Henze Hundert

The RIAS Chamber Choir Berlin is marking this anniversary with a special concert as part of the Musikfest Berlin, performing a work by Henze that is also celebrating an anniversary: Musen Siziliens for mixed choir, two pianos, winds, and timpani was premiered exactly 60 years ago by the Sing-Akademie and the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin—the predecessor of the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin—during the 1966 Berlin Festival. It is a musical homage to Henze’s adopted homeland of Italy, where he had settled in 1953—first on Ischia, then in Naples, and finally in Marino near Rome. The title and the text set to music are taken from the Eclogues by the Roman poet Virgil, a collection of pastoral poems. Henze himself wrote about his selection: “My Sicilian muses are for shepherds, farmers, travelers, and workers. They sing, to the rhythm of the Siciliana dance, of sun and cold, of the hardy vegetation of their land, and of the sad and joyful aspects of love.” And indeed, Henze sets the text fragments to music with a wonderful lightness, which he said should above all be “fun” for all performers and listeners. And since the theme is love, the RIAS Chamber Choir adds Johannes Brahms’s magnificent Liebeslieder-Walzer op. 52, to Henze’s Sicilian muses. Georg Friedrich Daumer compiled the underlying texts from international folk songs. Brahms set them in his inimitable style for choir and piano for four hands, characterized throughout by a waltz—or rather, a Ländler—rhythm. A statement by the composer has been preserved here as well: “Incidentally, I’m willing to risk being called a donkey if our love songs don’t bring joy to some people.” Was Brahms ever called a donkey? Hardly. The concert opens with Henze’s chamber music piece Notturno, a serenade that combines lyrical, almost floating soundscapes with a modern musical language.