Son of Night After Night

The German composer Hans Werner Henze left us today at 86, after a full, prolific and at times tumultuous life and career. This Telegram obituary provides an extensive overview of Henze’s life and work, and you’ll learn still more in this appreciation by Peter G. Davis published in The New York Times.

I first became aware of Henze’s music around 20 years ago, through a Cleveland Orchestra radio broadcast of his opera Die Bassariden conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi, and I consider myself fortunate to have seen and reviewed one of his later operas, Phaedra, last summer in Philadelphia.

Were it available, I would share a recording of Elogium Musicum Amatissimi Amici Nunc Remoti, which Henze completed in 2008 following the sudden, unexpected death of his longtime partner, Fausto Moroni Henze. (Read about it here and here.) Since that piece remains unrecorded, I’m offering instead the second movement, Dies irae, of another favorite latter-day Henze work, Requiem, a remarkable instrumental cycle composed from 1990 to 1993.

A great deal of music by Philip Glass is being shared today on this, his 75th birthday. My contribution is “Hymn to the Aten,” from his third opera, Akhnaten, about a heretical Egyptian pharaoh and the birth of monotheism. For me, this is Glass’s most ravishingly beautiful piece, and countertenor Paul Esswood sings it gorgeously. The libretto is in Egyptian, Arcadian and Hebrew, but Glass directed that the “Hymn” be sung in the language of its audience; English was chosen for this CBS recording.