WARMING TO HENZE

Hans Werner Henze may be the most-performed living opera composer, but his intricate music refuses to be pigeon-holed. And when it’s harnessed to a libretto as freaky as the one Auden and Kallman wrote for his “Elegy for Young Lovers”, managements tend to lose their nerve. So English National Opera’s joint production with the Young Vic is a welcome rarity. At its Glyndebourne premiere in 1961, “Elegy” was received frigidly: Henze was shunned throughout the first-night dinner by affronted bankers and their wives, and the papers scoffed about the “obscure” ramblings of this angry young German pacifist-homosexual.

Among the cognoscenti, the excellence and originality of this chamber opera was never in doubt. Set in an Alpine chalet in 1910, it has a cast of neurotics and lunatics revolving around the monstrously egotistical poet who devours their lives to feed his art. The music has a crystalline clarity that reflects the sparkling chill of the landscape. The baritone Steven Page sings the lead, but what makes this production intriguing is the presence of an actress, Fiona Shaw, in the director’s chair. After winning her spurs with Vaughan Williams’s “Riders to the Sea” for ENO last year, she applies her new-found skills to intimate theatre-in-the-round.

"Elegy for Young Lovers", Young Vic, London, April 24th to May 8th

~ MICHAEL CHURCH

Picture credit: German Federal Archive