Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze

Author(s): Helmut Lachenmann and Jeffrey Stadelman

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 189-200
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
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 OPEN LETTER
TO HANS WERNER HENZE

HELMUTLACHENMANN
TRANSLATEDBY JEFFREYSTADELMAN

Dear Hans Werner Henze,

N YOUR BOOK, Die englische Katze: Ein Arbeitstagebuch 1978-1982

(The English Cat: A WorkingDiary, 1978-82), I find myself labelled as
"representative of 'musica negativa"' (a term which, in a footnote, you
immediately place in a suspect light); and, not least on account of my
"bad manners" during a controversial exchange in a public discussion,
see myself delivered up to the indignation of the reader without opportu-
nity to defend myself directly.1
Because it was recorded by South German Radio, that exchange from
last autumn in Stuttgart can be reconstructed: my bad manners consisted
demonstrably of nothing other than my very cautiously and respectfully
raising the question of how music (in this case your music), insofar as it

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190 Perspectivesof New Music

merely helpsitself to traditional materials (instead of developing them fur-

ther), can justify such unbroken rapport with what is already created; or,
to be precise, how expressive content that is borrowed (or retrieved)2
from the tradition could today be made credible once again.
It would be an insult to your intelligence to assume that you actually
felt my statement as a personal attack. In the end the problem I raised
concerns all composers. It need not divide but, rather, could connect us.
Your reaction, at that time and again now, seems thus to be more that of
someone startled out of pious self-deception, who strikes out at another
as a precaution, in order to preserve his own cherished mask.
Regarding your attempt to attack and disparage not only my person
but also my aesthetic convictions, one could almost be content to con-
clude that you had just wrongly pigeonholed me-that is, if such unself-
conscious conceptual pigeonholing did not reveal at the same time a
notably self-betraying instance of Freudian omission. (In the past as now
has not the ill-repute of social awkwardness, constantly imputed by the
bourgeois class, been in truth that class's unconscious recognition of its
own awkwardness?)In any case I know of no musical work, not to speak
of any "movement," corresponding to your polemical attack, where "the
negative aspects of our time (i.e. corrupt musical life under capitalism,
with all its accompanying symptoms, including the symptom of a pluralis-
tic musical life"-to which I add the symptom of this defamatory state-
ment as well-"who think differently and do things differently) are
reflected as in a mirror image, where the ugly represents itself artisti-
cally."Such a repulsive interpretation! Truly your own tendentious depic-
tion must be placed at the very top of such "ars negativa" as a
characteristicexample and work of slanderous art. Actually, "shattering of
the material" is not practiced and celebrated where traditional musical
material is allowed to reflect, as for instance in my music-but rather
where it is unscrupulously exploited, as it is by you. And just because one
cheerfully roots around in a tradition doesn't mean that one is rooted in
it-not by a long shot.
Finally, to your unfortunate attempt to caricatureAdorno or perhaps
his school (to which I do not belong, though from which I learn) in
order to hit upon a "movement" "where, after Auschwitz, nothing more
can be articulated or depicted because everything is so worn out and
totally lousy, everything's been said, kaputt, kaputt! . . .": it seems that
you yourself, Herr Henze, belong to those "authors . . . who will and
must confine themselves to perpetuating and ritualizing these, their
gloomy and angry attitudes"-in your case, an already embarrassing
intellectual dereliction. It in fact only remains for me to join with you in
your philosophical head-shaking at the confusion, so beloved in this land,
of "truth and rudeness."

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 Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze 191

In view of your association with "those who think differently and do

things differently," the following passages, from a lecture I delivered in
April of last year, prove to be absolutely prophetic:3

"What provoked my generation creatively"-namely, the critical exam-

ination of traditional concepts of material-"is now felt once again by
composers as an undignified deadening and suppression of their expres-
sive needs. A younger generation"-in which you, Herr Henze, are a
confirmed believer-"experiences that aesthetic of resistance as mere
frustration. When they realize this, they suffer more from paralysisthan
from a breakdown of the ego. They refuse to stare at their own captivity
as the rabbit stares at the serpent; and in, despite, and because of this cap-
tivity and alienation, they dare to say 'I' for the first time precisely at this
point, and push through to that direct emotion which is addressed
immediately to their fellow men, in the belief that the true self has an
ability to communicate which, despite each and every one of its masks,
ultimately remains strong.
"That is at least how I think I understand the spirit which guides those
composers who are determined to resort to bourgeois emotion. And so I
respect and accept them, and so they stand closer to me than many struc-
tural mannerists, who by their misuse of a speechlessness transfigured
into an ideology, so to speak flirt with alienation, as 'inevitable outsiders'
indulging in a kind of negative arts and crafts....
"However, that outbreak of the muzzled subject into a new emotional
immediacy will be untrue, and degenerate into self-deception, wherever
the fat and comfortable composer, perhaps slightly scarred structurally
and therefore the more likely to complain, sets up house once again in
the old junk-room of available emotions. The temptation to do this is
great, and the impression cannot simply be dismissed out of hand that
after so much lamentable stagnation, the recent teeming abundance of
powerfully emotional music exists thanks to the degenerate fruitfulness of
maggots having a good time on the fat of the tonal cadaver.
"Those who believe that expressive spontaneity, and innocent drawing
from the venerable reservoir of affect, make that struggle of the fractured
subject with itself superfluous, and spare it an engagement with the tradi-
tional concepts of material, have disabled their own artistic voice. They
are gladly allowed to sit in the lap of a society which encourages those
who support its repressive game. They have nothing to say to it. Such
basic convictions have betrayed themselves most recently by the level of
their polemic against the old avant-garde. This polemic amounts to
obstructing the view using straw men, which can then be thrashed to the
satisfaction of Herr Peter Jona Korn.4 And what really makes me wonder

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192 Perspectivesof New Music

is that, alongside the obligatory journalistic climate-poisoners, there are

also respectable composers who-obviously with their own rationaliza-
tions-believe, more or less bashfully, that they ought to participate in
such whipping parties.
"There are for example the popular mug shots of the typical Darmstadt
composers who, closed off from emotional participation, with arrogant
gaze toward the future which they have created, do not want to be
understood by the present; hyper-romantics, apostles of progress, and
morose intellectuals at once, thrashing the musical materials with alge-
braic formulae. Incidentally,just this was said twenty-five years ago about
the composer of Varianti and Diario polacco, Luigi Nono. Wolfgang
Rihm's remark from 1980, about systems which give up on sensory per-
ceptibility, was at the time adopted unscrupulously by Nono's enemies:
"This system of ordering remains incomprehensible and is awarded, in
addition to the pest of its authoritarianism, also the shame of tedium."
Rihm, who is united with me by unbridled love for the creations of
Nono, understands very well that not only the 'shame of tedium,' but no
less the tedium of such shame, have had to be adjusted and revised from
generation to generation. Tedium is unforgivable, certainly-but tedium
for whom???. . .
"Can there be a more presumptuous and, at the same time, ignorant
program than the propagation of a 'human art' (in contrast to the up-to-
now inhuman ... ), and than the claim to be composing 'finally, again,
for the public'? For whom then were Nono's II canto sospeso,La terra e la
compagna, Stockhausen's Gruppen and Kontakte, Boulez's Le Marteau
sans maitre, Berio's Epifania and Cage's Concertfor Piano and Orchestra
composed? Reproaching a hermetically sealed music for insiders only
repeats the favorite excuse of a public which runs for cover when faced
with works like those just named. It runs because it is more affected by
the emotive power experienced in these works than it is entertained by
the emotions of the collected neo-symphonists.
"And one naturallyought not miss out on the polemical game with the
concept, 'rejection,' which would like to brand me as the ascetic, sulking
preacher with moralizing finger raised in the desert of choked scratching
noises-a straw man offering himself as perfect for punching because of
the deliberate misinterpretation, as "rejection of the public," of what I
have always described as simply a procedure of compositional technique:
the clearing away of what is lying around in the open, in order to uncover
the hidden and make it more clearly experienceable. My emergency defi-
nition of beauty as "rejection of convention" becomes instead, in the dis-
torting mirror of idiocy, "rejection of pleasure." Convention and
pleasure as one: here the petits bourgeois are unmasked.

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 Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze 193

"It is understandable that the provincial arts pages-but less so that

composers-unsuspectingly make use of such straw men in their polem-
ics, and so evade actual formulation of the question. This question reads
the same now as before: how does one overcome speechlessness, a
speechlessness which appears hardened and complicated through the
false eloquence of the ruling aesthetic apparatus?I myself know of no
other answer than that of making conscious the formulation of this ques-
tion through composition. That seems to me the fundamental aspect of
composing today."

You, Herr Henze, obviously do not have such problems. As you postu-
late in your macabre discussion, it suffices for you to be "really 'happy'in
composing." (Doubtless the German word, "gliicklich," was not foolish
enough for you-and rightly so.) It is understandable that my question
to you was frightening: self-examination rather than self-description was
required in considering it. Presumably your appointment book could
have been thrown into confusion.
"Shattering of material" here, "bad manners" there, straw men
("nothing really new") cunningly positioned in the public landscape,
handy for bashing: I respect your anxiety in the face of the inner insecu-
rity which these maneuvers bespeak, but I recognize therein a typical
reactionary behavior pattern, and I regret the lack of imagination you
show by seeking to cash in on your insecurity, instead of admitting to it
or even overcoming it creatively.These could actually provide credibility,
as an artist and as a human being, because "it is not important whether
one sticks one's head in the sand or sticks sand in one's head .... Hanns
Eisler would have liked to write a book about 'stupidity in music.' I hold
another more urgently needed: about playing stupid in music."5

I wish you-Gliick.
Helmut Lachenmann
Leonberg, 11 June 1983

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194 Perspectivesof New Music

APPENDIX

The above letter, which was refused for publication by the newspaper, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine (behind which there's always "some bright per-
son"), and which was then printed in a somewhat altered wording in the
August/September 1983 edition of the Neue Musikzeitung, expresses
Lachenmann's position on the following passage from Hans Werner
Henze's book:

Wednesday evening, October 13 [1982]

"... In the evening an incident during the podium presentation in the

Hochschule, which Clytus Gottwald moderated: Lachenmann, com-
poser, representative of 'musica negativa,'* attacked me from the audi-
ence (I did not know him at all, and he never introduced himself), and
was, I found, rather insolent and hostile. (He wanted to establish some-
thing; namely, that I, as everyone knows, and especially those reading this
book who have not laid it aside by now, quote from the tradition; that I,
as he expressed it, "retrieve" [abrufe] forms from the classics, and as a
result am an aesthetic and ethical horror to the real and genuine repre-
sentatives of modern music, among whom Lachenmann doubtless seems
to count himself.) He took as the object of his accusations the Piano
Pieces from Pollicino and the Margaret Waltzes(which had just been very
competently played by the young Hamary), both of which absolutely
teem with patterns from Classical and Romantic piano music. At the end
of a strenuous day where I had had to be with strangers from morning to
evening, and for hours proving myself before an eighty-man orchestra,

*"'musica negativa' is a (no longer really new) movement in which the

negative of our time (i.e. corrupt musical life under capitalism,with all its
accompanying symptoms, and including also those individuals of pluralis-
tic existence who think differently and do things differently) is reflected
as in a mirror image, where the ugly itself represents the artistic; where
'shattering of the material' is always to be practiced and celebrated; and
where, after Auschwitz, nothing more can be articulated or depicted
because everything is so worn out and totally lousy-everything's been
said, kaputt, kaputt! And where as a result authors will and must confine
themselves to perpetuating and ritualizing these, their gloomy and angry
conditions."

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 Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze 195

struggling for survival just as on all the previous days, Lachenmann's

entrance (I would actually rather not mention that its staging seemed
uncollegial and improper) was not exactly welcome, now that this
evening I had to stand up once again to a hall bursting with strangers. I
didn't always succeed-I couldn't always hide my anger at the bad man-
ners. Bad manners are part of the most unpleasant, regrettable phenome-
non in the world of the arts, and it is a shame that there are so many
people who imagine that they are appropriateand considered good form
when one wants to assert something, e.g. oneself and one's theories. The
ends justify the means, it appears, and in Germany one lies when one is
courteous. In no country of the world is the superstition so widespread
as with us, that truth and rudeness are one and the same."

So that readers can make their own pictures of Lachenmann's "bad man-
ners" and Henze's "intellectual laziness," there follow for the first time
the controversy-provoking passages from the Stuttgart discussion, docu-
mented in a transcription by Hans-Peter Jahn. Most recently, Peter
Petersen has taken up this dispute again in his book, Hans WernerHenze,
ein politischerMusiker.ZwolfVorlesungen[Hans Werner Henze, a political
musician: twelve lectures] (Hamburg, 1988), dismissing it with a refer-
ence to "Human, All Too Human"; that is, to "human weaknesses"-as
if it does not concern, in whatever form, fundamental compositional
positions. On the other hand, Petersen certainly does not adopt a one-
sided stance for Henze.
At the outset Lachenmann said some things about the music of
Schonberg and Webern which unfortunately remain for the most part
indecipherable, because the microphone was at first too far away. Con-
cluding this part of his remarks, he continued on as follows: ". .. and
indeed, when I reflect on it today, it was that, that this music-I can only
describe it atmospherically-reflected on itself and caused me to reflect
on my listening throughmy listening. And this reflection on one's listen-
ing means, at root, reflecting on oneself, and therefore on one's whole
situation. And it becomes for me almost a kind of artistic standard. And
in hindsight I believe, looking back now at old music, that the music of
Beethoven achieves this today, and could continue to achieve this if we
were not so totally overfed.... And I have now-I must simply say it
freely now-I have on the one hand a fascination for your music: I'm
attracted to it; and then again I'm disturbed by it because I have the
impression that you create a utopia in your works, that you simply set
down an intact language, as if this kind of lyrical style had been our lan-
guage from the beginning, with which we had always communicated our

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196 Perspectivesof New Music

feelings. Thus what I miss, so to speak (speaking again in rather school-

masterly tones), is the experience that this music reflects on itself, and
this breach in experience doesn't simply communicate with naive cheer
and naturalness, but at the same time with knowledgethat the categories
through which it communicates are no longer wholly suitable; that, as a
result of this in-credible mediascape, and puree of culture which is nearly
choking us, these categories are no longer completely credible. And so
then if something comes along-to be concrete for once-like a guitar-
idyll [Lachenmann refers here to the guitar in Henze's Kammermusik
1958, which had been played earlier by an ensemble], I immediately
become suspicious. I say, in order to say it once again bluntly and disre-
spectfully, the composer exploits the idyll which this instrument brings
with it, but he doesn't alter it, he doesn't alter-at root, he no longer
contributes enough of himself. This guitar-idyll, or bel-canto style: they
fundamentally support themselves, or nearly so. In other words the situa-
tion is for me genuinely, simply, utopian. However it is not actually so
pretty nor, to finally be even more concrete, are your piano pieces which
are strangely, extremely, Tristanesque or post-Tristanesque in their total
harmony. Naturally I ask myself, in what world do you actually live, with
this regarding of children? Or for what world do you imagine this chil-
dren's idyll? You have actually only spoken anecdotally or programmati-
cally [Henze spoke earlier of the history of the pieces' origins, and the
intention of these piano pieces], but this kind of hearing is at root what
really concerns us, more so than the merely anecdotal. Don't you believe
that it is a kind of utopia which you are simply putting into your music,
without questioning how it can be made credible now?"

After this, Henze gave the following response:

"Yes, Herr Lachenmann, difficult to answer. But I can only say to you
that it's not at all easy-I don't know whether you have ever tried to
write a piece of happy[English word] music? The artist-I think we know
this topic has already been discussed by Adorno in his books, and is espe-
cially familiarto precisely your type of composer; it's probably been thor-
oughly discussed by just such a thinker. I too have concerned myself with
this. I believe the following, however: an artist, whether young or older,
irrespective of where he is in his development, has not only the right but
also the privilege to be happy [Gliicklichsein], to reach for utopian rela-
tionships from time to time (at least if he succeeds in that, he should have
luck [Gliick]), to reach for a bit of happiness[English] in the soul and in
the head, and then on music-paper;it is permitted. It is permitted to por-
tray utopias, to sketch out and prepare models of utopias; it is permitted;

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 Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze 197

one has the allowance of the loving God if you will, or of whomever, even
of Adorno too [laughter in the hall]. The artist has permission from time
to time to retire from the awful things of the world which of course tor-
ment all of us horribly; and from the torment which we must bring to
permanent expression on the music-paper, allegedly according to a defi-
nite, but unknown, moral law. One has permission to write happy music
from time to time, if allowed to by one's personal situation and perhaps
by one's personal courage as well, or personal menefreghismo.That is the
only answer I can probably give at this moment before such a large
assembly; after all, we don't know each other personally at all." [Much
applause for Henze]

Lachenmann indicated his wish to speak once again, and Clytus Gottwald
consented:

"I certainly did not mean, or lay down as a quasi-postulate, that in

order to be credible a composer should always adopt a-let's see-self-
righteous or depressive attitude. However, I would like-I can only for-
mulate it personally, there's nothing else for it in this company: I can only
say that, for example, in Canto sospeso,the piece with soprano and
women's voices is understood in the musical sense as a thoroughly beau-
tiful piece; it should be understood, and in the most serious sense, as a
happy piece, because of its purity. Or if you want, once again to the com-
poser Webern: it is cheerful [heitere] in a completely new way. To me, the
concept 'happy'is too insubstantial; Gliick and happyare a bit something
else-pure . . . [complicated turn of events which covers this spot] ... I
am of the opinion that precisely now one should have at the ready the
courage for a cheerfulness which, however, does not distract one from
the contradictions . . . but rather as the growing conscious realization of
their surmountability. And I even find a work such as the Sinfonie, Op.
21 of Webern, or a piece that the audiences of the time made out as terri-
bly bad, the Varianti by my honored teacher Luigi Nono-to be a happy
cheerful music, which could not make itself understood during a time
when people were clinging to another type of beauty. One sensed it there
as a provocation, and I would agree with you that this kind of "Lament
for the Course of the World" [Den-Weltlauf-Beklagen] through tragedy
is once again at root a kind of flight from reality, in order to aesthetize
what one cannot cope with in another way. For me it would be entirely-
but I simply must put this conversation straight. To me it's not about
music being in a bad mood, but rather about the question of whether
music is permitted to be so simple, as if it could be. This idiom was of
course already known: in the Pollicino pieces there are accompanimental

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198 Perspectivesof New Music

forms that are very typical expressions of the cheerful, that you simply
retrieve, that you certainly did not invent but rather found and inserted.
Mahler did this in a completely different way, Stravinsky did this in a
completely different way-but my experience with these composers was
always that it had been in their case a distinct break. The music knew that
here was something that had already been used once, on which it once
again wanted to cast light, in a new manner. And it just seems to me that,
or with many of your works it always seems that this kind-that your
music feels much the same, and that this breachis not made conscious,
though it is nevertheless objectively there."

Henze commented on that as follows:

"I think that I can perhaps say two things to that, Herr Lachenmann.
The first would perhaps be this: I believe that you are a bit strict in your
treatment of the question of stylistic concepts. You quote from several
examples-Luigi Nono, who is a friend of mine too-and I know this
music very well; and I also know what is brought to expression there.
However, this does not have to force me to employ the same technique,
the same morality. I am another person and, for example, I also have stu-
dents now, as perhaps you know, in Cologne. They never get to see even
a note from me. We speak only of music there, and I devote myself to
accustoming my young colleagues to the development of independent
thought, musical thought; and at the same time I bring them to allow
themselves to do what they want to do, for or against. This stands in con-
trast to certain of the moral measures of compositional conduct you
cited, consciously or unconsciously, just now. That's not how it works,
Herr Lachenmann! Each artist has not only the right, but also the duty,
to behave as independently of these criteria as he wants to. [Loud
applause in the auditorium for Henze.] That's what matters to me! And
my technique that you mentioned, which is not only to be found in these
little piano pieces for the young, taken from a children's opera, but which
you can also find in my symphonic work (this can be heard again on Fri-
day evening): I use it-as I have already tried to show many many times
in my writings; I attempt very consciously to retrieve these signs
[Zeichen] and, thus, from within the signs, and with the help of the signs,
enable myself to make what matters to me comprehensible, to convey it.
Thus I use such signs, that can be retrieved (as you say), in order to
address, or retrieve, certain things with the listener; to make the listeners
attentive to certain things; to throw up a bridge to them to help provide
in my music the right direction for hearing, listening and thinking. Yours
is only one of the philosophies which object to the way I do this. It really

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 Open Letter to HansWerner Henze 199

does matter very much to me that I am followed as far as possible in my

music and also in its performance; it matters to me. I would in fact like to
be understood, I would even like to be loved, not necessarily by you
[sympathetic laughter in the hall], but preferably also by you. That's
what matters to me, and that's why it comes to such compromises, and
such amorality and retrieval of musical signs. Okay!"

REFERENCES

Helmut Lachenmann, "Offener Brief an Hans Werner Henze" (dated

Leonberg, 11/12 July 1983). Critical commentary on Henze 1983;
planned as publication for the arts page of the Frankfurter
Allgemeinen Zeitung. Refused, published under the title, "Ein Kampf
um kompositorische Standpunkte: Helmut Lachenmann erwidert auf
einen Angriff von Hans-Werner Henze" [A struggle for compositional
points of view: Helmut Lachenmann replies to an attack by Hans-
Werner Henze], in Neue Musikzeitung 32, no. 4 (August-September
1983), 8.
Hans Werner Henze, entry dated "13. Oktober abends [1982]," in Die
Englische Katze: Ein Arbeitstagebuch 1978-1982 (Frankfurt a. M: S.
Fischer, 1983), 345-46.
[Translator's Note: This translation was made in 1995 from the edited
and reprinted version of Lachenmann's "Open Letter" found in
Helmut Lachenmann, vol. 61/62 in the Musik-Konzepte series, edited
by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Edition Text +
Kritik, 1988), 12-18. Special thanks to David Alberman, who pro-
vided scores of suggestions for improvement of this translation.]

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200 Perspectivesof New Music

NOTES

1. Lachenmann's open letter, written in 1983 in response to an entry in

Henze's Die englischeKatze, ought to be read in conjunction with
the auxilliary materials presented in the appendix of this translation.
Bibliographic data documenting the source texts for the various
translated materials may be found there as well.The present text
reproduces in translation, with altered layout, the full text of Helmut
Lachenmann, "Offene Brief an Hans Werner Henze," from Helmut
Lachenmann, vol. 61/62 of the Musik-Konzepte series, edited by
Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text +
kritik, 1988), 12-18. My own few notes are clearly labelled as such.
For most readers it will make sense to read the appendix first, then
return to Lachenmann's letter. [JS]
2. The original German word here (in its infinitive form) is abrufen.
Throughout the present document this word alludes to the field of
data processing: Lachenmann's use of abrufen brings to mind the
"retrieval" or "calling up" of information from computer memory.
[JS]
3. Extracts from "Affekt und Aspekt," which appears in Neuland:
Ansatze zur Musik der Gegenwart 3 (Bergisch-Gladbach: Neuland
Musikverlag Herbert Henck, 1983).
4. "In 1975 Korn wrote the book Musikalische Umweltsverschmutzung
[Pollution of the Musical Environment] (published by Breitkopf &
Hartel) in which he violently attacked "Schonberg und die Folgen"
(Schoenberg and the consequences)-that is, the serial development
in the avant-garde after 1945. The composers Stockhausen, Cage and
Kagel are mentioned most often in Korn's book." The preceding is
drawn from a 2 February 1996 fax from Dr. Frank Reinisch of Breit-
kopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden, who wrote the present translator in
response to a request (from Lachenmann) for a brief summary of
Korn's position. [JS]
5. Quoted from Lachenmann, "Affekt und Aspekt."

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