Zeke Zubrow: > I am very intrigued these days by the music of Hans Werner Henze. ... > 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." It's not that uncommon to find composers radical politically and conservative aesthetically, and vice versa. Stravinsky was a Tsarist, Webern a (rather nayve) Fascist in all but name. On the other hand, Vaughan Williams was a Socialist (upper-class division) and Bernstein, Blitzstein, and Weill fairly left-wing. Ned Rorem has an essay on it. > I haven't been able to hear that much of Henze's music yet (and would > welcome recommendations). I can mostly take Henze or leave him alone. Some pieces I find very beautiful; others bore the snot out of me. One piece I enjoyed quite a bit is the opera Der junge Lord, which wittily plays with the opera buffa of Mozart and Rossini. Steve Schwartz *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html