I am very intrigued these days by the music of Hans Werner Henze.  He
has an interesting biography: forced into the Nazi Youth as a teenager,
reluctant soldier, then prisoner of war in WWII, ardent supporter of
student protests in 1968, who dedicated a piece to Che Guavara and made
visits to Cuba.

He wrote: ..."art without politics would be trivial...Art isn't involved
in itself.  If there are H bombs and concentration camps art either
acknowledges this (and makes these things its subject, literally or
analytically) or it deliberately turns its back on them and so falsifies
reality.  It can't turn aside and pursue its own path, it has no path.
Art is realism or it is trivial, and there's nothing much in between."

On its surface, this might appear forbidding and off putting.  Yet
there is also this: "In my world the old [musical] forms strive to retain
significance even when the new sounds, the modern timbre of the music
seldom or never permits them to rise to the surface...[they] appear to
me as classical ideals of beauty, no longer attainable but still visible
from a great distance, arousing memories like dreams."

I haven't been able to hear that much of Henze's music yet (and would
welcome recommendations).  But, from what I have heard it seems to me
that there is a dialectic posed by these two statements--and an attempt
to find a synthesis?  He seems like a man tormented by the reality, yet
always yearning for the dream.

Zeke

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