Any notion that revisions are only for the reticent – those reluctant to release their created offspring into the world – is quickly refuted in the work of Hans Werner Henze.Footnote 39 Over a long career Henze managed to be at the same time a prolific composer of new works and an inveterate corrector, reviser, excerpter and arranger of older ones (that last role often delegated to others).Footnote 40 During the 1990s Henze went one stage further, with a wholesale ‘meta-revision’ of his published output – an undertaking that involved, to be sure, the revision of individual compositions but sought above all to mark the boundaries of his official oeuvre. The result was Ein Werkverzeichnis, 1946–1996,Footnote 41 a handsomely produced volume with entries on each acknowledged work (many with short commentaries) and replete with colour illustrations, reproductions of sketches, a preface and a short essay,Footnote 42 a biographical chronology, indexes of works (chronological, alphabetical and by scoring) and a roster of text authors and librettists. A designer engaged at Henze’s expense had assured the catalogue’s appeal to bibliophiles, which won it prizes from the German book trade.Footnote 43
Self-cataloguing by composers is, of course, nothing new. Indeed, on Henze’s reckoning there could be nothing more ordinary: ‘From time to time, craftsmen like to tidy up their workshops and put things in order. Old works are reviewed, corrected, improved or rejected, new works are completed and refined.’Footnote 44 Yet several features mark out Henze’s initiative as unusual. Whereas, for instance, Mozart’s Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke had been a cumulative, open-ended project, with works generally recorded soon after composition,Footnote 45 Henze’s project was designed to be retrospective and emphatically finite. Once resolved on the undertaking in November 1990, Henze immediately envisaged both an end date (that of his sixty-fifth birthday – though it was delayed until his seventieth) and an end product (a ‘small’ handbook).Footnote 46 But, more significantly, cataloguing became itself coterminous with a far-reaching process of ‘rewriting’ in practically every conceivable sense. While many works remained untouched and others were withdrawn altogether, a whole continuum of change lay between those extremes, stretching from the replacement of a single preposition in a subtitle,Footnote 47 to significant retitling, rescoring or revision, to painstaking bar-by-bar recomposition. By its end, the process had touched getting on for a quarter of the titles composed over a 50-year period yet in just a tenth of that timeFootnote 48 – this alongside the composition of substantial new works such as the Eighth and Ninth symphonies (1992–3 and 1995–7 respectively), the opera Venus und Adonis (1993–5) and the ballet Le fils de l’air (1995–6).
‘The new catalogue’, Henze announced in the preface, ‘is a fully revised one, presenting my works in a way that corresponds to my current wishes and ideas.’Footnote 49 To that degree, much as it possesses the outward trappings of a scholarly catalogue raisonné, its orientation is presentist rather than historical. The book’s in-house coordinating editor spoke of its aim to walk ‘a fine line between personal commentary and academic seriousness’,Footnote 50 and this it does with considerable aplomb, albeit also with an element of smoke and mirrors. An orthodox Werkverzeichnis tends to prize authenticity, comprehensiveness and chronological consistency, working forward from earlier sources, editions or versions to later ones. Henze’s, on the other hand, forces the reader to read history backwards from the current state of the work, in a few cases erasing those earlier traces altogether. As the preface goes on to make clear, the book lacks entries not just for withdrawn works, but also for incidental music for film, stage and radio (only independent concert works refashioned from such are listed), ‘occasional music’ (including dedication pieces and political songs)Footnote 51 and contributions to collective compositions. Such pieces appear in the chronological index (in square brackets), but not in the alphabetical – and so are well concealed, in that locating them requires either knowledge of their date or a willingness to scan the index from start to finish.Footnote 52 And there are further seeming omissions, mostly explained by title changes freshly applied (with or without further revision) to works stretching back a decade or more, examples of which will be discussed in more detail below.Footnote 53
Henze’s ‘enduring, monolithic summation of his life’s work’ (to quote again the book’s coordinating editor) was therefore far from a neutral inventory but rather a conscious act of conservation and self-canonization.Footnote 54 It is no accident that the catalogue’s compilation coincided with a second ‘legacy’ project, the autobiography Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten, published in June the same year.Footnote 55 And there was yet a third, given a passing mention in the preface: ‘Some works that were previously only available for hire now appear in print for the first time.’Footnote 56 The project of issuing study scores of all hitherto hire-only works was what Henze dubbed his ‘selbstkritische Gesamtausgabe’.Footnote 57 By 1995 staff at Schott had come to refer to the work catalogue and the production of study scores as a ‘joined-up process’ (‘verbundener Arbeitsschritt’).Footnote 58 The need for the revisions in the print editions to keep pace with those in the Werkverzeichnis was one factor that delayed the latter’s publication until 1996.Footnote 59 The study score ‘edition’, for its part, was still catching up at Henze’s death in 2012.
To architects, even buildings appear fluid over time, and in similar fashion Henze’s monumental project was kept in constant motion not only by the mutability of his ‘current wishes and desires’ but also by the wish to see his music ever more widely disseminated and performed, even if that meant further adaptation. The irony of the whole project lay, perhaps, in this attempt to capture in durable, definitive form an output that, as Ilja Stephan suggests, constituted an ‘ongoing Work in Progress’, a web of ‘evolving intertextuality’, in which the stability of the work concept is shaken, and distinctions between Urfassung and Neufassung are made to seem less momentous as a result.Footnote 60
The motivations for Henze’s revisions of the 1990s are clearer at certain times than at others. For the 11 works revised under the same title, Henze tended to cite reasons of performance practicality.Footnote 61 Der Prinz von Homburg involved reorchestration, the Sixth Symphony the ‘composing out’ of improvised passages, and Die Bassariden the omission of the intermezzo Das Urteil der Kalliope, now presented as a separate work.Footnote 62 Similar considerations applied in the case of two of the three works revised under a different main title.Footnote 63 La piccola Cubana (1990–1) is a revision of La Cubana (1972–3) for reduced forces and fewer characters, while Le disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella (1992–5) constitutes a ‘Neuschrift’ of Jack Pudding (1949), a ballet dating from Henze’s time as music director at the Wiesbaden Staatstheater, which not only returns the clown protagonist to his commedia dell’arte origins but transplants stage directions and expands certain sections of music to allow more time for the action to unfold. But the bar-by-bar reworking of this, one of the most heavily revised scores of the 1990s, seems motivated as much by stylistic dissatisfaction with the original. Hindemithian stretches of uniform 4/4 metre are replaced by constantly changing time signatures (5/4 and 7/8). The music is emancipated in register too, and the orchestration, in keeping with the new Neapolitan setting, acquires the timbral delicacy and lustrous shimmer characteristic of late Henze.
All this raises questions endemic to debates on post-première revision: those of whether last thoughts are inevitably best, whether the tastes and preferences of later life should trump those of youth and whether, as a result, our view of the composer’s development risks being falsified. In the case at hand, the Werkverzeichnis entry hardly clarifies the picture, listing the work as Le disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella but alongside the première date for Jack Pudding. Footnote 64 The 1950 production is qualified as ‘Erstfassung’, and the accompanying commentary clarifies the titles’ relationship; but the conflation of these now very different works might well mislead anyone consulting the volume at speed. Filiations can be even more cryptic in the case of derivative works, compositions extracted from (generally) larger works or based on their material. The period 1991–6 saw 26 such titles appear in the catalogue, including self-standing versions made by others at Henze’s request: of these, ten were extracted from works of this period such as Venus und Adonis and Le fils de l’air, and the remainder from works of earlier decades.Footnote 65 But not all instances of dependency are acknowledged. Appassionatamente (1993–4) is subtitled Phantasie über ‘Das verratene Meer’, hence acknowledging its ultimate origin in the opera of the late 1980s. But an intermediate incarnation of this orchestral movement, Allegro brillante: Imaginationen über die Oper ‘Das verratene Meer’, is indexed nowhere in the volume, despite a prominent US première.Footnote 66 Also unacknowledged are the relationships, painstakingly demonstrated by Peter Petersen, between Adagio adagio, a short movement for piano trio, and the second movement of the Eighth Symphony, and between the three movements of the Piano Quintet (1990–1) and the ‘Dies irae’, ‘Ave verum corpus’ and ‘Lux aeterna’ of the instrumental Requiem. Footnote 67
But perhaps most telling of all are the purely titular changes which move towards the language of absolute music and away from the programmatic, the occasional and, especially, the political.Footnote 68 In the case of Compases para preguntas ensimismadas (1969–70), Henze stipulated that the original subtitle, Musik für Viola und 22 Spieler, was to become the main title.Footnote 69 The original title, now the subtitle, stems from lines by the Chilean poet Gastón Salvatore, a mainstay of Henze’s Cuban period (the work was begun in Havana), and is translated in the Werkverzeichnis as Tempi for Questions to Oneself, supporting the formalistic suggestion in Henze’s commentary that it refers to the note-groups rhythmicized at the players’ discretion. But neither the title (elsewhere translated as Questions Asked of One’s Soul Footnote 70) nor the aleatory elements in the musical notation were without political significance back in 1971. Both Compases and the original version of the Sixth Symphony had been conceived as socialist models of collective responsibility, in which Henze had sought to ‘overcome the division between soloists as individuals and orchestral players as an undifferentiated mass’.Footnote 71 The demotion of Compases to a subtitle, like the recomposition of the symphony’s aleatory passages, seemed now to step back from those aspirations. In another case, Das Floß der Medusa (1968), the original subtitle, Oratorio volgare e militare, allied to the work’s dedication to Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, was suddenly discarded in favour of a blandly generic one listing the performing forces.Footnote 72 The accompanying commentary makes no mention of any specific political references, let alone the disturbance that caused the première to be aborted,Footnote 73 noting simply that while the ‘outside world […] influenced the work’, that world was ‘a quite different reality from that of my music’.Footnote 74
In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, Irwin, the young teacher given to tidy inversions, remarks that memorials, far from being a way of remembering, are an ideal way to forget.Footnote 75 Memorials evade and even silence awkward questions, elevating certain details while burying others. But in the creative sphere, should all such burying be branded evasive or dishonest? Might composers have a right to forget and, equally, works a ‘right to be forgotten’? Since a 2014 European Court ruling (Google vs AEPD) which upheld the right of individuals to have links to their personal data removed from internet searches, and in legislative moves that have followed subsequently, the right to be forgotten has been a much-discussed area of data protection.Footnote 76 But the question being posed here is less the legal one of the enforceability of such ‘delisting’ than the philosophical one that weighs public interest against the rights of the individual and acknowledges, in the words of Ugo Pagallo and Massimo Durante, the ways in which ‘memory and oblivion cooperate [in] the construction of […] personal identity’.Footnote 77 In the case of authors or composers, it could be viewed as weighing the right of individuals to creative self-determination against any temptation to ‘rewrite history’. The downplaying of the political associations of Das Floß der Medusa is perhaps a pertinent example. The Medusa incident had been damaging both personally and professionally, and to that degree Henze’s wish to expunge these associations is understandable.Footnote 78 On the other hand, both the discarding of the subtitle and Henze’s reticence about the work’s other political references – including the use of the ‘Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh’ rhythm (a reference to Vietnam anti-war protests) in the percussion towards the end, itself artfully disguised in the 1990 revisionFootnote 79 – risk underplaying the work’s highly charged political significance. Just as the Google ruling did not authorize the destruction of information, only its removal from the results of search engines, Henze’s withdrawal of such peccati di gioventù as the Concerto per il Marigny was no order to ‘locate and destroy’ either copies of the score or, in this case, a widely disseminated recording of the première.Footnote 80 And while works for hire can have their performance materials withheld, the irony now was that the project running alongside the Werkverzeichnis – Henze’s ‘selbstkritische Gesamtausgabe’ of study scores for sale – would make the circulation (or withholding) of specific versions harder to control in future.
Needless to say, once the Werkverzeichnis had been published, things remained in flux. Not only, dispiritingly, was Henze soon forwarding errata to the catalogue, but there were further changes of mind and heart as print deadlines for the study scores approached. Titles changed yet again;Footnote 81 and dedication pieces, literally bracketed out in the Werkverzeichnis, were now to be included in the Gesamtausgabe after all.Footnote 82 Inevitably, the question arose of a catalogue supplement.Footnote 83 But counterarguments quickly emerged. For all its lavish presentation, Ein Werkverzeichnis had functioned remarkably like an ordinary trade catalogue. More copies had been given away than had been sold, and the warehouse retained a sizeable surplus.Footnote 84 If indeed the book’s eye-catching appeal to dramaturges and concert programmers had encouraged additional performances, then that only confirmed its primarily promotional function. Henze was in no position to disagree, since he had been agitating for its wide-scale distribution free of charge to universities and music colleges, opera houses and celebrity conductors.Footnote 85 The supplement was eventually published – and as a book rather than a trade product, albeit with a limited print run.Footnote 86 But this was in the face of calls to have it produced ‘as inexpensively as possible’, with ‘PDF format on the internet’ suggested as ‘the ideal form of publication’.Footnote 87
Indeed, the publication of the Werkverzeichnis had come at an interesting juncture. The September 1996 issue of the house newsletter Schott-Aktuell united on a single page the announcement of its publication and an advertisement trumpeting the launch of the publisher’s first ever website (‘Schott im Internet’). On the face of it, the internet would appear the ideal platform on which to update a composer’s catalogue. It promises the revision-prone composer flexibility, seemingly instant control and the ability simply to ‘overwrite’ superseded information. But the intervening decades have unmasked such fantasies of control as illusory. Even setting aside the wilful distortions of ‘fake news’, the internet’s instinct for constant self-proliferation ensures that cloned content and obsolete data continue to circulate long after the source information has been removed or updated. The ‘right to be forgotten’ is naturally jeopardized in an environment where much is never truly erased.
And this is not the only change that an online catalogue effects. The purpose of Henze’s Werkverzeichnis was to provide information about music. It is, to use Gérard Genette’s term, a ‘paratext’ – something that refers to the text (‘the music itself’) while remaining conceptually distinct from it.Footnote 88 With the internet, as the art theorist Boris Groys has noted, this distinction, long deconstructed in theory, is now blown apart in practice.Footnote 89 As music publishers populate websites with sound clips and online scores, ‘text’ and paratext, musical work and commentary now inhabit the same (virtual) space. And, however much living composers (or the guardians of dead ones) might persist with attempts to ‘curate’ an online identity, ‘the composer’, like similarly self-fashioned authorial subjects, now becomes harder to extricate from the empirical subject (‘the real person’), as a forest of links and hyperlinks causes the mingling of that self-consciously crafted creative persona with news and reportage. The materialist deconstruction of art’s ‘transcendence’ comes home to roost, and Henze’s holde Kunst becomes just another branch of current affairs, its expansive temporality now forced to coexist with (and pressurized to conform to) the rapid cycles of media consumption. With the dignified distance between work and non-work increasingly effaced, the former becomes gathered up in the ceaseless flow of the composer’s ‘production’ – and indeed of ‘production’ generally, as sidebars encourage the effortless surfing from one work and one composer to another.
At one level, nothing could seem more fitting for Henze’s Gesamtkunstwerk-in-progress, in which musical others – the composers he arranged, the arrangers who arranged him, or those (Hindemith, Stravinsky, Mahler, Berg) who provide the music’s undercurrent of stylistic allusion – coexist in a single stream. Yet even today composers work in a system (of royalties and copyright inter alia) to which traditional notions of authorship remain fundamental and the composer’s exercise of control over correctness or incorrectness (even on a level as mundane as proof correction) is not just a right but a duty. Where authorized meanings are concerned, these are less easily reined in by trilingual commentaries in a work catalogue – commentaries which, quite rightly, should provide the beginning rather than the end point of critical interpretation. But the algorithms of the internet do not interpret; they simply expose. Search rankings throw up repetitive gobbets of information, reducing meaning to (often literally) anonymous soundbites. As Groys suggests, the ‘gaze of others’ under which the internet places us ‘is experienced by us as an evil eye’ not because it is all-seeing – it isn’t, quite – but because it ‘reduces us to what it sees and registers’.Footnote 90
Henze’s attempt to ensure the longevity of his output by making of it a cloth-bound physical memorial may, from this vantage point, seem an antiquated and somewhat futile gesture, a mode of authorial control exercised in its very death throes. And yet perhaps he was prescient too in realizing that such longevity may depend on his works’ ability to forget their origins from time to time and forge new paths into the future: a future not of instantaneous transparency but of ongoing hermeneutic endeavour, the constant creation and recreation of meaning; a future not left to the inertia of impersonal repositories of information, but shaped humanly, intentionally, subjectively, as a willed ‘compositional’ and communicative act.
