Hans Werner Henze - 2. Konzert für Klavier und Orchester (1967)

2. Konzert für Klavier und Orchester (1967) [Piano concerto no. 2]
Composer: Hans Werner Henze (1926 - 2012)
Performers: Christoph Eschenbach, piano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, dir. Hans Werner Henze

0:00 Moderato
14:22 Vivace
28:26 Moderato
35:18 Vivace
36:54 Lento
40:41 Vivace
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"On the face of it the Second Piano Concerto, written in 1967 for Christoph Eschenbach ("the Angel with three wings", as Henze calls him in a non-autograph dedication on the present writer's copy of the piano score) and first played by him at the inaugural concert of the Bielefeld Kunsthaus in September 1968, is more abstract and discreet. But beneath the tightly composed surface of
theme and counterpoint, soloist and orchestra, there are plentiful hints of a personal connotation and a hidden dramaturgy. The composer suggested that "it was the continuation of the lamenti of the finale of [his 1965 opera] The Bassarids, transferred to instrumental music: a depiction of the destroyed city of Thebes after the triumph of the vengeful Dionysus"; but also that "it forms a bridge from the baccants and maenads of The Bassarids to the dying soldiers and workers of The Raft of the Medusa". In Henze's Medusa, the Dionysian spirit stands for Death. And here, in the Piano Concerto, the composer clinches his "condemnation of the bacchanalian, anti-Apollonian world" with an extended reference to Shakespeare's famous sonnet (no. 129) about self-loathing – "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame" – which is supposed to provide a template for the form of the Concerto's finale, while at the same time elucidating some of its musical imagery. Whether we can go so far as to infer from this that the Concerto amounts to a coded rejection of certain aspects of Henze's own previous work is much more doubtful. But it does dramatize creative problems of which the composer himself had certainly been aware, and which – as Tristan shows – would continue to torment him: "the antagonism between strict form and formlessness, compulsion and freedom, moderation and excess".

The Concerto, taken as a whole, forms a single enormous arch in three linked movements. Unlike Tristan, it is not a work of allusions and quotation marks, though Henze tells us that the semitone clusters prominent at the start of the first and third movements (and elsewhere) refer to the sound of Japanese Gagaku music, which he had heard in Tokyo the previous year. An apparent reference in the second movement to the drowning music in Berg's Wozzeck may or may not be accidental, but in any case has never been acknowledged by Henze. This is really quite a different kind of music, in which process often seems to be drawing a veil over passion without ever completely concealing it for very long. The slow first movement, for instance, can perfectly well be discussed in terms of its musical design: a series of three polyphonic meditations for piano, divided by brief orchestral interludes, and constructed as a palindrome, with its second half a retrograde of its first. At the start, the musical language may seem angular and impenetrable. But emerging patterns, based in various ways on the initial shapes, soon begin to take on emotional meaning, and eventually to form quite drastic expressive climaxes which perhaps confirm, perhaps refute, Henze's "antagonism between moderation and excess".

The middle movement "has been forced", Henze remarks cryptically, "into a scherzo form, consisting of a wild, violent dance [with] an evil, wicked quality, in which the smile of the Bassarids hardens into a threatening dance that promises no good". Presumably this is Shakespeare's "lust in action":

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme.

But the writing is controlled, and the form clear, with an extended trio section (Meno mosso) followed by a modified reprise of the Vivace. In the finale, though, the drama comes to the surface, not just in the freer, stream-of-consciousness design, but in the music's very obvious character of "Rückblick" – "backward glance" – over the contrasted musics of the earlier movements. At one point two brief snatches of funeral march hint at a Mahlerian fate. There is a Mephistophelian quality of distortion: "the thoughts are constantly expressed in new shapes [...] tenderness becomes terror, misfortune, helplessness". Yet something inscrutably musical survives, and an epilogue returns us to the mood and polyphony of the very start, "good" form is restored, the antagonism is – at least provisionally – absorbed."

~Stephen Walsh
Source: CD booklet
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