David Dalle
Thursday December 22nd, 2022 with David Dalle
The Winter Solstice journey from Darkness to Light: This year with Igor Levit's new recording of Hans Werner Henze's "Tristan".

Every year around the winter solstice we join a human heritage dating back millennia in the northern hemisphere, confronting the longest night with joyful, festive noise. I don't think contemporary humans can really understand the terror the long nights must have held for humans in Neolithic and earlier times, particularly for humans spreading into the northern hemisphere. The short days, long nights and impending winter was the most dangerous time of the year. Humanity did what it has always done, it makes noise, it dances, it performs rituals, it rages against the dying of the light. The celebration of Christmas is part of this lineage. I love creating a musical journey which echoes this ancient heritage. This year the darkness comes from German composer Hans Werner Henze and a new recording of his "Tristan" with pianist Igor Levit. Hans Werner Henze was born in 1926, and, like many post-war Germans, had a very conflicted and difficult relationship with the past. As a communist (in West Germany) and homosexual, he also had a difficult relationship with the present, so he emigrated to Italy in 1953, which was more open politically, where he lived the rest of his life, dying in 2012. Many of his works were very politically pointed and also greatly varied in form and influences. Completed in 1974, Henze's "Tristan" is based on Wagner's "Tristan", one of the most influential works of music in Europe for at least half a century after its 1865 premiere. It is not strictly an homage, as Henze was very critical of Wagner, more of a reflection on "Wagner's great song of love and death". "Tristan" started as a prelude for piano in 1972, reacting to the Prelude from Tristan, famous for its endless yearning and longing expressed in its dissonances which are never resolved--until over three hours later! Henze stated that "Wagner's music has an incandescent and exclusive quality. Something totalitarian. Mine is cool, as if it were early morning, and the questioning and longing are expressed with muted voice; it comes from far away, and has, so it seems, a marmoreal sound and a depersonalized quality." What started as a solo piano piece came to encompass an orchestra and electronics into a six movement hybrid of electronic music, concerto, symphony, and theatre music. He worked with the British electronic music pioneer Peter Zinovieff on the electronic tapes in the work. What started as "darkly nightmarish thoughts of the Tristan of myth and legend which haunted Henze" became more personal as tragedies and losses in his life occurred while working on the piece. Including the death of W.H. Auden and the death in a fire of his close friend, the writer Ingeborg Bachmann. These all culminate in an orchestral "scream of death" at the end of the 5th movement. Henze explained "the scream of death was no longer simply that of Isolde or Tristan, but of the whole suffering world." That, is the darkness this year. There will be light.