Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973). By Stephen Downes.

Abstract

Stephen Downes’s contribution to Ashgate’s Landmarks in Music since 1950 series looks at Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan, for piano, orchestra, and electronic tape. Any twentieth-century art work, musical and/or otherwise, taking that name can hardly fail to provoke comparison with Wagner’s drama. As Downes points out, Henze’s work stands in a ‘ “tradition” of Tristan-alluding twentieth-century works’ (p. xii). He ensures, however, that consideration of Wagner does not entirely eclipse other contexts, explaining how this ‘single piece can interrogate the styles, expressions, genres, and aesthetics of major conflicting trends in European culture’ (p. xii). Moreover, Wagner comes to be mediated by successors, not least Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, in the context of Celia Applegate’s ‘eternal recurrence of Wagnerian controversy’. (It is no coincidence, one might add, that Mann would prove a continuing preoccupation for Henze, as for instance in his subsequent Third Violin Concerto.) Musical intermediaries, such as another of Henze’s bugbears (increasingly so as time went on), Schoenberg, are also invoked. For instance, the work of Thomas Christensen and Michael Cherlin on Schoenberg’s Op. 11 No. 1 piano piece is discussed, seen almost as a staging post for Wagner’s Tristan, as well as Wagner’s Tristan, to bear the agony of its and his wounds on the road to Henze. Frank Martin’s Le Vin herbé, whose first German performance Henze heard in 1943, is cited too; it would have been good to hear a little more on this alternative Tristan path, given the actual as well as theoretical precedent it may well have set.