Outrage at the Donaueschingen Music Festival 1957

The photo shows soprano Gloria Davy, Hans Werner Henze and Ingeborg Bachmann after the premiere. The composer recalls:

"In the spring of 1957 I wrote Nachtstücke and Arien, with Ingeborg's poems Freies Geleit (Safe Conduct) and Im Gewitter der Rosen (In the Tempest of the Roses). The latter consisted at first only of the four-liner

Where we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit by thorns, and the thunder
of the foliage, which was so quiet in the bushes,
now follows us on its heels.

until, for the sake of symmetry, she added a second quatrain, which makes the poem even more beautiful:

Wherever extinguishes what the roses inflame,
Rain washes us into the river. O distant night!
But a leaf that hit us drifts on the waves
To the mouth of the stream.

These lines roughly reflect the prevailing mood of Nachtstücke und Arien, even though in the other aria a choral hymn to a beautiful, nuclear-bomb-free future is sung and played, which continues in the instrumental finale, in whose centre, incidentally, a few notes from the epilogue of Ondine appear.
With this music, I had probably reached the most extreme counter-position to the so-called Darmstadt School, and so it is not surprising that at the premiere on 20 October 1957 in Donaueschingen, sung by Gloria Davy and brilliantly conducted by Hans Rosbaud, three representatives of the other extreme, Boulez, Nono (my friend Gigi!) and Stockhausen, demonstratively jumped up from their seats after the first bars and left the hall. That's how they escaped the beauties of my recent efforts! There was no end to the shaking of heads over my cultural aberrations that evening. Ingeborg and I were suddenly out for certain people who actually knew us, especially Dr. Strobel. There was a certain kind of indignation in the superstructure, probably also about the fact that the audience had celebrated our piece so vividly, and a kind of ban went into effect - actually exactly what I had wanted so much. It gave the impression that the whole music world had turned against me. It was actually strange and ethically quite questionable: where was the cultural freedom? Who or what allowed itself to mix moral criteria with aesthetic ones? Teddy Adorno? Nachtstücke is a beautiful piece! Alfred Andersch said to me in the evening when we parted: "Oh, what the hell, next time you'll just write something less pastel, and then everything will be OK again". It was as simple as that. A few years later, on 23 and 25 September 1961, Karl Böhm, Gloria Davy and the Philharmonic Orchestra opened the Berlin Festival with Nachtstücke und Arien."

From: Hans Werner Henze: Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten. Frankfurt 1996, p. 181-183. Translation: M. Kerstan