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Henze-Cuba-Fest in Rome
to mark the centenary
In the spring of 2024, Paolo Arcà, former artistic director of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, had, following consultation with the Hans Werner Henze Foundation, commissioned the El Cimarrón Ensemble to stage and perform the two works.
From 15 to 21 May 2026, an exhibition was held in the foyer of the Teatro Nazionale, featuring posters from the Foundation’s collection that Hans Werner Henze had brought back from Cuba in 1969; these offer a surprising and striking insight into the artistic diversity and political climate in Cuba in the late 1960s.
On the initiative of the journalist Carmen Oria-Valdéz, the Hans Werner Henze Foundation invited the writer Miguel Barnet from Havana to attend the performances. After all, both plays are based on his novels.
Rehearsals for ‘La piccola Cubana’
‘La Cubana’ was commissioned by the New York television station Channel 13, which first broadcast it in 1974. The composer had always wanted to create a stage-ready version of the monumental score (36 solo parts, ballet and extras) entitled “La piccola Cubana”, but this was not realised until the 10th anniversary of his death, by Henze’s former assistant Jobst Liebrecht. The world premiere of this version was originally scheduled for the 2020 Salzburg Easter Festival under the then artistic director Peter Ruzicka, but this was prevented by pandemic restrictions and was not staged until 2022 by the Berlin State Opera.
For the Italian premiere, the ensemble placed great emphasis on keeping the production light and ‘traveller-friendly’, in keeping with the work’s subtitle, ‘Vaudeville’, which could be loosely translated as ‘revue’.
Whilst the cast for “El Cimarrón” had already been finalised, singers, actresses and musicians for “La piccola Cubana” were selected with great care. Conductor Roland Böer (GMD at the Nuremberg State Theatre) immediately agreed with great enthusiasm, as did costume designer Christine Knoll, who only joined the project at a very late stage following a cancellation. She had to design and source 35 costumes in a very short space of time. Even later, répétiteur Hojun Kang joined the team, having learnt the piece in a remarkable three days.
As most of the performers live in Switzerland, the first phase of rehearsals was to take place in Zurich. We rehearsed in a band rehearsal room and at the Kulturbahnhof Affoltern, known for short as ‘KubaA’ – a nice coincidence.
The full ensemble rehearsals involving all the musicians and performers were moved to Bad Dürrnberg, near Salzburg: there, we had the use of the beautiful hall at the Bergknappenkapelle Dürrnberg, which offered a spectacular view down the River Salzach as far as Salzburg.
For the final rehearsals, everyone involved moved to Rome. Staying in various flats and rooms around the city, they would then meet up every day at the Teatro Nazionale for the final rehearsals.
La piccola Cubana
“La piccola Cubana” is the smaller version of “La Cubana”, a television opera composed by Hans Werner Henze in 1973 for the New York television channel Channel 13. The work is based on the ethnobiographical novel “Canción de Rachel” by Miguel Barnet and tells the story of an actress struggling to survive the various Cuban democracies and dictatorships.
In the main narrative, the elderly Rachel – portrayed by an actress – looks back on her life alongside her housekeeper Ofelia on 8 January 1959, the day Fidel Castro arrived in Havana with his revolutionaries, through four interludes, a prologue and an epilogue. Rachel’s character is inspired by the dancer Amalia Sorg, who emigrated from Hungary to Cuba with her mother.
In the sung episodes, Rachel recalls five stages of her career, beginning with her first engagement in 1906 at the Tivoli Theatre in Havana.
"El Cimarron" – a timeless monument
“El Cimarrón” is based on a novel by Miguel Barnet. In colonial Cuba, an escaped slave was known as a “Cimarrón”. In 1963, the Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet conducted a very long interview with Estéban Montejo, who was considered the last surviving Cimarrón and was 103 years old at the time. When the composer Hans Werner Henze began teaching in Havana in the winter of 1969–70, he too, thanks to the help of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, met the elderly Montejo at the residence reserved for heroes of the revolution.
Enzensberger later condensed the text into a libretto in fifteen scenes, which Henze set to music as a ‘Recital for four musicians’. The subtitle suggests a deliberately open form of performance: the work can be presented either as a chamber music evening on a small stage or as a music theatre production with a larger-scale staging and numerous scenic elements. Over more than forty years, many different approaches were tried, but the composer himself ultimately preferred the concert version, as he was convinced that excessive stage action could weaken the work’s dramatic tension.
With this production, the Cimarrón Ensemble aims to remain entirely faithful to the maestro’s intentions: the musicians become an integral part of the action on stage, and the instruments take on a theatrical and dramatic role in addition to their musical function. The production includes political and revolutionary scenes – the struggle against slavery, against the Spanish and against the Americans – as well as descriptive scenes (women, priests, machines) and reflective scenes (slavery, friendship, the machete), thus bringing together all the elements of great lyrical theatre.
Exhibition: ‘The Visual Language of Cuba’
Alongside the performances, there was also an exhibition in the foyer of the Teatro Nazionale showcasing authentic works of art from Cuba in the late 1960s.
The motifs reflect Cuban visual art and the revolutionary spirit of that era. On display were works by Cuban graphic artists and illustrators such as Salvador Corratgé Ferrara, René Portocarrero, Luis Balaguer, Alfredo Rostgaard, René Salustiano Ávila Valdéz, Antonio Fernández Reboiro and other artists.
The posters come from the personal estate of Hans Werner Henze, who brought them back from his trips to Cuba in 1969 and 1970.
Henze had been invited by the Cuban Ministry of Culture to teach and conduct artistic research.
Interview with Miguel Barnet
The author of the original texts that formed the basis for the works “La piccola Cubana” and “El Cimarrón”, performed in Rome, is the Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet.
The Hans Werner Henze Foundation, the journalist Carmen Oria Valdés and the Cuban Ambassador to Rome, Jorge Luis Cepero Aguila, made it possible to bring 86-year-old Miguel Barnet from Havana to Rome so that he could take part in the celebrations.
On this occasion, Kerstan conducted an exclusive interview with the international doyen of ethnobiographical research.
