Uploaded October 2010 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
The soloist plays throughout the concerto, in the style of Schoenberg or Berg. The violinistic technique includes the frequent use of double, triple and even quadruple stopping. By avoiding the medium register of the instrument, the writing calls mostly on the extreme ranges, so that the high and very high tessituras rapidly alternate with the lowest one in melodic lines that are tense but always unified when the violist passes from the ethereal heights to the lowest abyss. The musical style provides two distinct areas, one in which tapering melodies or series of long held notes evolve around brief but virtuosic arabesques, and where "irrational" rhythms make a sporadic appearance (triplets, quintuplets or septuplets, especially at the end of the melodic cell, where they act as a cadential rubato in the tradition established by Stravinsky), and another composed of rapid sections in which the solo violin plays in a percussive style with martial connotations, therefore using "rational "rhythms.
The soloist plays throughout the concerto, in the style of Schoenberg or Berg. The violinistic technique includes the frequent use of double, triple and even quadruple stopping. By avoiding the medium register of the instrument, the writing calls mostly on the extreme ranges, so that the high and very high tessituras rapidly alternate with the lowest one in melodic lines that are tense but always unified when the violist passes from the ethereal heights to the lowest abyss. The musical style provides two distinct areas, one in which tapering melodies or series of long held notes evolve around brief but virtuosic arabesques, and where "irrational" rhythms make a sporadic appearance (triplets, quintuplets or septuplets, especially at the end of the melodic cell, where they act as a cadential rubato in the tradition established by Stravinsky), and another composed of rapid sections in which the solo violin plays in a percussive style with martial connotations, therefore using "rational "rhythms.
![Hans Werner Henze, Being Beauteous for coloratura soprano, harp and four cellos [1963]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qG9ItqMVdk/mqdefault.jpg "Hans Werner Henze, Being Beauteous for coloratura soprano, harp and four cellos [1963]
Devant une neige un Etre de Beauté de haute taille. Des sifflements de mort et des cercles de musique sourde fontmonter, sélargir et trembler comme un spectre ce corps adoré, des blessures écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes. Les couleurs propres de la vie se foncent, dansent, et se dégagent autour de la Vision, sur le chantier. Et les frissons sélèvent et grondent et la saveur forcenée de ces effets se chargeant avec les sifflements mortels et les rauques musiques que le monde, loin derrière nous, lance sur notre mère de beauté, - elle recule, elle se dresse. Oh! nos os sont revêtus dun nouveau corps amoureux.
O la face cendrée, lécusson de crin, les bras de cristal ! Le canon sur lequel je dois mabattre à travers la mêlée des arbres et de lair léger !
Arthur Rimbaud
Hans Werner Henze (born 1 July 1926, Gütersloh, Westphalia) is a German composer of prodigious output best known for his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life.[1] His music is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition.
Henze is also known for his political convictions. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality. He lives in the village of Marino in the central Italian region of Lazio, and still travels extensively, in particular to Britain and Germany, as part of his work. An avowed Marxist and member of the Communist Party of Italy. In 1945, he became an accompanist in the Bielefeld City Theatre, and was able to continue his studies under Wolfgang Fortner in Heidelberg in 1946.
Henze had some successful performances at Darmstadt, including an immediate success in 1946 with a neo-baroque work for piano, flute and strings, that brought him to the attention of Schotts, the music publishers. He also took part in the famous Darmstadt New Music Summer School, a key vehicle for the propagation of avant-garde techniques. At the 1947 summer school, Henze turned his thoughts more thoroughly to serial technique, and it seemed for a while as if he might become a leader of young German composers in this idiom.")
