The 14th opera of Hans Werner Henze, 81
Sep 28th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Volker Hagedorn, the music critic of our classy Hamburg-based weekly newspaper Die Zeit, visited Henze at his home above the Tiber valley in Italy, where he composed Phaedra, his newest opera, recently unveiled at Berlin’s Deutsche Staatsoper. Hagedorn reports:
Henze sat in the shade of the terrace gazing at the olive trees. He seems smaller than I had expected, as often happens when one gets to know the works before the composer. Smaller, too, than the man I had seen at first performances, where he was always the best-dressed person, his tanned complexion exuding vitality and making him stand out among the pale musicians and singers in make-up. Composer Hans Werner Henze is eighty-one. He gets up with some effort, but there is an amused twinkle in his eye when he hears where his visitor is from: Lower Saxony. “May I tell you that you look like a Hanoverian. My grandmother was from Hanover…” Henze certainly doesn’t look like a native of Westphalia in his thin, white summer clothes, with his aristocratic profile and bright Mediterranean eyes. He moved to Italy more than half a century ago….
If you want to read the definitive critique of Phaedra (wild horses couldn’t extract from me the name of the reviewer) you’ll have to click on http://www.musicalamerica.com and sign up there for a free trial subscription. You can read an unabridged English translation of Volker Hagedorn’s portrait of its composer by clicking here.
