Henze Collezionista

from: 40^o Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte Montepulciano, Catalogo a cura di Elena Minetti, Montepulciano 2015
by Michael Kerstan

Hans Werner Henze, Renzo Vespignani, Natascha Ungeheuer
- artistic friendships -

Hans Werner Henze was always very interested, perhaps because there had been so little during the Nazi dictatorship, in the music, literature, cinema and arts of his contemporaries, even in politics. He always bought paintings from young artists, often friends, not as an investment but to support creativity. At the same time, many pieces of his collection are gifts given to the composer by their authors, like sketches for stage settings, costume figurines and posters. His earliest acquisitions were folky landscape paintings by unknown painters in Naples, then came the young Italians, and later Henze collected also internationally reknowned artists – amoung his collection there are works by Carl Timner, Hans Arp, Corrado Cagli, Lila de Nobili, Bice Brighetto, Eduardo Arroyo, and Elsworth Kelly.

Two of the protagonists of this exhibition are no longer with us, unfortunately: Renzo Vespignani and Hans Werner Henze. Many of Vespignani's works remained in his friend's house untitled. The painting techniques he used we could make sure by consulting numerous books published by and on Vespignani.

Natascha Ungeheuer, on the other hand, is a living active artist, good news. She has, moreover, photographed and titled her works carefully and given each one a title, so that they can be easily identified and documented.

Henze, Vespignani and Ungeheuer have in common to pass cildhood and youth during World War II which implicated their disgust of Fascism and it's implicationes like racism, dogmatism, militarism.

All three have a narrative imagination in their DNA, an affection for theatre and distinct practical theater experience (Vespignani as a stage designer, Ungheuer in street theater, Henze as author of ballets and operas, as conductor and stage director). Hence, it is an existential need for this illustrious trio to express, more, to exclaim to the world the suffering of man that they intimately share and, at the same time to celebrate the joy of life in their works. Often these opposing sentiments are coexisting, united in a painting or in a piece of music. So it is needless to say that the composer felt great vicinity, affection and esteem for these two painters.

The first place Henze lived in Italy was the island of Ischia (from 1953 to 1955). At the time, Ischia was a small meeting point of international artists, still unknown to mass tourism. In that context, he met, among others, his English colleague William Walton, the writer Heinz von Cramer (libretist for “The Stag King”), and the poets Chester Kallman and W.H. Auden (librettists for “Elegy for Young Lovers” and “The Bassarids”), the choreographer Frederic Ashton (librettist and choreographer of “Ondine”) and many painters including Werner Gilles who was the one who suggested moving to Ischia). On the island he also met and frequented for a long time Luchino Visconti who later suggested to Henze to make an opera out of the plot of Kleist's “Prince Frederic of Homburg”.

Renzo Vespignani

Visconti already had a common project in mind about a dance competition in Roman outskirts, “A Dance Marathon”. It was commissioned by the Ballets Jean Babilée and scheduled for a Paris theatre festival in 1956. The stage designer chosen by Visconti himself was Renzo Vespignani. In fact, the premiere of the new piece was delayed for one year and took place in Berlin, still with Babilée and his ensemble, because Henze had an accident while driving to Paris with his music still half-done at his side and ended up in a Hospital in Milan for two weeks.

A Berlin friend, Klaus Geitel, remembers well the world premiere: “Vespignani had practically lived in the theater studio and had painted with his own hands the decorations for a decrepit ballroom full of smoke, adding loads of objects in a hyperrealistic way.

The première in Berlin was the height of scandal. Visconti was enthusiastic though: “A great success. A real triumph!” The friendship between painter and composer began under a hail of catcalls and whistles. The etching, “Ragazzo di Trastevere”, is from tht period, a gift for the première of “Maratona”. Vespignani worked a lot on interpreting the setting of his childhood, life in the lower-class Roman neighbourhood of Portonaccio, with poor but proud children and youths playing in ther parks amidst junk, alone but full of imagination. Henze, on the other hand, had left behind his past in Nazi Germany and the restaurative period after the war, to experience optimistic, forward looking and welcoming Italy. In this context, it's easy to understand his preference for ballets and operas with anti-heroes and courageous but desolate women. Henze and Vespignani detested Fascism, which they had personally experienced, while they loved the personality and literature of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Vespignani set up an exhibition in Rome in memory of Pasolini in 1985, ewntitled “Come mosche nel miele” (Like Flies in the Honey), while Henze entrusted a commission inspired by Pasolini's film “Teorema” to Giorgio Battistelli for the third Munich Biennale – Festival for New Music Theatre.
Twenty years before, in 1966, the residence of Hans Werner Henze and Fausto Moroni had been inaugurated at Marino; they called it “La Leprara” because it was a hare's pasture at the time of the Colonna family (they say that Vittoria Colonna would take walks there with her friend Michelangelo, inventing sonnets together). Vespignani painted for big tableaux for the Leprara drawing room – the hall was meant to serve as concert hall and therefore almost as a public space, which by this means became something like a personal Vespignani-gallery.

The painter was invited to Teatro alla Scala of Milan to design the stage sets for Henze's “The Bassarids” in 1968. A very particular year and a rather special opera. At the beginning of the student's rebellion in Europe, Henze had composed this mythological opera for the 1966 edition of the Salzburg Festival; the young part of the audience considered it to be a reactionary regression and the conservatives thought it was an appropriate historical revision. The composer had the feeling that the applause came from the wrong side. - It was Vespignani in Milan in '68 who put the piece in its true light according to the public awareness: a collapsing empire, nostalgia for betrayed beauty, antique stones against everyday and family violence; seen in this way, the opera was breathing a new life and had gained a future.

In the political tempest of those years, Vespignani depicted families, children, wives, mothers; in particular, the hands of his mother express extraordinary meaning in 1969: hard work, tranquility, goodness.

Vespignani continuously depicted, on the other hand, a subject far more cruel: Fascism, be it Italian, German or anywhere else in the world. For an exhibition in Berlin in 1976 he made a series of paintings with most frightening and powerful motifs showing the violence, cruelty, barbarism but also the vanity of the Nazis and the opportunism of people. For that exhibition, Henze wrote an introduction, a declaration of respect, friendship and solidarity towards Vespignani, which was re-published on occasion of the FrankfurtFeste in 1986. The prestigious Frankfurt festival celebrated Henze's 60th birthday, and Vespignani created a folder of pencil drawings, printed in 100 copies, reflecting the biography of his musician friend: childhood under the Nazi regime with a photograph of his parents, the composer conducting beneath an Italian statue and his head, always thoughtful, serious, with a piercing glance of eyes which seem to watch you anywhere in the room. Besides, for this folder, Henze added his text on Vespignani mentioned above, and five reproductions of autographs – exerpts of his 1st and 2nd string quartets (1947, 1952), excerpts of the score of “Apollo et Hyacinthus” (1949, exerpts of “Kammermusik 1958” and of the “Sonata per pianoforte” (1959), sketches of his 7th symphony (1983/84), and the basic poem, sketches, score and diary excerpts of his guitar concerto “An eine Äolsharfe” (1986). The latter had been commissioned by the Frankfurt Feste.

Natascha Ungeheuer

In 1971, Hans Werner Henze composed a new theatre piece for the concert podium, as he had done before with El Cimarrón, i.e. it does not require stage, wings, pit or sets. The Tedious Way to the Place of Natascha Ungeheuer is based on a poem by Gastón Salvatore. The percussionist is acting mainly between car wrecks, and the player may organize the material on his own, even install dsome instruments inside the cars. The sound material should then consist of scrap (and also of different instruments installed there) like steel, alluminium, rubber, wood, glass and leather. It is basically all about “objets trouvés” transformed in artistic objects. The performence requires a baritone and sixteen musicians, including a jazz formation.

Salvatore did not know the painter when he wrote the poem, nor did Henze know her when he composed the music. However, when Henze published his autobiography, he learned that Natascha Ungeheuer really existed. She still lives in Kreuzberg, Berlin, and she has only her name in common with the title of the piece – because Gastón Salvatore had picked it by chance in the student's scene and used it as a metaphor.
Among the students of '68 (politically on th left), the real painter Ungeheuer was very popular, and whoever was invited to her house felt proud and fascinated.

In Henze's piece, a student tries to find the apartment of Ungeheuer in Kreuzberg, but in vain; he doesn't even know who she is, maybe a Sphinx he could ask about the future, or maybe utopia in person or exactly the contrary. Who knows what he would probably find in her house: lovers, drug addicts or the weak ones. The piece is a terrific tableau of Berlin and Natascha U. the metaphor arching over all of this.

The real existing painter was not at all amused about her name being abused for a theater piece, and 15 years had to pass before she agreed to meet in her house. Henze was already fascinated of her art - somebody sent him the collection of Morgenstern poems Es läutet beim Professor Stein with her coloured illustrations, published in 1981, poems he has been memorising for decades.

In 1987 the composer finally went to Berlin to see her with an immense bouquet of roses that nearly covered him. He delivered the flowers and immdiately fell in love with an enormous painting called “The waiting room, showing plenty of people in a waiting room, almost all of them full of sadness and sorrow”. He bought it right away and displayed it in his recently rented apartment in Munich, when he founded the Munich Biennale – International Festival for New Music Theatre.

Seven years later Fausto Moroni was the one who acquired another painting of Natascha U, 627 Days Until the Eruption of the Volcano, as a Christmas present for his partner Hans. And Henze wrote a nice letter to the painter, saying: “You are certainly a magnificient, superb story-teller.”
In his last letter to Natascha Ungeheuer in January 2012, he confirmed that her paintings have remained vivid as if they would have been new, and that many artists, gazing at the pictures, have been filled with joy and that other persons just have admired them. He finished the letter: “I believe that you go on giving so much imagination, gentleness and heartiness to the world and that many many viewers will be deeply moved by your work so rich in ideas and reflections.”