Hans Werner Henze - Tristan (1973) Préludes für Klavier, Tonbänder und Orchester

Tristan (1973) [Preludes for piano, electronic tapes and orchestra] Composer: Hans Werner Henze (1926 - 2012) Performers: Homero Francesch, piano; Peter Zinovieff, tape; Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, dir. Hans Werner Henze 0:00 I. Prologue 5:11 II. Lament 11:13 III. Preludes and Variations 20:21 IV. Tristan’s Folly 26:06 V. Adagio 31:43 VI. Epilogue ____________________________________________________ “The origins of Tristan are confused but well-documented, thanks to Henze’s own intensely introspective nature and his inveterate habit of seeing his music in terms of outside events. It began with a piano prelude, sketched early in 1972, in which he straightaway recognized a distant kinship with Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Later, while in London working on a tape for his Second Violin Concerto, he began to have musical nightmares around the figure of Tristan himself, and when he tried to write down the music he had dreamt, it came out in two distinct episodes: one a piece of dense seven-part counterpoint for prepared piano and percussion; the other a parody of Renaissance music based partly on a Florentine Lamento di Tristano of the 14th century. Henze has described in lurid detail how these episodes were put on tape at the Putney studio of Peter Zinovieff. For the counterpoint ’we threw glass marbles at the [prepared-piano] strings ... we bombarded bass strings with tennis balls ... It was playful, but it also had a diabolical, neurotic, evil, lunatic element. We were tense, excited, screamed at one another, were beside ourselves.’ Later, a pianola performance of Chopin’s Funeral March was processed by a synthesizer into sounds ’of an overpowering hideousness ... grotesque, terrifying, this violation, this battering of music.’ Later still, Zinovieff computer-analysed the first four bars of Act 3 of Wagner’s Tristan. The results spilled out of the computer ’like veritable waves ... Suffering and reconciliation, death and redemption in one ...’. Finally, Henze composed more piano preludes, the orchestral music to go with the taped episodes, and eventually - after a period of emotional depression and withdrawal - the long epilogue for solo piano, which is followed in the score by the music he built round the Wagner computer analysis. He finished the work in autumn 1973 in Venice, where Wagner had died 90 years before. [...] 1. Prologue. Solo piano, with woodwind responses, presumably based on the original prelude. The Wagner relationship can be sensed rather than identified, but rising minor sixths are prominent, as are chords of fourths - perfect or augmented - like the famous “Tristan“ chord. 2. Lament. A farther-reaching derivative of the original prelude material. The score is built round the Renaissance parody tape, embroidered with piano and orchestral counterpoints which Henze calls ’an elaborate network of revelations, correspondences, answers, calls’. 3. Preludes and Variations. A long monologue for piano, at first in the calm mood of the Prologue but then with more drastic contrasts, is followed by three scherzo-like orchestral variations, then by another piano solo (“prelude“) and a three-part orchestral canon based on it. This is interrupted by a stark quotation of the opening of Brahms’s First Symphony, after which the movement disintegrates (but still over the Brahms pedal C). 4. Tristan’s Folly. Here the tape re-enters with the “diabolical“ prepared-piano improvisation, followed by the synthesized Chopin Funeral March. Much of the orchestral material is itself improvised on given pitches. Brahms is again plundered, before being replaced by Chopin. 5. Henze calls this ’a sequence of burlesque dance pieces’. The first, Burla I, is a brief waltz, the second an alla turca, then there is a Ricercare, with bursts of imitative counterpoint interrupted by pulsating chords, Burla III, a skeletonic march - and finally Ricercare II, whose more sustained counterpoint is later broken into by further shrapnel fragments of Brahms. The final gesture is a “scream of death“ (the tape part supposedly derived from the scream of a well-known Wagner soprano). 6. Epilogue. The longest of the piano “preludes“ leads to the final tape section, based on the trans-formation from Wagner’s Act 3. The orchestra plays this music over a tape-recording of a heartbeat, and a child (also on tape) recites a “love-death“ from the 12th-century Tristan of Thomas of Erceldoune, accompanied by a Wagner fragment. Finally ’bells chime, as though from the many towers of Venice, and are accompanied by taped electronic transformations of this old music, waxing and waning, chaconne-like, glistening like the sea on an autumn evening’.“ ~Stephen Walsh Source: CD booklet _______________________________________ For education, promotion and entertainment purposes only. If you have any copyrights issue, please write to unpetitabreuvoir(at) and I will delete this video.