JAVS Summer 2018

Example 9. Hans Werner Henze, Viola Sonata, m. [262]. e nal chords in the piano.

Henze SONATA per viola e pianoforte. Copyright © 1980 Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors Company, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany.

A few years after completing the sonata, Henze was thinking about using the solo viola again, this time in his Barcarola for orchestra. He noted:

more information, recordings and lms, go to www.peter sheppard-skaerved.com

Recall the nal lines of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Lieder von einer Insel:

Notes 1 Hans Werner Henze, Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953–81 , trans. Peter Labanyi (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 248–9. 2 Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 378. 3 Henze, Bohemian Fifths , 327. 4 omas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. by John E Woods (New York: Vintage International, 1999), 484. 5 Henze, “A Letter to Young Artists (1981)”, in Music and Politics , 276–7. 6 Giuseppe Ungaretti, A Major Selection of the Poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti, trans. Diego Bastianutti (Toronto: Exile Editions Ltd,1997), 128. 7 T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets,” in Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1991): 177. 8 Henze, Bohemian Fifths , 378. 9 W. H. Auden, “In Time of War,” in Journey to a War (New York: Paragon House, 1990): 272. 10 Hans Werner Henze, Conversations (Royal Northern College of Music: Todmorden, Lancs and Arc Publications, 1999), 59. 11 Henze, Music and Politics , 252. 12 Henze, Bohemian Fifths , 380. 13 Henze, “A Letter to Young Artists (1981)” Music and Politics, 276–7.

A great re will come A flood which come over the earth. We shall all be witnesses. 12

It is no exaggeration to say that this is the landscape, the cataclysm, that the Viola Sonata reveals.

e sincerity and emotion of this great work for viola and piano takes me back to Henze’s Letter to young Artists . It’s as resonant today as the day that it was written: Every verse you write, every painting you paint, every lesson you give, every bar of music you write or play, can be a move against those who want to reverse the wheel of history to use the power of the police and of blackmail to drag you back into their sullenness. . . . Don’t lose heart! 13 Peter Sheppard Skaerved is the dedicatee of over 400 works for violin, the ongoing result of a lifetime of collaboration. A Grammy nominee, he has released over 70 critically acclaimed CDs, including cycles of sonatas by Beethoven, Tartini and Telemann, and many of the works written for him. Peter performs globally, and recently gave the most northerly solo recital violin ever, on Svalbard! For

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 34, 2018 Online Issue

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