Bohemian Fifths by Hans Werner Henze

Bohemian Fifths by Hans Werner Henze

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.

"Henze is a significant figure in the music world whose career has spanned the major part of this century, and in locations that were crisis spots... There are interesting passages here about his relationships with other artistic figures: W. H. Auden, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Luchino Visconti. He is quite candid and amusing about encounters with musicians such as Luigi Nono, Sergui Celibidache, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The descriptions he provides of some of his concerts ... will become part of theater lore."--Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
"Hans Werner Henze is one of the most important composers of the twentieth century, and these are his extensive, detailed memoirs. For that reason alone, they should be read. I found the book highly interesting and highly readable."--John Rockwell, Editor, Arts and Leisure, The New York Times
"Rich, informative and engaging. . . . [Henze] is an excellent memoirist and his book is full of vivid sketches of places and people. . . . Mr. Henze makes a convincing case for himself as a bad boy, self-destructive in love, anticonventional in his creative beliefs and belonging at heart in that demimonde of what he elsewhere describes as the Sodom and Gomorrah of war-wrecked Berlin. But as a composer, in public, he puts on his three-piece suit."---Paul Griffiths, Critic's Notebook, The New York Times
"Henze's passionate reminiscences offer facet after bright facet of the kaleidoscope of modern culture. . . . He is eclectic, iconoclastic, never a slave to musical fashion and anything but boring. . . . Henze's writing is masterly, drenched in the same canny sense of drama that has marked his music. . . It is rare--very rare--to find a great composer who can write beautifully about his own music. Hans Werner Henze is such a composer and his Bohemian Fifths is a sweeping, moving portrait of the man, his art and his time."---Octavio Roca, San Francisco Chronicle

Hans Werner Henze was born on July 1, 1926, in G tersloh, Germany. Since the 1970s, he has lived in Marino, near Rome. His creative output covers all musical genres, including operas (Boulevard Solitude, K nig Hirsch, Der Prinz von Homburg, Elegy for Young Lovers, Der junge Lord, We Come to the River, The English Cat, Das verratne Meer, Venus und Adonis), ballets (Ondine, Orpheus, Le disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella, Labyrinth, Le fils de l'air), oratorios such as Das Floss der Medusa, nine symphonies, the instrumental Requiem, and many concertos. Stewart Spencer is the editor, with Barry Millington, of Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, Wagner in Performance, and Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion. He has also translated books on Wagner and Liszt.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780691006833
ISBN 10	0691006830
Titel	Bohemian Fifths
Autor	Hans Werner Henze
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Princeton University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	1999-02-21
Seitenanzahl	520
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar