Articles
Henze Eighth Symphony
The music of Hans Werner Henze is less well known and less often performed in the United States than it is in Europe. Seiji Ozawa, music director of the Boston Symphony and artistic director of Tanglewood, has been something of a champion of Henze's music in America. He has invited Henze to be composer in residence at Tanglewood during two summers, and has performed his music with the Boston Symphony both there and in Boston. After conducting performances of Henze's Seventh Symphony, Ozawa commissioned the composer's Eighth Symphony. The first performances of the new work occurred in Symphony Hall in Boston early in October. The Symphony reflects the composer's fondness for the Orchestra and its conductor, just as the performance offered testimony to the affection and admiration which the performers have for the composer.
Unlike his Seventh Symphony, which Henze has described as tragic and sullen, his Eighth Symphony is elegantly fanciful. He has called it a summer piece. Moments in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream are the starting points for the work. Early in the play Oberon dispatches Puck to find the flower whose juice he intends to squeeze into Titania's eye, so she will become enamored of the first (he hopes extremely foul) creature she sees when she wakes. Bragging about the speed with which he will complete his assignment, Pucks declares that he will "put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes." In the first movement of the symphony, Henze says that he has composed the girdle, offering glimpses of what Puck sees on his journey. The texture of the piece suggests both the great speed and the magical floating quality that would characterize the sprite's travels.
The second movement portrays the dalliance between Titania and Bottom. The movement includes a sequence of set pieces--Canzonetta, Aria, Waltz, March--set into a sort of mating dance containing occasional lurching halts. Music associated with Bottom, primarily involving winds and brass, particularly a virtuoso trombone playing a galumpfing, vaguely latinate music, alternates with a slightly slower music, featuring strings, often groups of soloists, playing long elegantly sinuous lines, which represents the fairy queen.
The third movement strikes the tone of resolution and reconciliation which characterizes the end of the play, particularly Puck's envoy to the audience. Without sounding at all like it, the movement is rather reminiscent of Ives's The Housatonic at Stockbridge, building slowly and with swirling figuration to an impassioned climax. The end of the work, however, is a suddenly quiet, shimmering, and truly magical coda.
Henze's Symphony is full of wonderfully human music, by turns lyric, earthy (in the second movement), and fantastical, abounding with wonderfully imaginative instrumental writing. The orchestration, however full or busy it might get from time to time, remains at all times transparently lucid; it always sounds. It is a thoughtfully and imaginatively mature statement by a composer who is in complete control of his technical means and who can do whatever he wants. The performance of the work was lovingly prepared and beautifully and surely realized by Ozawa and the orchestra.