Guiding thoughts for the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte Montepulciano from 1989, published in the program book of the Cantiere 2022.
The composer wrote this text to highlight the uniqueness of the Cantiere and to ensure its economic survival in the long term.

With the founding of the Munich Biennale, the City of Munich commissioned five to six compositions every other year. Hans Werner Henze succeeded in bringing the premieres of new music theatre works to the attention of the international public and thus making a decisive contribution to the renewal of the genre.

Hans Werner Henze had a special relationship with Berlin, which started to form in the last weeks of World War 2. He returned to the city frequently, whether as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg or to attend the numerous premieres and first performances of his operas at Berlin's three opera houses.

In 1984, Hans Werner Henze founded a new youth music festival in Deutschlandsberg, Styria. As is well known, he had already achieved a coup in 1976 with the establishment of the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte in Montepulciano, Tuscany, with which he had enormously advanced the promotion of artistic expression among children, young people and adult amateurs and demonstrated the social relevance of cultural education.

From 1981 to 1983, Hans Werner Henze spent the last days of October in Northern Styria to develop and perform new music with young people and amateurs. However, those responsible did not want to support his wish to compose with young people, and so the collaboration came to an inevitable end.

Hans Werner Henze founded the Cantiere in 1976 and directed it for five years. With the realisation of joint projects by residents of all ages with internationally renowned artists and young talents, it quickly became one of the most important music festivals in Italy and also in Europe, if the focus is on the educational and social implications.

In the fall of 1973, Hans Kumpf completed a work on music theory entitled „Wechselwirkungen und Parallelen zwischen Strömungen in der Postseriellen Musik und im Jazz seit 1960“. Jazz Podium has since published revised and supplemented parts of it. (in German)

In his autobiography, Hans Werner Henze remembers the circumstances of the cancelled premiere of his oratorio "The Raft of the Medusa" on 9 December 1968 in Hamburg.

After the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke and his expulsion from Switzerland, Dutschke recovers at La Leprara, 1968. Excerpt from the autobiography "Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten: Autobiographische Mitteilungen 1926–1995"