Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) by Stephen Downes (review)

Stephen Downes’s contribution to Ashgate’s Landmarks in Music since 1950 series looks at Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan, for piano, orchestra, and electronic tape. Any twentieth-century art work, musical and/or otherwise, taking that name can hardly fail to provoke comparison with Wagner’s drama. As Downes points out, Henze’s work stands in a “‘tradition’’ of Tristan-alluding twentieth-century works’ (p. xii). He ensures, however, that consideration of Wagner does not entirely eclipse other contexts, explaining how this ‘single piece can interrogate the styles, expressions, genres, and aesthetics of major conflicting trends in European culture’ (p. xii). Moreover, Wagner comes to be mediated by successors, not least Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, in the context of Celia Applegate’s ‘eternal recurrence of Wagnerian controversy’. (It is no coincidence, one might add, that Mann would prove a continuing preoccupation for Henze, as for instance in his subsequent Third Violin Concerto.) Musical intermediaries, such as another of Henze’s bugbears (increasingly so as time went on), Schoenberg, are also invoked. For instance, the work of Thomas Christensen and Michael Cherlin on Schoenberg’s Op. 11 No. 1 piano piece is discussed, seen almost as a staging post for Wagner’s Tristan, as well as Wagner’s Tristan, to bear the agony of its and his wounds on the road to Henze. Frank Martin’s Le Vin herbe é, whose first German performance Henze heard in 1943, is cited too; it would have been good to hear a little more on this alternative Tristan path, given the actual as well as theoretical precedent it may well have set.

And so, ‘ambivalent resistance and emulation, pessimistic negation, elegy and mourning, displacement, allegorical disenchantment, and the use of dark, sometimes horrifically surreal-istic distortions all feature’ in the ‘thirty-minute span’ of Henze’s response (p. 36). Put like that, even without the name of the work, reminiscences of Wagner’s drama seem unavoidable, all the more so when read—even if some of these did not feature on Henze’s own particular road of intention, influence, and context— against a backdrop of anti-Wagnerism from the likes of Hindemith, Weill, Brecht, Poulenc, and Shostakovich. The Third Reich, the Second World War, the Holocaust: they of course featured heavily throughout Henze’s career, somehow both impediment to and generator of his own echt-German, neo-Goethian, even neo-Wagnerian, flight from Germany, be it politically, culturally, or simply in terms of domicile. (He famously drove south one day across the Alps, not leaving his car until he arrived in Italy, settling there for good, albeit with plenty of confrontational visits to home soil to come.) Henze’s own earlier oeuvre is also briefly considered in this light, not least the Rimbaud setting, Being Beauteous, with its own entirely un-ironic quotation from Tristan und Isolde. Alone among Wagner’s works, it had always tended to evoke more sympathetic responses from Henze, perhaps on account of its triumph of metaphysics over retrospectively tainted politics, though his Tristan of course originated in a period that might well be considered his most overtly political.

The book is divided into four chapters, the first, discussed above, dealing with Henze’s work in the shadow of Tristan und Isolde, the ‘ Tristan tradition’, and Wagner more generally. Detailed attention, descriptive and analytical, is offered in the second chapter to the compositional process as later related by Henze and his collaborators, notably Peter Zinovieff; to Henze’s sketches; to Henze’s principal musical materials (note rows, allusions, and direct quotations); and to ‘formal and dramatic structure’ (p. xii), that ‘and’, as in Wagner’s celebrated und, a telling point. In that respect, Downes discusses and rightly criticizes the claim made by Peter Petersen (Hans Werner Henze: Ein politischer Musiker (Hamburg, 1988)) that Brahms, his First Symphony crucial in Henze’s aural gallery of quotations, serves as a merely negative, anti-erotic, anti-Wagnerian dramatic ‘character’. Subsequent discussion concerning what we might call the...