Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926)
Guitar Music, Vol. 1

 

There can be few other living composers who have had such remarkable success with an extraordinary quantity of music in all genres. A brief glance at Henze's catalogue outlines a formidable series of symphonies, stage works (both opera and ballet), concertos and quartets, and it is on these large-scale and solidly Teutonic structures, often unconventional in formal design and personal in their approach, that his stature as one of Europe's foremost composers rests.

Born in Westphalia in 1926, Henze received his earliest musical training against the background of Nazism, becoming a reluctant recruit into the Hitler Youth movement and, in 1944, serving as a radio operator with a Panzer division. After the war he returned to his formal education, studying first with Wolfgang Fortner, and later with René Leibowitz in Darmstadt and Paris, where he encountered serial techniques. It was