hans werner henze, bohemian fifths: an autobiography

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This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University] On: 15 November 2014, At: 01:46 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK New Political Science Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnps20 Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography John Bokina Published online: 18 Aug 2010. To cite this article: John Bokina (2000) Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, New Political Science, 22:3, 429-431, DOI: 10.1080/713687942 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713687942 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access

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Page 1: Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography

This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]On: 15 November 2014, At: 01:46Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

New Political SciencePublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnps20

Hans Werner Henze,Bohemian Fifths: AnAutobiographyJohn BokinaPublished online: 18 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: John Bokina (2000) Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: AnAutobiography, New Political Science, 22:3, 429-431, DOI: 10.1080/713687942

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713687942

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access

Page 2: Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography

and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 3: Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography

Reviews 429

choice made by workers, and not (as Marx and some vulgar Marxists pro-pounded) natural results of inexorable laws of nature leading to the inevitabledownfall of capitalism, Grace and James Boggs, like Gramsci before them,maintain that it is workers who heroically make choices to change the world.Grace in particular vigorously argues that this miserable capitalist world canonly be changed by the action of people in concert, and not by stiff communica-tive programs of critical theory. Living for Change is a great read, honest, brave,and imaginative.

TEODROS KIROSSuffolk University

Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, Stewart Spencer (trans.),Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, 512 pp.

One of the 20th century’s most proli�c and successful composers, Hans WernerHenze has lived a controversial and contradictory life. Hence, the book is aptlytitled. Bohemian �fths were intervals played by Bohemian horn players thatdeliberately �aunted the rules of 18th-century classical composition. Born to apoor German family, Henze has spent most of his adult life in self-exile in anextravagant villa just outside Rome. A wealthy composer who is proud of hiscommitment to the pleasures of la dolce vita, he supported the New Left andremains a member of the Italian Communist Party. Always concerned about hisprecarious health, he also writes of extensive binges on alcohol and drugs andprotracted periods of homosexual promiscuity. A portrait of the aging artist (hejust turned 73) as a decadent and political radical, this long book also providesfascinating glimpses of a wide array of prominent musical, cultural, and political�gures. Several years ago, Henze published his essays on politics and music.1

This book connects the personal dots behind these manifestos, as well asproviding instructive insights into the development of radical political identityand the process of artistic creation.

With regard to Henze’s political development, I will make a concession toHeidegger: mood precedes thought. Henze did not become a revolutionarysocialist by reading some radical tract and being convinced of its truth. Rather,from the time of his youth, his mood was rebellious and anti-authoritarian. Hegradually found an outlet for this mood in a commitment to socialism. Theorigin of this mood was classically Oedipal. He despised the increasingly fervidNazism of his father, as he would also despise his own forced membership inthe Hitler Youth and drafting into the German army. After World War II, hecritically observed the views of liberals and radicals in personal encounters.Only later came his reading of Gramsci, Fanon, and Marx, and a direction for hisrebelliousness. Crucial in this regard, given his sexuality, was his encounter withMarcuse. Eros and Civilization was the true source of the idea that the personalis the political: “Doors sprang open. It became possible to see myself in a wider

1 Hans Werner Henze, Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953–1981, Peter Labanyi(trans.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

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430 Reviews

social context” (p. 203). Years later, Henze wrote a musical piece for Marcuse’smemorial service.

Henze reveled—and was reviled—in the long decade of New Left activism.He was a friend of Rudi Dutschke and other prominent New Left �gures, andparticipated in a number of demonstrations. But his contacts with really existingsocialism, the old Communist left, were more problematic. He made a pair ofextensive visits to Cuba, which included conversations with Castro. In additionto his musical activities, he spent the then de rigueur week at agricultural labor,while inwardly regretting that Cuba kept homosexuals in concentration camps.As a protest gesture, he also quit the West Berlin Academy of Arts and quicklyjoined the East Berlin Academy. Initially, Henze’s change of allegiance waswelcomed, and he was treated as a star in East Germany. But as the Newness ofHenze’s leftism became more apparent to the Party bosses, his work wasboycotted in the East as well: “I lived in the knowledge that I had becomepersona non grata for the world in general” (p. 309). Still, he joined the morecongenial Eurocommunist Italian CP in 1976.

Henze’s musical career has also been a series of Bohemian �fths. He barelyavoided his father’s plan to send him to a music school run by the Waffen SS!His rebelliousness also caused him to reject the prevailing style of postwarGerman art music. In the 1930s, the Nazis condemned the serialism of theSecond Viennese School, i.e. Schonberg, Berg, and Webern, as degenerate music.In a dialectical return of the musically repressed, serialism, now centered inDarmstadt, became the standard of aesthetically and politically progressivepostwar composers. Serialism was the antithesis to the now discredited traditionof German romanticism, and Henze was initially viewed as one of the mostpromising young proponents of the rediscovered style. In the 17th century,Claudio Monteverdi wrote that there was no such thing as a holy note, i.e. apitch in itself had no extrinsic meaning. But in the eyes of serialist championslike Adorno, it was not the verbal text that made a musical work politicallyprogressive. Thanks to Nazi persecution, even purely instrumental serialistcompositions acquired the cachet of political radicalism.

Henze’s enthusiasm quickly cooled. For Henze, serialism was intellectuallysophisticated. But the problem was—and is—that this music was neitherpleasurable nor popular: “Frigid inhumanity was now the �avor of the month”(p. 67). As an alternative, Henze turned to the paragon of the First VienneseSchool, Mozart, as a model, hoping to revive that �eeting golden moment whentechnically advanced music was also popular music. More than his hatred ofNazism and Nazi recidivism in postwar West Germany, it was Henze’s searchfor Mozartean beauty in music—melody, closed forms, sometimes politicallyradical lyrics, and, through them, a connection to the public and not just to acircle of aesthetic elitists that drove him from Germany to Italy.

Henze’s distaste for serialism was con�rmed by his encounters with Adorno,the philosophical champion of the Darmstadter style. In a second depiction ofAdorno’s distasteful character to appear within a year, Henze castigates him asa musical dictator, a “queer bird” who was completely intransigent in his views,and a political coward who backed out of a letter writing campaign to supportartistic freedom because a few Communists were also involved (pp. 146, 168,244).2

2 See also Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Ewald Osers (trans.)(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 407–425.

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Reviews 431

Large sections of the book are devoted to the creative process of certainworks, from the initial idea to the �nal performance, sometimes recounted inexcessive detail. These sections will be most interesting to musicologists, sociol-ogists of art, and a few odd political scientists.3 In general, Henze’s success as acomposer was in an inverse relationship to the signi�cance of his politicalactivities. He enjoyed many early triumphs. But when, during the decade ofdissidence, his radicalism posed a genuine threat, he was boycotted by both thebourgeois musical establishment and the old left: broken recording contracts,postponed or canceled performances, boycotts of his works by performers. Manyof his works had radical political subjects or themes. During this period, Henze,a tireless workaholic, organized a series of innovative music festivals. The �rstand most important of these was in the tiny Italian village of Montepulciano,where Henze involved the townsfolk as students, performers, and audience. Buteven here, Henze’s efforts were not entirely successful. He was making pop-ulist—but de�nitely not pop—music for an unwilling people: even in remoteMontepulciano, “radio and television were quite suf�cient for them” (p. 362).

With the defeat of the New Left, and then the demise of Communism,Henze’s politics were no longer threatening. The unevenly organized closingchapters list a dizzying array of concerts, revivals, commissions, awards, andfetes in the past two decades. Amid this professional success, he retains a senseof humor about his work. With regard to his Seventh, and latest, Symphony, henotes that audience defections at the end of each movement “seems to havebecome something of a tradition at performances of this piece” (p. 428). But heretains something more than this. Against all the odds, he remains committed tosocialism. “The theory has lost none of its beauty”—Henze’s highest adjective ofpraise—“and signi�cance, even if reality and the actual state of the world haveovertaken and undermined it” (p. 483).

Reviews in this journal usually examine a product, a controversial theory orbody of research, often with some kind of left orientation. But Henze’s autobi-ography is different. Here we look at a process. How does a person become aperson of the left? And what are the consequences of this? When readers of thisjournal meet together at a scholarly conference, it is safe to assume that we eachhave different ideas, but also at least a few common assumptions. And each haslikely traveled a unique path, experiential and intellectual, to reach thesecommonalities—that will forever remain opaque to each other. There’s not alarge market for autobiographies of political scientists, left or otherwise. But inthe special case of this colorful composer, we have an intriguing chance to sharethe vicissitudes of a fellow traveler, in the best sense of that term.

JOHN BOKINAUniversity of Texas–Pan American

3 For example, I wish that I had had access to Henze’s account of his opera, The Bassarids,before I wrote my chapter on this work. I didn’t get it wrong, but I could have gotten it muchmore right. See my Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1997), pp. 167–197.

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