Bohemian Fifths

Bohemian Fifths PDF Author: Hans Werner Henze
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691006833
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Hans Werner Henze is one of the world's leading composers. His autobiography is frank, impassioned, and alive with memorable images and characters and graphic accounts of the creative process and performances of his music. Henze's unhappy childhood during the onset of Fascism found release in music, which, in spite of the disruption of the war, became the center of his life. He studied composition but began to make a career as a ballet conductor, until his creativity found expression in music that, by the early 1950s, had begun to distance itself from the fashionable but dogmatic rules of serialism in favor of his own individualistic conception of beauty. In both the political and sexual spheres, Hans Werner Henze is an outsider whose utopian dreams of a humane communism have always had to contend with reality. In musical and cultural matters, however, he is one of the best-connected and most influential figures of the postwar era and his autobiography brims with personal stories and observations of such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ingeborg Bachmann, Luchino Visconti, and Hans Magnus Enzensberg. A true cosmopolitan, he is happiest living in Italy, where his innate lyricism has found a natural home. "Bohemian fifths" are intervals that were played by Bohemian horn players, and which, according to Baroque and Classical rules, were proscribed. Henze's writing protests the lack of freedom that such a prohibition implies, both in music and in life.

Bohemian Fifths

Bohemian Fifths PDF Author: Hans Werner Henze
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691006833
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Get Book

Book Description
Hans Werner Henze is one of the world's leading composers. His autobiography is frank, impassioned, and alive with memorable images and characters and graphic accounts of the creative process and performances of his music. Henze's unhappy childhood during the onset of Fascism found release in music, which, in spite of the disruption of the war, became the center of his life. He studied composition but began to make a career as a ballet conductor, until his creativity found expression in music that, by the early 1950s, had begun to distance itself from the fashionable but dogmatic rules of serialism in favor of his own individualistic conception of beauty. In both the political and sexual spheres, Hans Werner Henze is an outsider whose utopian dreams of a humane communism have always had to contend with reality. In musical and cultural matters, however, he is one of the best-connected and most influential figures of the postwar era and his autobiography brims with personal stories and observations of such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ingeborg Bachmann, Luchino Visconti, and Hans Magnus Enzensberg. A true cosmopolitan, he is happiest living in Italy, where his innate lyricism has found a natural home. "Bohemian fifths" are intervals that were played by Bohemian horn players, and which, according to Baroque and Classical rules, were proscribed. Henze's writing protests the lack of freedom that such a prohibition implies, both in music and in life.

Hans Werner Henze

Hans Werner Henze PDF Author: Stephen C. Downes
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754666554
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
CD-ROM contains a performance of Tristan.

Music and Politics

Music and Politics PDF Author: Hans Werner Henze
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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After Mahler

After Mahler PDF Author: Stephen Downes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107469937
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.

Three Questions for Sixty-five Composers

Three Questions for Sixty-five Composers PDF Author: Bálint András Varga
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 1580463797
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Do today's composers draw inspiration from life experiences? What has influenced recent composers? How essential is it for a composer to develop a personal style? This book reveals the spontaneous thoughts of some of the most famous composers from around the world about their own development as composers and their reactions to the outside world.

Ondine

Ondine PDF Author: Hans Werner Henze
Publisher: Dance Books Limited
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
In 1957 the English choreographer Frederick Ashton and the German composer Hans Werner Henze began to collaborate on a new ballet, Ondine. During the creation of the work Henze kept a diary of its progress and his thoughts on the choreography and the music. Here translated into English for the first time, the diary gives a major insight into the workings of the creators' minds during the composition of one of the twentieth century's major works of art.

Hans Werner Henze

Hans Werner Henze PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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After Wagner

After Wagner PDF Author: Mark Berry
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843839687
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This book is both a telling of operatic histories 'after' Richard Wagner, and a philosophical reflection upon the writing of those histories. Historical musicology reckons with intellectual and cultural history, and vice versa. The 'after' of the title denotes chronology, but also harmony and antagonism within a Wagnerian tradition. Parsifal, in which Wagner attempted to go beyond his achievement in the Ring, to write 'after' himself, is followed by two apparent antipodes: the strenuously modernist Arnold Schoenberg and the stheticist Richard Strauss. Discussion of Strauss's Capriccio, partly in the light of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, reveals a more 'political' work than either first acquaintance or the composer's 'intention' might suggest. Then come three composers from subsequent generations: Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, and Hans Werner Henze. Geographical context is extended to take in Wagner's Italian successors; the problem of political emancipation in and through music drama takes another turn here, confronting challenges and opportunities in more avowedly 'politically engaged' art. A final section explores the world of staging opera, of so-called Regietheater, as initiated by Wagner himself. Stefan Herheim's celebrated Bayreuth production of Parsifal, and various performances of Lohengrin are discussed, before looking back to Mozart (Don Giovanni) and forward to Alban Berg's Lulu and Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore. Throughout, the book invites us to consider how we might perceive the sthetic and political integrity of the operatic work 'after Wagner'. After Wagner will be invaluable to anyone interested in twentieth-century music drama and its intersection with politics and cultural history. It will also appeal to those interested in Richard Wagner's cultural impact on succeeding generations of composers. MARK BERRY is Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman

W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman PDF Author: Wystan Hugh Auden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 808

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Book Description
W. H. Auden called opera the "last refuge of the High Style," and considered it the one art in which the grand manner survived the ironic levelings of modernity. He began writing libretti soon after he arrived in America in 1939 and abandoned his earlier attempts to write public, political drama. Opera gave him the opportunity to rise to the high style in public, not in an attempt to elevate his own status as a poet, but in service of the heroic voice of the singers. These works present their mythical actions with a direct intensity unlike anything in even his greatest poems. In this volume of Auden and Chester Kallman's libretti, extensive historical and textual notes trace the history of the production and revision of the works and provide full texts of early scenarios, as well as abandoned and rewritten scenes. Almost all the works included here were previously published in incomplete and often inaccessible editions--or were never published at all. The book prints for the first time the full text of Paul Bunyan, Auden's first libretto, which he wrote for music by Benjamin Britten. It also includes Auden and Kallman's The Rake's Progress, written for Igor Stravinsky, and Delia, written for Stravinsky but never set to music. The book continues with Auden and Kallman's two libretti written for music by Hans Werner Henze, Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids, and their adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost, composed by Nicolas Nabokov. It also contains their translation of The Magic Flute, with its scenes reordered for greater dramatic coherence and added dialogue for sharper mythical significance, and their antimasque, The Entertainment of the Senses, for music by John Gardner. The book contains two radio plays--The Dark Valley, a monologue written by Auden alone, and The Rocking Horse Winner, written with James Stern and based on a story by D. H. Lawrence. Also included are the unpublished masque that Auden wrote for Kallman's twenty-second birthday, the unpublished versions of The Dutchess of Malfi that Auden prepared with Bertolt Brecht, scenarios for a film script and a libretto that were never completed, Auden's narrative for the medieval Play of Daniel, two narratives for documentary films, and his song lyrics written for Man of La Mancha before the producer decided to use a different lyricist.

Das Urteil Der Kalliope

Das Urteil Der Kalliope PDF Author: Hans Werner Henze
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operas
Languages : de
Pages : 26

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Book Description