For Henze and his native country had had a violent falling out. He had already moved to Italy in the 1950s, disappointed by the conservative climate of the FRG and the dominance of the serialists. Then came the scandal in 1968. When the oratorio "The Raft of the Medusa" was to be premiered in Hamburg, left-wing students hoisted a Che Guevara banner in the hall. Musicians refused to perform under the banner and the police cleared the hall with truncheons. Henze demonstratively accepts a teaching position in Havana and writes his sixth symphony in Cuba. In Germany, the organisers prevented performances of his works for years. Musically, too, it was a break. In his Sixth, Henze dissolved the orchestral apparatus from within, treated each musician as a soloist, and also involved two orchestras in an interplay. In this way, he pushed the musicians to their limits; Henze realised that he could not go on in this direction, according to Kerstan.
Thus Henze's Hölderlin Symphony is a double reconciliation. On the one hand, it is a reconciliation with Germany, where his politically committed music theatre has met with a positive response since the 1970s - Stuttgart was at the forefront. After all, it was none other than the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra that commissioned a symphony from him. "And you don't turn down a commission from the Philharmonic," Kerstan says with a laugh.
On the other hand, it was also a reconciliation with the traditional form of the symphony and with the conventional orchestral apparatus. The Seventh is considered Henze's closest to the classical symphony form. It has the typical four movements, the second movement is slow, the third a kind of scherzo.
However, it is a reconciliation not without pain. According to Kerstan, all movements are based on a twelve-tone row, which, however, as is often the case with Henze, is not openly audible. Even if the first movement alludes to the baroque dance form of an "allemande", the basic tone is serious, in the third movement agitated about Hölderlin's suffering and altogether very profound. His light, his summer night symphony was only to become the eighth. (GEA)
