Born in Westphalia in 1926, Henze received his earliest musical training against the background of the rise of Nazism in Germany; his realisation that all the modernist music, art and literature that stimulated him most profoundly had been condemned by the Nazis ingrained in him the belief in the potential of art to be genuinely subversive, inspiring a tendency that was to surface explicitly in his work thirty years later. After the Second World War he resumed his formal education by studying with Wolfgang Fortner, and composed the first pieces that he still acknowledges in an elegant neo-Classical style, which mingled Stravinsky and Hindemith while already demonstrating the innate lyrical gift that has characterised Henze's music in all its phases. In the late 1940s, however, he began to attend the Darmstadt summer schools and realised the value of serialism. But, typically, he did not follow many of his contemporaries in embracing the technique to the exclusion of all else, and instead fused it with his neo-Classical style. The Violin Concerto (1947) first put this synthesis into practice, and it served also for his first opera, “Boulevard Solitude”.
In 1953, Henze left Germany to live in Italy. The change of scenery brought a new richness and colour into his music, an expressive world that was celebrated in the opera “King Stag” (1955), and, over the following ten years, in a sequence of operas each with their attendant satellite works in response to a seemingly endless supply of commissions. “Elegy for Young Lovers” (1961) and “The Bassarids” (1965), both to librettos by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, belong to this period, as do the oratorio “Novae de infinito laudes” (1962) and the cantata “Being Beauteous” (1963). With “The Bassarids” Henze reached a stylistic turning-point, and during the second half of the 1960s he began to look for ways of combining his new musical interests with his increasing commitment to radical politics. Works such as “The Raft of the Medusa” (1968), the Sixth Symphony (1969) and the “recital” for baritone and instruments “El Cimarrón” (1970), show his music becoming more angular, and suppressing its lyrical style. The musical climax of Henze's explicit political engagement was reached in the early 1970s, with the completion of the eclectic song-cycle. “Voices” (1973) and the “actions for music” “We Come to the River”, to a text by Edward Bond, first staged at Covent Garden in 1976. In its aftermath Henze turned to more traditional forms, producing three string quartets as well as his Seventh Symphony in the late 1970s and early 1980s; “The English Cat”, again to a satirical libretto by Bond, was constructed as a “number opera” from a sequence of traditional closed forms. But with “Das verratene Meer”, after a novel by Yukio Mishima, first performed in 1990, he returned to the through-composed music dramas of the early 1960s, though the score also betrays the influence on his work of Monteverdi's “Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria”, of which he made a sumptuous new realisation in 1981. In the early 1990s Henze's work was dominated by the composition of an instrumental Requiem, dedicated to the memory of Michael Vyner, the former director of the London Sinfonietta. These nine “spiritual concertos” were first performed complete in 1993, and that year also saw the premiere of his Eighth Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa. In January 1997 the Bavarian State Opera gave the premiere of “Venus and Adonis”, and in November of the same year the Berlin Philharmonic introduced his Ninth Symphony conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. In 1999, he composed his Tenth Symphony which will be given its world première at the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland) in 2002, by Sir Simon Rattle.
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