Henze sustained an extraordinarily abundant creative output across more than six decades, producing symphonies, concertos, operas, and songs in an unusually wide spectrum of idioms. He once observed, "I am bored by the idea of employing approaches which I have already tried." At intervals, his outspoken political positions drew nearly equal public scrutiny alongside his scores.
Henze began writing music at twelve, before entering the Braunschweig State Music School for training between 1942 and 1944. Social and political questions occupied him from an early point. Disaffection with the middle-class outlook of his upbringing and firsthand contact with Nazism probably contributed substantially to his subsequent convictions. He performed limited wartime duty in the German army and endured brief captivity as a prisoner of war.
After 1945 he resumed studies at Heidelberg's Institute for Church Music with Wolfgang Fortner and at Darmstadt with René Leibowitz, a pupil of Schoenberg. The Chamber Concerto of 1946, his first work to reach listeners, dates from this period, as does the completion in 1951 of Boulevard Solitude, his initial full-length opera.
Although traces of jazz and neo-Classicism appeared in those formative pieces, Henze remained closely associated for several years with composers extending Arnold Schoenberg's serial techniques. His 1953 relocation to Italy encouraged a fresh melodic orientation. This shift surfaces in König Hirsch, unveiled in 1956, and in the Symphony No. 4 of 1955, which reworks material from the opera's second-act close.
W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, librettists for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, supplied texts for Elegy for Young Lovers in 1961 and The Bassarids of 1965-1966. During the same span Henze assumed his first teaching position, overseeing master classes at the Salzburg Mozarteum.
The turbulent 1968 Hamburg premiere of the oratorio Das Floss der Medusa, conceived as a requiem for Che Guevara, led to the arrest of its librettist and several participants, further increasing Henze's notoriety. Exchanges with German students and Italian intellectuals prompted him to embed stronger political awareness in his music. Socialism and the New Left held growing appeal, especially after his 1969-1970 residency in Cuba, where he conducted the Cuban National Symphony in the first performance of the Symphony No. 6 for two chamber orchestras.
Voices, the 1973 song cycle drawing on poems by Ho Chi Minh, Bertolt Brecht, and others, mirrors both his political engagement and his openness to varied idioms. Subsequent scores absorbed rock and vernacular elements, electronics, taped material, microtones, and extended vocal and instrumental techniques. The Symphony No. 9, introduced in 1997, recounts the flight of inmates from a German concentration camp and carries the dedication "the heroes and martyrs of German anti-fascism."
Many compositions functioned as memorials, often to individuals he had known. One of his final pieces, Elogium Musicum of 2008, commemorates his longtime partner Fausto Moroni, who died in 2007.
Henze composed for numerous leading musicians of his era, among them Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Pears, Julian Bream, Heinz and Ursula Holliger, and Christoph Eschenbach. He further promoted his own catalog by traveling widely to conduct and record his works. Henze died in Dresden in 2012 at the age of 86.
