Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Henze composes his homage to anti fascism., December 8, 1998
By A Customer
Henze was a young man during the rise of Hitler. His father forced him into the Hitler Youth an organisation that Henze despised. Throughout his life Henze has been haunted by fascism. When neo-nazi's reared their ugly heads in the 1950s Henze moved to Italy. In the ninety sixties Henze embarked on a series of pieces about fascism and it's related movements. Henze's music battled against all forms of oppression. In a large way Henze's Ninth Symphony is a culmination of all his work. It is his great statement against the nazi's. It is one of the few times when he has written so definitely about the defining cause of his life. This is the cause of anti-fascism. This symphony follows the escape of a man who is being held for being anti nazi. The piece covers his voyage from detention to freedom in Holland. He has to lie in the mud to escape his captors and later swim a river. He has a quasi religious event in a church with thundering organ chords punctuating his voice. The choir takes all roles in this piece, like Stravinsky uses the choir in Les Noces. The orchestra is also vital in telling the story. The music is disturbing in a way that even Henze has rarely acheived. The music mixes tonal and less tonal techniques giving a very unsettling backdrop to the story. Henze's final message is that though fascism has been defeated it has not been vanquished, and that we must remain ever vigilant in case it ever threatens to take hold again. It is no co-incidence that Henze chose this theme for his ninth symphony. He sees the work as a realistic answer to the joy and optimism of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Henze has had to write against a backdrop of such awful events in the twentieth century that he is unable to completly embrace the optimism of Beethovens symphony and he prefers to give us a warning of the dangers of complacency. As always Henze succesfully manages to convey a starkly political message in a pwerful and artistic manner. His music is always of the highest standard and does not capitulate to his message, it enhances it.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you want to discover this symphony..., August 8, 2008
...there is a recording available at an affordable price at the e-store of the NY Philharmonic website: it's the US premiere with Kurt Masur conducting.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Henze's choral symphony for the antifascist resistance, April 26, 2009
"Dedicated to the heroes and martyrs of German anti-fascism"
Hans Werner Henze, one of the great composers of the late 20th century, was forced by his father to join the Hitler Youth, and after being called up in 1944, spent time in a British P.O.W. camp. This experience had a profound effect on his life, of course, and as an artist he struggled to express it somehow. Finally he turned to the novel "The Seventh Cross" by Ana Seghers, which tells the tale of a prisoner, one of seven who are to be crucified, who escapes from the Nazis. Henze turns it into a choral symphony in seven movements. The movements are: 1) Escape, 2) Amongst the Dead, 3) The Persecutor's Report, 4) The Plane-Tree Talks, 5) The Fall, 6) Nighttime in the Cathedral, and finally 7) The Rescue. This recording, still the only one, is from the premiere performance on September 11, 1997.
Oddly, though, it conveys a peaceful and lovely mood of sadness, an elegiac, somewhat philosophical tone, more than the terror of the story. According to Henze, "...in my Ninth Symphony people spend the entire evening evoking the world of terror and persecution that still throws its shadow to the present." But it seems to me that Henze had already given powerful expression to his wartime experiences in his Symphony No. 7, and so by the time he wrote the 9th he had moved to another level of understanding. Henze's Italianate lyricism shines forth in his vocal writing, reducing the harshness of the German/Austrian 12-tone elements.
This original EMI release from 1998 includes a 68-page booklet with the lyrics in German, French and English. The verses are by Hans-Ulrich Treichel. It almost immediately vanished and was never widely available in the U.S. Fortunately it has been reissued in 2009 along with the excellent original recording of Henze's Symphony No. 7 in EMI's 20th Century Classics series. Of course the downside is that there is no booklet and no English translation of the lyrics.
But don't miss it!
Henze was born in 1926, and so was of the "Darmstadt" generation along with Boulez, Ligeti, Xenakis, Nono, and Berio. While he utilized serial techniques, Henze moved in the direction of the classical tradition fairly early, and turned to opera as one of his main forms of expression. Henze also embraced the New Left of 1968, and his radical socio-political views clearly inform his Symphony No. 9. Who among us could tell back in the 1970s that the world would veer far to the right, moving ever closer to fascism rather than moving in the direction of our New Left utopian vision? Well, some of us, like William Blake, "will not cease from mental fight...'til we have built Jerusalem, in Earth's green and pleasant land."
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