Lucky Hans

"Hans im Glueck," his friends call him --Lucky Hans. Always in the right place at the perfect time, smiling, reticent, cologned--and ready with a new composition. Ideas, he says, swell his head like brain tumors, nourished as much by pleasure as by pain. When the pressure of their presence becomes annoying, Lucky Hans excises them by setting his thoughts on paper. This pleasant debility is persistent enough to have made him one of Europe's leading composers, and in the German press it has won him a new nickname. "Der Erfolgskomponist," the papers call him, which means that Hans Werner Henze is, at 36, a composer addicted to success.

With four operas, seven ballets and four symphonies already behind him, Henze turned up in New York last week for the world premiere of his Fifth Symphony, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its first season at Lincoln Center. The Fifth is Henze's Roman symphony, marked by a synthesis of fragmented lyric themes and rich moments of atonality in which Henze expresses "the sensual conflicts, happenings and joys that the modern, sensually-pleasing Rome suggests." Scored for an orchestra that omits clarinets and bassoons in favor of two pianos and two harps, the music is punctuated with tyrannic claps of the kettle drums, which Henze says "shelter and develop" his themes. On first hearing the new symphony, Manhattan critics responded with careful respect.

Early Fascination. Once he got out of an English prisoner-of-war camp in 1945, Henze began staging what amounts to a one-man revival of German music. But since 1952, he has lived in Italy as something of a cultural exile. "I was eager to leave the growing materialism and persisting narrowness of my motherland," he says. His music, though, remains German in its contrapuntal structure, and it is still played mostly in die Heimat. But respectful German critics readily grant Henze his Stravinskian legacy and the Italianate influences in his music. Says H. H. Stuckenschmidt, one of the most distinguished German critics: "He is the least bourgeois and the least Teutonic German composer."

Henze's early fascination with twelve-tone technique marked him a decadent in Nazi Germany, and his operatic works since then have split his audience into two camps--the admiring and the appalled--with the critics generally on his side. He has a talent for finding high inspiration in avant-garde literature (Allen Ginsberg's Howl inspired his recent Antifone per Orchestra) and for attracting notable collaborators. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (the librettists of Stravinsky's Rake's Progress) wrote the libretto for his Elegy for Young Lovers, and the collaboration remains among his happiest experiences. "Auden said that a libretto should be a love letter to the composer," he recalls. "I found that very touching to hear."

Elegant Speed. At home in his Roman villa, Henze is capable of turning out serious music with elegant speed and imperturbability. His Fifth Symphony is the product of one good month last summer; this summer he plans to write six concertos for neglected instruments such as the trombone and guitar. He swoops through the Alban hills in his Maserati, sunning himself in "the Italian humanity" and perfecting his Roman dialect. "I live in a tradition of German artists who have lived in Italy," he says. "Mozart, Goethe and Wagner all went to Italy, and when Handel stayed in Naples, he had 20 valets. I think that's wonderfully extraordinary."

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