Little Elegies for old instruments

World premiere 13. december 1986

Köln · Westdeutscher Rundfunk

Taverner Players
Conductor Andrew Parrott

In 1966 I wrote the score for Volker Schlöndorff’s first film “Young Törless”. I imagined that the sound of the ancient instruments I had chosen might act as a metaphor for the early immature, almost childish and youth- fully vulnerable souls of the protagonists in Musil’s novel. Later on, I arranged some of this music for string sextet and also made a string orchestra version. In 1985 I found the parts for the film music, but not the score. In order to make this music available again for performance on renaissance instruments, I made a new score: I wrote in the existing parts, but then felt compelled to add new lines and insert them into the old context. see also “Fantasia for Strings”

Hans Werner Henze