Mürztaler Musikwerkstatt 1982-83

Afterwards, there was a panel discussion entitled "New Music in the Province", followed by a discussion with several young people and the composer. In his autobiography Bohemian Fifths, he writes that these young people

"wanted to tell me that the real local cultural concerns, or rather needs, were not so much with the local citizens as with them, the unemployed young workers. But they felt as if they had been sidelined and forgotten. They demand culture, want people to take notice of them and their problems. They want to judge and present the things in life in their own way, in a way that is different from the way the cultural sponsors of the railway junction might be comfortable with. Would I be prepared to help them with this? I was.

Now I travelled every few weeks and months to work with these young people. A story emerged in a collective way. It came straight from life, it was about the worries and complications in the world of labour and those who no longer had a job. The state-owned stainless steel factories in the Mürztal valley, which once seemed to guarantee many people work and bread, had just been closed.

In our play, this became the - deliberately exaggerated - portrayal of a citizens' initiative: the motorway was blocked, the Mürztal was flooded. The government has a solution: it decides to shoot the strikers to the moon, where they can build a society entirely according to their own ideas. Or something like that, it was meant to be bitter and sarcastic.

We dramatised this story, rhymed song lyrics, learnt to set them to music, and in doing so, very carefully and gradually put aside the clichés of rock music, replacing them with something we had made ourselves. A year later, the result was to be staged in form of the rock opera Sperrstund (Curfew) in a pub hall, on the occasion of the "Mürztaler Musikwerkstatt", as my initiative was now called, which also included a number of other events.

I brought my students from Cologne with me and gave them specific compositional, organisational and interpretative tasks. Everything revolved around contemporary Styrian issues, history and art. Equipped with these new themes and tasks, I returned to Marino, whistling a little melody that was later to become part of the Cat music, as the upper voice of the celesta that accompanies the final villanella of Louise the mouse in the opera's epilogue."

(Hans Werner Henze: Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten. Autobiographical Notes 1926-1995, Frankfurt/Main (S. Fischer) 1996, pp 479 )

April 1982:

"I studied the disease journal of the Mürztal labour poet Buchebner, the name of whom the Mürzzuschlager Kunstverein has written on its banner. I read Karl Kraus' remarks about the Hervay case in Mürzzuschlag: In 1904, the local and then the national press actually picked on a Jewish fellow citizen, the wife of the district governor Hervay, and denounced her on suspicion of adultery, with so much malice and dishonour until the district governor knew no other way out than to disembody himself. I intended to suggest to the Kunstverein that this story should be the subject of a joint theatrical-musical production at the next Mürztal Music Workshop, with a great deal of public participation, but this was met with resolute rejection. In the second half of April, I was there again to spend a long weekend writing poetry and making music with the young and wild ones in the basement of the primary school. I was provided with good assistants, outstandingly Harri Huber from Vienna, and very importantly the Mürztal economics student and lyricist Hubert Höllmüller, the Hölm, and I still meet up with him from time to time."

(H. W. Henze: Reiselieder ..., p. 484)