On the creation of the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte in Montepulciano

In autumn 1975, the former mayor of the city of Montepulciano and the cultural assessor of the Tuscan regional administration asked Hans Werner Henze for advice on how they could organise a music festival in town, after their first attempt had failed.

After numerous conversations with various councillors and residents and a detailed inspection of the existing cultural facilities, the composer drew the following conclusions: there were no music lessons in the schools, the music school was empty and only had two broken pianos, the theatre from 1796 was in disrepair and permanently closed and only once a week there was a film to watch in the church's own cinema. The only musical activity was the annual "Bruscello" in mid-August, a fictitious folk play staged by a priest and accompanied by him "on an electric organ, from which he had been confidently and freely eliciting the same depressing, because wrong, chord combinations since 1939".

Henze approached various young and established artists to see if they would like to take part in a new kind of art festival where they would realise joint projects with the inhabitants of Montepulciano, the Poliziani. So it was not a festival, but a "Cantiere" - a building site or workshop in which each participant would be both a learner and a teacher. Together with fellow composers (Peter Maxwell Davies, Michael Denhoff, Thomas Jahn, Henning Brauel, Fabio Vacchi, Geoffrey King, Niels Fréderic Hoffmann, Richard Blackford and Francis Pinto), Henze created a collective opera for the first year, Der heiße Ofen, and with other colleagues, Luca Lombardi and Wilhelm Zobl, the song cycle Hommage à Kurt-Weill. Thomas Jahn composed three one-act operas titled Il palazzo zoologico based on texts written by four English children under the guidance of Edward Bond, which were then translated by Italian schoolchildren. This new work was directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Mathieu Carrière. The then 23-year-old Riccardo Chailly began his career by conducting Il Turco in Italia, and because they had forgotten to invite a choir, it was formed ad hoc from the members of the 1st Cantiere, including Henze as tenor. The latter also arranged Giovanni Paisiello's opera Don Chisciotte della Mancia for a performance in the Piazza Grande. After all, music lovers also owe the creation of Henze's Royal Winter Music for guitar to the Cantiere, as the composer had lured the international star of the time, Julian Bream, to Montepulciano to give a masterclass and a concert.

In the first five years up to 1980, the Cantiere provided the basis for numerous artistic careers, for example for the Roman stage and costume designer Nanà Cecchi or the Stuttgart-based rosalie, for the stage director Willy Decker and the conductor Jan Latham-Koenig, who premièred Henze's Pollicino (with the libretto by Giuseppe di Leva) in 1980. In the same year, the newly famous choreographer William Forsythe presented his dance version of the Elizabethan drama 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford. This production caused a veritable outrage during the subsequent guest performance at the choreographer's home theatre, the Stuttgart State Theatre, probably because it was too explicit and too advanced for the Swabians.

However, Henze has written about this at length in his autobiography "Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten" (Frankfurt 1996), and particularly in the two essays "Pollicino - eine Oper für Kinder" and "Die Kunstwerkstätten von Montepulciano 1976-1980", both in his collection "Musik und Politik. Schriften und Gespräche 1955-1984" (Music and Politics. Writings and Conversations 1955-1984).