crazy, irrational marionettes, then they are being manipulated from beneath rather than above. The supreme conjurer lies confined in the pit (where Wagner, the magic man of the theatre, desired to hide), reaching up from his basement in an attempt to perform his aesthetic illusions. The moment’s ambiguous tone – generated by the coexistence of skittish humour (focused on the Tristan quotation) and melancholic religiosity – is a defining one in Poulenc’s musical style. In Poulenc, humour’s pervasive ‘double’ is mourning.91 But, as Daniel Albright points out, in Poulenc’s music ‘clowning and weeping’ characteristically ‘switch too fast’; semantics are thereby ‘violated or teased’. The abrupt juxtaposition of tragedy and farce leads to Poulenc’s own brand of modernism, one founded upon the ‘emancipation of semantic dissonance’. The musical materials in themselves may sound traditional, old, or borrowed – the music is far from the ‘emancipated dissonances’ of Schoenberg or the emancipated rhythms of Stravinsky – but Poulenc’s assemblages and carefully controlled switches of expressive character and stylistic allusion are path-breaking and iconoclastic. They are also heart-breaking, for the funeral of Presto and Lacouf, the gamblers who shoot each other in a duel at the end of Act 1 of Les Mamelles, is far from parody. Albright concludes that Les Mamelles ‘is “authentic” in that there is not one moment of our lives in which there isn’t a funeral march playing somewhere in the back of our skulls’.92 Poulenc’s music often reminds us of this. It frequently sounds as a series of ephemeral, beautiful or familiar moments, which we prize and recognize at the same time as we realize that their end is imminent, in their exquisite charm their loss is already felt, the aura has already faded. Tiresias’s body may be cut up (Albright hears Les Mamelles as a cadavre exquis, and in the mutilated bodies of his surrealism

91 On Poulenc and mourning see my The Muse as Eros, 194–216. 92 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 299–300, 307. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 35

Poulenc ‘constructs musical equivalents of crutches – the crutch as crotch, fetishized, eroticized, desired’) but there are still subsurface, symbolic connections. Tiresias is divested, but meaning is still invested in the work’s apparently ridiculous antics. As Poulenc wrote, ‘Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, full of latent poetry, never descends into humour that is merely skin deep’. ‘Therefore it is essential’, he continues, ‘to sing Les Mamelles from beginning to end as if it were Verdi. It will perhaps not be easy to make this understood by interpreters who generally stick to the outward appearance of things.’93 And if one sings it like one would Verdi, then one should also listen for Wagner’s surprising guest appearance. Poulenc’s opera quotes Wagner’s Tristan to make a skittish point about love and death in a time of war. Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony (1971) evokes conflicts and contradictions through symbolic collisions between humour and pathos, quotation and inward subjective expression, the mechanical and organic, the human and inhuman. The first movement famously quotes Rossini’s well- known Overture to William Tell. This seems like a comically incongruous gesture, a moment of surprising recognition for the listener, but one which nonetheless contains demonstrable motivic relationships to surrounding materials (i.e. the quote is understood in reflective retrospection as prepared by certain figures preceding its appearance). In the last movement musical symbols of the deathly and sexual appear in the guise of quotations of Wagner’s ‘Fate’ motive from the Ring cycle and the opening melodic gesture of the Prelude to Tristan Act 1. Shostakovich thus raises Rossini’s ‘operatic’ antipode, for if we take Wagner to be the German operatic successor to Beethoven then this polarity can be heard to sustain (and of course in Shostakovich’s symphony also parody) the Rossini–Beethoven opposition which Dahlhaus famously raised as a great divide in nineteenth-century music.94 The meaning of these quotations in the symphony seems puzzling and opaque. They are part of the symphony’s inscrutable character. Christopher Norris writes of the ‘impenetrably cryptic character’ of ‘riddling gestures’ which ‘often sound like a defence built around the private places of memory’; ‘the unsettling coexistence of a deep lyrical impulse with a reflex desire to mock, subvert or defensively cover the sources of emotion.’95 The finale is a cryptic response to the deathly tone of the slow movement. Kramer argues that a move out of death into redemptive transcendence

93 Francis Poulenc, Diary of My Songs [Journal de mes mélodies], dual-language edition with a translation by Winifred Radford (London: Gollancz, 1985), 77, 79. The emphasis on ‘sing’ (‘chanter’) is Poulenc’s. 94 Dahlhaus’s division has recently attracted critical revaluation. See, for example, Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 44–8. Much of Henze’s music achieves similar revisionary work, undermining the Germanic–Italian opposition. 95 Christopher Norris, ‘Shostakovich: Politics and Musical Language’, in Christopher Norris (ed.), Shostakovich: The Man and his Music (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1982), 167, 182. On the ‘double’ character of the Rossini allusion (euphoric and dysphoric) and its 36 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) or transfiguration is no longer possible in Shostakovich’s world, for it ‘has had too much death for any symbolic power to manage’. ‘Love is absent’, Kramer continues, and ‘heroic death impossible, because the world is no longer one in which meaning is credible, even allegorically.’ The finale’s passacaglia thus ‘constitutes an extended act of mourning for the world where love and death could still be concentrated in the exemplary fates of a Siegfried or an Isolde.’96 The finale’s motives may, however, still be heard to play a generative role, most notably when the ‘Fate’ and Tristan motives are synthesized within the apparently naïve allegretto melody (3 and 4 bars after fig.113). Indeed, as Kramer notes, transformations of the ‘Fate’ motive ‘haunt the mourning process’. But the process of organic connection is contradicted by a doubly mechanical ending, based first on dwindling echoes of a pounding bass derived from the machine of bellicose destruction heard in the first movement of the Seventh Symphony and secondly on the return of the rattle and bells of the machine music of Fifteenth’s own first and third movements. If this truly is mourning music (Kramer hears the Tristan motive reduced to an ‘empty skeleton’, but all skeletons bear the essence of the structure of the dead body; they are not truly empty) then a remnant meaning can still be grasped out of the moment of gravest despair. The Wagner quotations function as symbols of lost cultural responses to death, but in opening up that world the Symphony’s bleak outlook is tinged with the merest glimmer of hope of constructing a successful, legitimate and ‘authentic’ mourning process in a post-Stalinist, post-Second World War world.

Henze and the Austro-German Musical Traditions: Trajectories to Henze’s Tristan

The varied creative responses to Wagner’s Tristan illustrated by the works discussed above are potently mixed in Henze’s Tristan.Ambivalent resistance and emulation, pessimistic negation, elegy and mourning, displacement, allegorical disenchantment, and the use of dark, sometimes horrifically surrealistic distortions all feature in its thirty-minute span. These strategies are juxtaposed to generate a work with a deeply complex relationship to the German romantic tradition to which Wagner’s Tristan in many ways seems to represent the zenith or ultimate paradigm. This deep-seated ambivalence was almost inevitable, of course, given the historical and political situation in the decades during which Henze began to emerge as an important figure. The last section of this chapter summarizes how Henze’s relationship to the German romantic musical traditions developed during his career up to the early 1970s. The post-Second World War reputation of Wagner is ineluctably tied to the problems of German identity and reputation following the defeat of Hitler’s Third connection to motives in other Shostakovich works see Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 198–204. 96 Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture, 117–18. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 37

Reich. In his autobiography, written in 1996 and published in English translation as Bohemian Fifths, Henze declares:

The Germans are still hated in Europe, still the object of contempt and mistrust. More time is needed: at least two more generations must come and go before the Germans’ reputation is more or less restored and the events of 1933 to 1945 are mercifully forgotten … All things German fell into disrepute, and every German was affected by it. For me, German art – especially the middle class, nationalistic art of the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries – became insufferable and suspect. For a time I was unable and unwilling to take any interest in it, unable to contemplate the German forests or hear any mention of the German soul – the depraved German soul.97

In musical terms this problematic German identity was – Wagner apart – most closely associated with the genre of the symphony. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century symphonic legacy of Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler (the ‘Germanness’ of these last two of course is highly debatable) remained a potent symbol of an ‘heroically’ German, national artistic achievement. In romantic discourse the ‘symphonic’ had become the characteristic of German music which, it was claimed, raised it above other musical types into an absolute or metaphysical plane which the music of other nations was unable to reach. In such spirit was the supposedly ‘symphonic’ quality of Wagner’s music dramas, Tristan especially, identified. Wagner himself saw his stage works as the next essential step beyond Beethoven’s Ninth.98 It is unsurprising therefore, that many composers of the post-Second World War period shunned both the symphony as a genre and the ‘symphonic’ as a broader idea, or at least sought to place it at a controlled distance through techniques of parody or ironic critique. Henze, by deliberate, dissenting contrast, continued to interrogate the symphony and the symphonic, in a sympathetic if ambivalent manner. In so doing he was engaging with a tradition which for many of his contemporary compatriots had become irrevocably tarnished by its distasteful ideological or historical associations. As Karen Painter has recently commented, ‘after the collapse of the Third Reich it would be difficult to pick up a tradition that had been so laden with political expectation and eventually with debased political programs … For postwar German composers the rehabilitation of a musical tradition led them back to the Second Viennese School and the modernist Weimar

97 Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber, 1998), 53. 98 See Carolyn Abbate, ‘Opera as Symphony, a Wagnerian Myth’, in Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (eds), Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 92–124. 38 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Left, with its recourses to montage and brevity.’99 Henze is the notable exception. But, as Painter notes, he engaged with this legacy from a position of increasing and self-imposed exile. Henze’s geographical and creative distance from the current ‘orthodoxies’ of the German Heimat raises a centrally important issue. Henze’s feeling of being an outsider – as artist and homosexual – was confirmed by his increasing desire to rebel against the rule of German avant-garde ideologues. From his youth Henze had developed a refined appreciation for the taboo literature of the so-called ‘degenerates’:

the voices of decay and decline that entered German poetry through Georg Trakl’s lyric verse struck a chord with us: our evenings passed in a haze of blue; crystalline tears would fall from our eyelids; shed for a bitter world. Shivering bluely, the night wind swept down the hillside like a mother’s dark lament, only to die away again, and for a moment we glimpsed the blackness at the centre of our hearts, whole minutes of shimmering silence. We lived completely bound up in this world of forbidden pleasures.100

He also developed an enthusiasm for the ‘young German bourgeoisie of the early nineteenth century, with its discoveries concerning not only the language of music and music of language, but also the significance of our folk tales and myths and the soulscapes that they conceal, since it seems to me that such ideas may help us to escape from our benighted state of spiritual underdevelopment and into the light and lucidity of classical culture.’101 Henze is here clearly speaking of the romantic culture of Rückert, Schlegel, von Platen, Novalis and Tieck – many of whom, as we have seen, were enthralled by the Tristan myth. But it all seemed so untimely and desperately out of fashion. Moving to Italy allowed him to revalue the potential furtherance of German legacies. In a famous study of exile, Edward Said argued that alienation and agonizing distance from dominant cultural processes are essential if a critically informed consciousness is to emerge. Paradoxically, however, the ‘critic’ (and, by extension, for argument, the artist) nonetheless remains an inseparable part of this culture. There is no escape. Said’s prime example is Erich Auerbach’s classic text of the post-war years, Mimesis (1947), written when the author was in Istanbul and thus exiled from Western European culture, the very topic of the work. The condition of exile generates the risk of not writing, because as an outcast from home, nation and milieu the author experiences a ‘loss of texts, traditions and continuities that make up the very web of culture’. The question for Said is how Auerbach was able to transform this predicament into the creative production of a critically voiced text. He

99 Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics 1900–45 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 243. 100 Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 26. 101 Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 55. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 39 finds an answer in a later essay of Auerbach, ‘Philologie derWeltliteratur ’: ‘The most priceless and indispensable part of a philologist’s heritage is still his own nation’s culture and heritage. Only when he is first separated from this heritage, however, and then transcends it does it become truly effective.’ Auerbach analyses culture’s aggressive fortification, the affirmation of identity through silencing or excluding alterity, as an ‘affirmation of the known at the expense of the knowable’.102 All this is strikingly resonant with Henze’s position, with his exclusion from the homeland’s dominant musical culture and his flaunting of a deliberately provocative alterity which ultimately allows him to develop a new creative, ‘transcendent’ if ambivalent relationship with the culture of his Heimat. Looking back in 1971 Henze sought to distinguish his experience as a German in Mediterranean climes with the tradition of the Central European artist’s ‘Italian Experience’; what mattered to him was isolation, freedom and search for self- identity – not ‘Italy’ itself.103 This isolation led to a personal crisis and to a radicalized engagement with the world and politics. Before that crisis, the atmosphere he found in Naples was especially conducive, liberating and inspirational. In 1964 Henze confessed that it ‘seemed the appropriate environment for jettisoning all possible convention and caution, and any excess of counterpoint and esotericism, and for responding with a similar openness to the spontaneity and directness to be found in everything Neapolitan’. He was able to rejoice in the colour, melodiousness, faded melancholy, sensitivity, sentimentality and unruly din he experienced there. ‘There is no city so dominated by grief, the frenetic noise that makes one think of despair, a deep buzzing in Hades.’104 Though Naples’s ‘cultural pessimism’ was something from which he later sought to escape, these were ‘carefree years’, during which, he recalled, he ‘lived out the adolescence which, for historical reasons, I had never known at home’.105 He heard special expressive qualities in the Italian energetically and extravagantly spoken around him. This, he described, was ‘speech not in the Central European sense; this speech traverses all conceivable timbres, always with a tendency to break into song … It is the cry of birth, the cry of distress, the cry of the market-place, the groan of hunger, the moan of death.’ This confirmed for the composer that singing was a ‘psychic necessity’, that ‘singing stands for all nuances between laughing and weeping’.106 These ideas fed most explicitly into

102 Erich Auerbach, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, trans. M. and E.W. Said, Centennial Review 13 (Winter 1969), 17; cited in Edward Said, The World, The Text and The Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 7. On exile as a central experience of modernity see Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), 173–86. 103 Hans Werner Henze, ‘Art and Revolution’ (1971), in Music and Politics: Collected Writings 1953–81, trans. Peter Labanyi (London: Faber, 1982), 178. 104 Hans Werner Henze, ‘Naples’ (1964), in Music and Politics, 66, 70. 105 Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 145, 178, 203. 106 Henze, ‘Naples’, 69. 40 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) the composition of the Five Neapolitan Songs (1956) and parts of Nachtstücke und Arien (1957). The controversial circumstances of the first performance of the former are well known. Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono – the Darmstadt holy trinity, high priests of iconoclastic avant-garde – left ostentatiously after just a few bars: ‘What must have shocked them’ Henze comments, ‘were presumably … the light cadences of Neapolitan or Spanish café chantant music which the piece incorporates at certain points.’ Here, as in the Neapolitan languor which overtly characterizes parts of the ballet score Ondine (1956–7), Henze’s ‘musical syntax became de-Germanized, and Neapolitanized instead’.107 Henze’s relationship with his father was deeply problematic because of the latter’s overt Nazi sympathies. As such, the loathing of the father figure becomes identified with repugnance for the current condition of the fatherland. In the essay ‘Art and Revolution’ he recalls that ‘my hatred of my father became entwined with my hatred of fascism, and was transferred to the nation of soldiers, which seemed to me like a nation of fathers’.108 His father decided to send Hans to a school run by the Waffen-SS, where he hoped his son would be trained to ‘become a proper German’.109 Mercifully, Hans was rescued from this fate by passing the entrance exam to the Braunschweig State School of Music. It was while at this school that he heard the first German performance of Frank Martin’s Le Vin herbé in 1943, a chamber oratorio based on Bédier’s retelling of the Tristan legend. Henze recalls his astonished, beguiled reaction: ‘So that’s what twelve-tone music sounds like, I thought. So beautiful and so tender! Such ravishing sounds! And it was all produced without Stufengänge (to borrow Schenker’s expression), without Hindemithian fourths and fifths … I wondered whether the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern sounded as beautiful as this.’110 Here lie seeds of many important aspects of Henze’s subsequent development as a composer. In 1946 Henze attended the first Darmstadt summer school. The following year the school was also attended by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, whose moral, political and communicative commitments enthralled Henze. (Later, in 1952–3, he greeted Hartmann’s musica viva concerts in Munich with great enthusiasm.) Hartmann’s technical expansion of orchestral timbre and commitment to large-scale symphonic forms were important models for Henze’s own symphonic ambitions.111 These interests were crucial to Henze’s increasing lack of sympathy for the developing Stockhausen–Boulez Darmstadt orthodoxy (strictures that were not manifest in the early years of the school). He saw the move towards total serialism as a dogmatic misreading of the music of Webern. ‘My antipathy was not directed against Webern’s

107 Hans Werner Henze, ‘German Music in the 1940s and 1950s’, Music and Politics, 46. 108 Henze, Music and Politics, 178. 109 Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 28. 110 Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 29–30. 111 See Hanns-Werner Heister, ‘Zur Bedeutung Karl Amadeus Hartmanns für Hans Werner Henze’, Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 20 (2003), 205–214. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 41 music’, he wrote, ‘but against the misuse and misinterpretation of his aesthetic and indeed, of his technique and its motivation and significance. Thanks to the initiative of Boulez and Stockhausen this had become institutionalized as official musical thinking.’ This led to music which Henze considered barren and lifeless:

Everything had to be stylized and made abstract: music regarded as a glass-bead- game, a fossil of life. Discipline was the order of the day. Through discipline it was going to be possible to get music back on its feet again, though nobody asked what for. Discipline enabled form to come about: there were rules and parameters for everything. Expressionism and (left-wing) Surrealism were mystically remote; we were told that these movements were already obsolete before 1930 and had been surpassed. The new avant-garde would reaffirm this.112

Henze despaired at the coexisting view that the public could be dismissed as mostly irredeemably illiterate and philistine. He set out to create a musical art of more immediate engagement and expressive openness. An urgent sense of a need for new musical freedoms was more widely in the air in the mid- to late 1950s. To Adorno, for example, the new music seemed to have grown prematurely aged.113 The desire was heightened for new informal modes of subjective expression rather than total, objective construction. Writing in 1960, Adorno, however, considered Henze’s pursuit of such freedoms to be mired in failure because the composer had succumbed to a retreat to the comforts of old forms of restriction. Adorno noted that ‘total constructivism, as a taboo on the subjective need for expression, stirs up opposing forces … Some of the most talented German composers … suffer so terribly under determinism that they attempt to break free of it; the foremost of these is Henze. In such works as the opera König Hirsch, however, this attempt led not to the longed-for realm of freedom, a true “musique informelle” but, rather, backwards: to compromise. The laments about the compulsion of constructivism can become a mere pretext to withdraw into the more comfortable bondage of convention.’114 Adorno hankered for a new type of expressive and formal freedom akin to that he heard in Schoenberg’s radical atonal scores of the years from 1908. Adorno’s statements were a powerful part of a discourse in which Henze’s position was becoming increasingly stereotyped as a retrenchment in opposition to his more obviously avant-garde contemporaries, such as Stockhausen.

112 Henze, ‘German Music in the 1940s and 1950s’, 38, 43. 113 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’ [1955], in Essays on Music, selected with introduction, commentary and notes by Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 181–202. 114 Theodor Adorno, ‘On the State of Composition in Germany’ [1960], in Night Music, 408–409. See ‘Vers une musique informelle’ [1961] in Quasi una Fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 269–322. 42 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Stockhausen’s lack of sympathy for Henze’s work at this time is well known, and he was against the publication of Rudolf Stephan’s article on Henze in the 1958 issue of Die Reihe devoted to ‘Young composers’. In that essay Stephan focuses on Henze’s creative relationship to the most apparently oppositional composers of the century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky – the first manifest in Henze’s recourse to twelve-note compositional technique, the second in the employment of ‘natural’ note-relationships (fifths as the basis for harmonies, thirds and sixths as sonorous textural thickening, seconds and sevenths as dissonant spices), complex metrical devices and fondness for parody. Stephan notes that Henze’s relationship to both composers is ‘thoroughly ambivalent’. Henze’s twelve-note technique is ‘wholly un- Schoenbergian’ – being much closer in spirit to Frank Martin and especially Alban Berg – and the tonal ‘peculiarities’ of Stravinsky are also combined with Berg’s ‘play with traditional sounds’ and expressive freedoms. Stephan concludes that Henze has no close relationship with the ‘constructional tendency’ of serial music, but demonstrates how it can be employed as a ‘stimulus’ or to generate stylistic conflict of theatrical character. In the serial String Quartet (1952)115 he hears how Henze ‘has come to grips, in a somewhat forced way, with techniques that are inwardly foreign to him … these technical procedures suppressed a large proportion of his best qualities’.116 However, the ambiguity of the relationship to Schoenberg is more complex than merely a question of twelve-note technique. In fact, in Henze’s music serialism is probably the least significant aspect of Schoenberg’s style and aesthetic. Much more important are the atonal works, with their ambiguous relationship to Wagnerian chromaticism, and their subjective ‘expressionism’, which in the pursuit of revealing deep psychological truths is both an extension of romantic expression and a striving for a realist, analytical objective stance to counter the fancies of romantic idealism. The attraction of Stravinsky for Henze was no doubt partly based on its apparent ‘anti-Germanic’ aesthetic, but most of his music is at heart ‘post-Schoenbergian’ in form and expression. Henze always seems to approach the German traditions with a sense of what we might, to evoke Schoenberg again, call ‘Erwartung’ – anxious, or nervous expectation. Nonetheless, Henze has repeatedly sought to challenge these ‘German’ features with apparently oppositional styles and techniques. In particular he has attempted to find a way of creatively engaging with Stravinsky without jettisoning the Germanic legacy. Through the 1950s he was drawn to Stravinsky as the ‘diametrical opposites of those of the expressionistic Schoenberg. Enslaved by one, enthralled by the other, I have tried ever since, for decades, to sustain a double life, a contradiction, a dualism within myself, and to draw the aesthetic

115 There is a row analysis of bars 1–31 of this quartet in the appendix to Josef Rufer’s Composition with Twelve Notes, trans. Humphrey Searle (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1954). 116 Rudolph Stephan, ‘Hans Werner Henze’, Die Reihe (English Edition) vol. 4 ‘Young Composers Issue’ (1960), 29–35. Original German Die Reihe 4 (1958), 32–7. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 43 consequences.’117 On the surface this seems to counter the famous chasm in modern music opened up in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music (1949). But it is rather too pat to assume that Henze achieved – or even sought – an organic synthesis of Adorno’s opposition. Indeed, the sense is often one of an approach towards a kind of negative dialectic. In this tensed, anti-organic position, the music of Berg and Mahler powerfully suggested to Henze modes of engagement with the German symphonic tradition which can accommodate sustained dissent and conflict. Several key works from the late 1950s reveal how Henze’s engagement with the German traditions rejected by the contemporary avant-garde was sustained, enriched, countered and inflected. Such works included Kammermusik and Der Prinz von Homburg (both composed during 1958). In the latter, Heinrich von Kleist’s exemplification of a move out of Prussianism into Greece provided an outlet for Henze’s interest in early nineteenth-century Italian opera and allowed him to ‘free my musical technique from the burden of Expressionism.’118 During the composition of this opera in the ‘seductive Naples’ of the late 1950s Henze recalled that he ‘had to nail [his] windows shut in order not to hear the siren songs of tonality reaching up to me on the fifth floor from a thousand guitars and mandolins’.119 Again a sustained, unresolved contradiction or lack of resolution between opposing styles is characteristic. In the essay ‘Instrumental Composition’ (1963) he noted how alternations between contrapuntal and cantabilità pieces, ‘a polyphonic North German temperament in the arioso South’,

could be interpreted as indecisiveness, but also as an artistic means of clarifying tension and resolution, rigour and effortlessness, brightness and darkness; as something theatrical, perhaps even as the intention to interweave things that are irreconcilable. There is no attempt at synthesis. The resulting frictions produce a dramatic effect which differs from work to work.120

Everything here tends towards the ‘theatrical’, though in the orchestral pieces ‘the characteristics of certain symphonic traditions are not lost sight of’. The formal and structural power of the symphonic sonata was especially important. Henze declared that all the orchestral works composed up to this point in his career – he lists Ode an den Westwind (1953), Quattro poemi (1955), Nachtstücke und Arien (1957), and Antifone (1960) – ‘incorporate different formal experiments in the greatest Central European form of instrumental music, the sonata’. But the symphonies he composed are far from consistent in their relationship to Austro-German symphonism. He considered the First Symphony to be a failure in its original version (he revised it

117 Hans Werner Henze, Language, Music and Artistic Invention [The Prince of Hesse Memorial Lecture], trans. Mary Whittall (Aldeburgh: Britten–Pears Library, 1996), 7. 118 Hans Werner Henze, ‘Der Prinz von Homburg’ [1960], Music and Politics, 102. 119 Henze, Language, Music and Artistic Invention, 8. 120 Henze, Music and Politics, 131. 44 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) in 1963); the second (1949) and third (1949–50) are really ‘sinfonias’, suggesting a preclassical cut; the fourth (1955) is a ‘five movements in one’ structure incorporating overture, sonata, variations, scherzo and rondo finale with ‘theatrical’ origins (its material is drawn from Act 2 of Konig Hirsch). The Fifth (1962) has a very much clearer engagement with the classical symphony, but in a highly condensed form, obviously indebted to Stravinsky’s Symphony in C and Symphony in Three Movements. It was Henze’s growing enthusiasm for Mahler which encouraged new dialogues and developments with the Austro-German symphonic legacy (though not, for some years, in a work entitled ‘Symphony’). Henze became convinced that it was possible to ‘develop the line of thought of [Mahler’s] music, for above and beyond its incontestable necrological qualities, it contains many new starting-points, challenges and stimuli’.121 The main attraction was the eclectic idiom and subjective complexity of Mahler’s music, which represented ‘one of many possible responses to the restrictive and … one-dimensional approach to music which many adopted in the period following the Second World War, in the post-fascist world’. It was Mahler’s example which encouraged Henze ‘to find a wholly personal approach to the music of the present and of the past, the trivial and the ritual music of all periods’, a ‘personal path’ he now felt more confidently able to pursue ‘outside the “acceptable” aesthetic course of the mainstream of self-styled modern music’.122 In an essay written upon conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony (1975) he describes how this music can be heard interrogating itself, how the tradition is continued but also critiqued, that it is music both ‘knowing’ and ‘tragic’, thus sharing a state of consciousness similar to that also exposed by Freud, Kafka and Musil. Henze was especially taken with how Mahler’s music ‘contains much grief for things that have been lost, but messages for the future of mankind should also be discerned: one of them is hope; another, directed at the very essence of music itself, love … Its provocation lies in its love of truth and its consequent lack of extenuation.’123 Aesthetically, this is reflected in Henze’s preoccupation with conjunctions of beauty, love, death, abjection and regeneration, in a visionary art which offers the possibility of ‘redemption’, but which is ‘multilayered’ in its ‘illusions and Utopias’:124

My music draws what strength it has from its inherent contradictions. It is like a thorny thicket full of barbs and other unpleasant things. It is as poisonous as any serpent’s sting. Its embraces may be dangerous, they may turn out to be a form of betrayal and frustrate one’s expectations. People may feel repelled by its often

121 Henze, Music and Politics, 131–2. 122 Henze, Language, Music and Artistic Invention, 7. 123 Hans Werner Henze, ‘Gustav Mahler’ [1975], Music and Politics, 157–8. 124 Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 57. For more, see my ‘Hans Werner Henze as Post-Mahlerian: Anachronism, Freedom, and the Erotics of Intertextuality’, twentieth-century music 1 (2004), 179–207, from which the comments which follow on Being Beauteous are derived. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 45

garish colours and the infernal din that it seems constrained to produce … My music has an emotional dimension that is unfashionable, an emotional untimeliness.125

A good illustration of this style and aesthetic is Henze’s 1963 setting of Rimbaud’s ‘Being Beauteous’, from Illuminations (1872–3), for high soprano, harp and four cellos.126 This short piece is especially useful in that it brings Wagner’s Tristan back to a central position. Rimbaud’s poem speaks of metamorphosis through destruction and creation. Sounds (music and whistlings) cause the adored, beautiful body to expand and burst open, into vibrant colour, movement and sensuality. The spectators become acolytes, initiates intoxicated by the new beauty, embraced and reclothed by it. But the whole is mingled with death and violence. In the final lines the ‘Being Beauteous’ becomes a grotesque dummy:

Devant une neige un Être de Beauté de haute taille. Des sifflements de mort et des cercles de musique sourde font monter, s’élargir et trembler comme un spectre ce corps adoré. Les couleurs propres de la vie se foncent, dansent, et se dégagent autour de la vision, sur le chantier. Des blessures écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes. Et les frissons s’élèvent et grondent, et la saveur forcenée de ces effets se chargeant avec les sifflements mortels et les rauques musiques que le monde, loin derrière nous, lance sur notre mère de beauté, – elle recule, elle se dresse. Oh! Nos os sont revêtus d’un nouveau corps amoureux. Ô la face cendrée, l’écusson de crin, les bras de cristal! Le canon sur lequel je dois m’abattre à travers la mêlée des arbres et de l’air léger!

[Against the snow a high-statured Being of Beauty. Whistlings of death and circles of faint music cause this adored body to rise, expand, and quiver like a ghost. The colours proper to life deepen, dance, and detach themselves round the vision in the making. Scarlet and black wounds burst in the fine flesh. And shudders rise and rumble, and the frenetic flavour of these effects is filled with the mortal whistlings and the raucous music which the world, far behind us, hurls at our mother of beauty – she recedes, she rears herself up. Oh! Our bones are clothed with a new and amorous body. O the ashen face, the escutcheon of horsehair, the crystal arms! The cannon at which I must charge across the skirmish of the trees and the light air!]127

Henze recently wrote, in words and images which echo the vision of Rimbaud’s poem,

125 Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 56. 126 For a useful, brief analysis of the work’s formal functions and symmetries, motivicism and instrumentation see Hans Vogt, Neue Musik seit 1945 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1972), 311–17. 127 Translation by Oliver Bernard, from the CD Henze, Versuch Über Schweine, etc., Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, et al. DG 449 869-2 (1996). 46 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

The sight of … beauty moves us, we feel a sacred awe, it plucks a string within us which vibrates and reverberates. It causes something to happen inside us, perhaps it’s a kind of conversion. Wounds and sores disturb this harmony, as we know. We cannot prevent our thoughts from turning from the sight of a handsome human face to pictures of its destruction. And we cannot prevent mourning and regret sounding like an incessant dissonance, distracting us from the contemplation of beauty, a steadily dripping poison which clouds our sight and makes our eyes smart. ‘Whoever looks on beauty is already in death’s hands.’128

Henze’s final line is a quotation from the ‘Tristan’ Venetian Sonnet of August von Platen (1824). It is characteristic of Henze to recall and quote a beloved predecessor at moments of heightened expression. This cultural legacy and technique is also manifest in an embedded allusion to the opening of Wagner’s Tristan towards the final section of Being Beauteous (bb.189–92; Example 1.7). The allusion occurs as the beautiful form in Rimbaud’s text is most imperiled and yet also most alluring. It emerges from the texture after the line ‘Oh! Nos os sont revêtus d’un nouveau corps amoureux’ (Oh! Our bones are clothed with a new and amorous body). Henze’s Tristan allusion therefore suggests that it is the Wagnerian erotic tone which might be borrowed to clothe the skeletal, deathly body, that the Wagnerian might be drawn upon as a source of new beauty and new life. Wagner’s melody is transposed, rhythmically altered and texturally embedded but remains in its original register, played on the cello. It also retains a suggestion of the expressive rhetoric of resolution to the dominant of A minor, and the cello is of course the instrument which carries the erotically charged melos of Wagner’s opening gesture. Both of Henze’s Tristan allusions (the literary one in his essay and the musical one in the Rimbaud setting) are examples of non-satirical intertextuality. (They are comparable, therefore, with Berg’s Tristan reference in the Lyric Suite rather than Debussy’s Tristan cakewalk). Neither irony nor alienation is of prime interest here for Henze. By contrast with Mahler – one of Henze’s beloved models for musical allusion and intertextuality whose preoccupation with fate, death and mourning often leads to ironic or parodic styles – Henze’s intersections of Eros and Thanatos may include contrasting functions, including the parodic, but largely lack Mahler’s characteristic tendency to imbue this with devastating irony. Being Beauteous is in effect a miniature, a small- scale and intimate exploration of eroticism and death partially viewed through a lens more or less overtly stolen from Wagner. Being Beauteous sustains an engagement with Tristan that is overt at the end of the opera, Elegy for Young Lovers composed just a couple of years earlier (1961), where, as Kramer suggests, ‘death and transfiguration’, which ‘may coalesce’ at the end of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, ‘tear asunder in a moment that, in their stead,

128 Henze, Language, Music and Artistic Invention, 22. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 47

Example 1.7 Hans Werne Henze, Being Beauteous (Arthur Rimbaud); bars 187–92 48 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) conjoins aesthetic greatness with abjection’.129 Walter Bernhart has explored Henze’s opera as an example of the problems of artistically depicting evil. In the libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman the central character Gregor Mittenhofer is an aging poet seeking creative inspiration in an Alpine holiday, in the company of his much more youthful lover. Inevitably, the latter falls for one of the young hotel guests. Mittenhofer sends the lovers up the glacier to find the edelweiss, the flower of his inspiration, knowing that a terrible blizzard is forecast. The death of the lovers then forms the inspiration for Mittenhofer’s elegy – the title of the opera – which is received as a masterpiece. Henze named Wagner as one of the models for Mittenhofer as a mythic romantic genius accused of evil.130 But, as Bernhart explains, Henze’s early commentary on the opera (1962) suggests that the artist’s ‘guilt’ is an open question. Henze ends his essay with lines from Auden’s poem ‘The Composer’:

You alone, alone, imaginary song Are unable to say an existence is wrong And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.131

These lines express Auden and Kallman’s conviction that there is a ‘lack of identity between Goodness and Beauty, between the character of man and the character of his creations’;132 a conviction shared by Henze in the early 1960s but which was to be abandoned by the political revolutionary Henze of the end of the decade and the early 1970s. Thus, in his essay of 1975 Henze described the music as one which sarcastically condemned Mittenhofer, and the ‘beauty’ of the final elegy – ‘very beautiful music’ as Auden said in 1968 – is all in ‘inverted commas’, the elegy is a ‘sinister reflection of the viciousness of the poet who wrote it’. During the early stages of the collaboration with Auden and Kallman on The Bassarids in the mid-1960s his librettists urged Henze to reconsider his disdain and distaste for Wagner’s music. They insisted Henze listen to Götterdämmerung and that he should learn to overcome political and aesthetic aversions to Wagner’s music. But on attending a production conducted by Herbert von Karajan in Vienna, Henze heard ‘silly and self-regarding emotionalism, behind which it is impossible not to

129 Lawrence Kramer, ‘Introduction’, to Chapin and Kramer (eds), Musical Meaning and Human Values, 3. 130 Hans Werner Henze, ‘Elegy for Young Lovers (2) The Artist as Bourgeois Hero’ (1975), Music and Politics, 110. 131 Walter Bernhart, ‘“Pour Out … Forgiveness Like a Wine”: Can Music “Say an Existence is Wrong”?’, in Chapin and Kramer (eds), Musical Meaning and Human Values, 171–4. See Hans Werner Henze, ‘Elegy for Young Lovers (1) Birth of the Opera’ (1961), Music and Politics, 108. 132 W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, ‘Genesis of a Libretto’, in W.H. Auden, Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings, 1939–1973, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 246. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 49 detect a neo-German mentality and ideology. There is something of an imperialistic threat, of something militantly nationalistic, something disagreeably heterosexual and Aryan in all these rampant horn calls, this pseudo-Germanic Stabreim, these incessant chords of a seventh, and all the insecure heroes and villains that people Wagner’s librettos.’ However, Tristan was a special case. This work was exempt from Henze’s sceptical if not downright toxic view of Wagner’s work. Writing on the genesis of The Bassarids in 1966, he notes that, despite attempting to avoid Wagner’s work out of a certain antipathy, ‘I am well aware what Wagner signifies, wherein his greatness lies; Tristan, which I have never seen, although I have studied the score in detail, has subsequently become a kind of bible for me.’ The libretto for The Bassarids arrived as Henze ‘was beginning to discover the great forms of nineteenth-century symphonic music.’ ‘I believe’, he wrote, ‘that the road from Wagner’s Tristan to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and with The Bassarids I have tried to go further along it. I am not prepared to relinquish what the centuries have passed on to us. On the contrary; “One must also know how to inherit; inheriting, that, ultimately, is culture.” That was Thomas Mann’s view and I willingly subscribe to it.’133 There is hardly anything of Wagner in The Bassarids (there is much that is Mahlerian and Bergian) but these Tristan ‘seeds’, though they would lie dormant for several years, were now firmly planted. This admission of the continuing power of Wagner’s Tristan came just a few years before Henze became involved in left-wing revolutionary politics. How does Henze the political composer of the late 1960s and early 1970s relate to the German musical tradition, and Wagner in particular?134 In 1975 Terry Apter asked: ‘How was a Marxist – or any composer who sought to integrate his political and his musical commitments – to cope with the self-contained and individualistic world revealed with such damnable fascination in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde?’ In Apter’s view, Henze’s Tristan ‘is not a philosophical treatise on this subject – the drama is clearly a musical one. In it, [Henze] integrates one aspect of Wagner’s world into his own imagination, and in doing so he deals with problems which face anyone who is captivated by the opera and yet wishes to live at least half his or her life in daylight.’ This is mostly uncontroversial (though the work’s drama is certainly not a ‘purely’ or solely ‘musical’ one – it is also psychological). Apter’s judgement is more dubious when he writes that Henze’s Tristan ‘lies comfortably within the romantic tradition: there is no opposition between romanticism and some antithetical temperament. The tension is between different types of romantic vision, and thus quotations from

133 Hans Werner Henze, ‘The Bassarids: (1) Tradition and Cultural Heritage’ (1966), Music and Politics, 144–5. 134 Henze has always cut a paradoxical and ambiguous political figure: writing in 1981 Michael Walsh described him as a ‘Marxist composer in striped pants and gold cuff links who talks about revolution while sipping Calvados puffing unfiltered Gitanes in an elegant hotel restaurant’ and quotes Henze’s quip, ‘better a Communist in a Rolls Royce than a Fascist in a tank’. Time, 7 December 1981. 50 Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973)

Brahms and Chopin lie beside quotations from Wagner.’135 Here Apter’s reading is too simplistic and comfortable. The romantic quality of the work is imbued with ambivalence, and the Chopin quotes in particular are brutally treated. (But more on this in the next chapter.) It is crucial, at this point, to recognize the political climate at the time Henze began composing a ‘Tristan’. This was the early 1970s, an age of wide-spread turmoil and political and social paranoia. Peter Petersen highlights the Vietnam war, the height of Nixon Watergate scandal, the Chilean military coup led by General Pinochet in September 1973 and the murder of the elected Salvador Allende – a political disaster which had a personal dimension for Henze through friends as victims (such as the Chilean songwriter Victor Jara) and his own political hopes. The television pictures from Chile so upset Henze that he found compositional work was for a while impossible, and he joined protestors marching the streets of Rome.136 Petersen argues that of the three works composed in 1973, all of which show clear but quite different manifestations of ‘social commitment’ (Streik bei Mannesmann is overtly about a industrial dispute; Voices, a collection of song settings of widely varying topic and style, is for Petersen a ‘song of solidarity’ for its embracing of a world of diverse voices), it is Tristan which ‘develops his political ideas further than anywhere else’.137 This is achieved through its coming to terms with both humanistic love and the violence of history, reflecting both the turbulent political events – most importantly those in Chile – and the tragic personal losses of that year. The paranoia of the age is musically manifest in the displacing of internal trauma onto ‘outer’ musical objects, and Wagner’s Tristan in particular. Henze’s Tristan is typically ambitious. It sustains Henze’s interests in psychology, in particular his enthusiastic reading of Erich Neumann, which was so important in The Bassarids. Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949) was conceived and written during the Second World War and published as the nuclear nightmares of the Cold War took hold, to which the horrors of Nazism seemed to be only a dark prelude. In Jungian terms Neumann argued that in the face of evil mankind must acknowledge and hear the inner voice of the dark ‘shadow’ in each and every individual. But he moves from Jungian psychology to develop an ethics capable of transforming these inner forces and their destructive potential. ‘The lake of blood’ which ‘threatens to engulf the whole world’ is the result of incapacity to deal with the psychic nature. A new ethic of the total unit – a state of wholeness that is not perfection but is beyond opposites, where rather than project evil onto the

135 Terry Apter, ‘First Performances: Tristan and The Bassarids’, Tempo, New Series 112 (March 1975), 27. 136 Peter Petersen, Hans Werner Henze: Ein politischer Musiker (Hamburg: Argument- Verlag, 1988), 185–6. 137 Peter Petersen, ‘“ … eine Form und ein Name: Tristan”. Strukturelle und semantische Untersuchungen an Hans Werner Henzes Préludes für Klavier, Tonbänder und Orchester’, in Otto Kolleritsch (ed.), Verbalisierung und Sinngehalt: Über Semantische Tendenzen im Denken in und über Musik Heute (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1989), 168. Contexts: Confronting Tristan Legacies 51

‘Other’ a ‘process of transformation … bound up with the shadow throughout its course … the creative grace of renewal, healing and transformation, which emerges unexpectedly from the darkness of the unconscious, retains to the last its connection with the paradox of the deus absconditus, that unaccountable and inscrutably numinous power which may encounter the human ego under the guise of the Devil, the shadow of God, in the very citadel of the psyche’.138 Neumann acknowledges that given the dark spectre of the most horrific ‘dance of death’, such a new ethic may seem anachronistic or obsolete. Henze has frequently been judged in these very terms. The important essay ‘Music as a Means of Resistance’ (1963) provided a riposte. Henze writes that ‘music in our time’ – in a world ‘which leans towards self-destruction’ – is too often one of ‘denial’, negation and ‘rejection’; it is ‘given little opportunity for glorification and flooding people with illumination’. He finds creative tension in his engagement with a world in which there is little ‘cause for affirmation’ but ‘there is no harm in this’, though again this leads to his isolation from the ‘aesthetic puritanism’ of the ‘progressives’, who, in their ‘foolish response to the nineteenth-century’ stand by the hopes of technical innovation, mechanization and depersonalization, and esotericism. Compositional ‘recourse to older worlds of sound’ is more invigorating and promising than the ‘colloquial’, ‘learnable language of modernism espoused in the academy and the electronic studio’.139 For Kramer, Henze’s Tristan is a ‘polymorphic work’ which ‘is perhaps the most thoroughgoing musical confrontation with the figure of Wagner that we have. It is a piece driven not only by the forces of alienated modernity that Wagner opposed, but also by the forces of destruction that his legacy served.’ Kramer concludes that ‘the problem is the old one of the “Wagner case” made new by the immolations of recent history: what do you do when the Wagnerian enchantment becomes the Wagnerian horror?’140 The next chapter examines the compositional strategies and materials which Henze employed in his attempt to respond to such problems and questions.

138 Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, trans. Eugene Rolfe (London: Harper & Row, 1973), 146. 139 Henze, Music and Politics, 123–7. 140 Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture, 120, 122.

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