Elogium Musicum (2008)

Henze is so complete a musician, such an embodiment of the last century’s crises (artistic and political), that when one work is heard you also hear the seeds of the rest. He’s the organic composer par excellence. His recent Elogium musicum, a blazingly personal work of homage and memorial. Impossible not to be moved by his raw response to the death of his long-time partner Fausto Moroni, or the memory trail of musical heroes, predominantly Stravinsky. Behind the orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus mourned, raged, and gave praise. So did we, in front.

Setting four specially written Latin poems by Franco Serpa, Elogium is a densely packed, 20-minute choral work that moves from austere mourning through rage and fond memory to a final radiant vision of acceptance. Some of the choral writing (delivered by the excellent BBC Symphony Chorus) has a Stravinsky-like austerity to it – his ­Canticum Sacrum as much as Oedipus Rex – but as in other recent Henze works, the orchestral textures, ­especially the prominent use of a solo saxophone, evoke the world of Alban Berg more than anyone else. It's a beguiling score, ­beautifully ­presented by Knussen and the BBCSO, and a reminder that there is so much of Henze's ­output that we hear too rarely.

Despite being a product of Henze's old age, this Stravinskyan cantata is no sentimental farewell. After a first half dominated by a barren lament and a Dies irae -like blast of bitterness, the second half celebrates mankind's kinship with nature and ends with a pantheistic Mass of Life.

Elogium Musicum, dedicated to and written for his late partner of 50 years, Fausto Moroni, ended the evening on a note of almost unbearable rawness and intensity. At times, Henze's story-telling can careen into tragically naive political territory or be swallowed up too much by personal vortices, but it never ceases to engage.

“Adagio” is written over the final poem: “A holy peace enfolds the entire world”. The brightness of day, glorious brilliance of the sun, where eagles, larks and swallows fly.” The expressive sounds – from the most tender intimations to the most severe eruptions – that Henze continuously conjured up in new combinations for this and for the entirety of the nearly 25-minute work may well be called his Opus summum. Not only are major and minor sounds used imaginatively but the most brusque, dissonant agglomerations and manifold intermediate levels are created.

Everything that fascinated less than one year ago with the première of the opera “Phaedra” by the Staatsoper Berlin reaches its pinnacle in this composition vivified by Riccardo Chailly for the Gewandshaus Orchestra Leipzig and the MDR Radio Choir in a more concentrated space.

The music begins with an elegiac string quartet, escalates into a dramatic desperate and navigates to the end of the movement on the great emptiness of a chord fading away into a pianissimo. The tone of the choir leads one to suspect how hard it must have been for Henze to formulate his experience into music. With a thunderous decrescendo of the bass drum before the leaden line “I remember a saddest day”, he gives expression to the hollow sensation and negative energy he had to fight with. Then in the second movement Nox, umbral bird beings ominously raise their leading tones, and the world lies in sharp dissonance “deserted, cruel, blind”. The way Henze managed to merge private suffering with art in this work is inconceivable. Even in his dark moments, he transforms dreams into beauty the way he always has.
The melodic gestures of memory with which he traces the amatissimi amici nunc remoti (“the very beloved friend who is now far away”) are perfect in form. Using only sparse lines, his hand effortlessly makes the atmosphere dazzle. And following the darkness of night – typical Henze – comes southern summer light.
Here one senses Henze’s old impulse yet again, the celebration of life in all its colour as it triumphs over suffering. The agnostic lets the god Dionysus emerge.

A wonderfully competent composure predominates, an “ego-tone” here too, that in Beethoven’s terms seems to come directly “from the heart” and speak directly “to the heart”.

A substantial portion of this poise can be credited to the text, written in Latin by Franco Serpa according to Henze’s clearly detailed specifications and motifs. The clever device of using Latin prevents the depicted subject matter from becoming too direct and voyeuristic and endows the poetic metaphors with a quality of timelessness. The parable of the two falcons, one of which fate takes from the sky, consequently becomes – through a threnodic opening movement – an analogy for transience, loss and separation. In Henze’s score, the sounds of orchestra and choir first remain pure and unmixed. Thus the introductory string movement evokes a passionate elegiac sound, reminiscent of the expressionism of Mahler and Alban Berg. It is not until the more eventful middle portion depicting the fall of the falcon, that the whole is employed together. However, the arrangement and the instrumentation are consistently handled with an economy and a pointed clarity that reminds one of Stravinsky or the Verdi of the “Quattro Pezzi sacri” – an association that arises repeatedly in the course of the work.

With a serenity that probably comes only with age, Henze allows his work to end with a life-affirming hymn, with all the light and darkness that there is and was. Even the traditional ”deo gratias agimus“ and the idea of a higher grace are included as a matter of course. This is the way it must sound when a great artist has made his peace with himself and the world.

Musical sounds from a composer whose entire doings are fraught with the desire for communication and empathy; a music that wants to deal directly with life, over and above every aesthetic artistic coherency. Henze once called his music, musica impura, “impure” music that interferes, enriched with reality.
Henze did not compose a morbid, threatening requiem here, but a brightening succession of four vivid compositional works, of natural images and thought images, full of contrasting emotions, including reminders of the serenity of life, of “sunlight” and “happiness”.

Even in technique, the work of this great, 82-year-old composer reflects the gentle optimism he turns toward the future. “While I composed, I had only the blank page before me. I never looked back at what I had previously written.” This four movement work is music composed from a gut feeling, or better yet, from the heart. The choir sings of humans. The orchestra tells of the world in which they live, of their determining fate. [...] Both are treated strictly separately; they are however closely dovetailed by the brilliant beauty of Henze’s movement, which aims at clarity and makes unreserved use of the tradition from which Henze never really broke. [...] With this moving première, music history is finally being written in Leipzig once again, rather than just being read.