With its home theater under renovation, the Komische Oper branches out, beginning with Henze’s “The Raft of the Medusa” at Tempelhof Airport. By Zachary Woolfe In Berlin, the Komische Oper is ...

LONDON — “Why don’t they just blow up and disappear? Why don’t they all DIE?” screams the poet Gregor Mittenhofer about the fawning creatures that surround him in Hans Werner Henze’s opera “Elegy for ...

Hans Werner Henze was one of the pre-eminent composers of the 20th century. Over his 60-year career he wrote a wide range of music, including opera, ballet, film scores and ten symphonies. Defying ...

At an inn in the Austrian Alps Hilda Mack waits for her husband. 40 years ago he went climbing without, it seems, declaring that he might be some time. So she waits - knitting, contemplating, ...

Although a few radical composers had no use for opera in the mid-20th century (like Pierre Boulez, who infamously advocated blowing up the world's opera houses), the art form in Europe brushed itself ...

In his personal life and his music Henze was a natural outsider, but not perhaps a natural rebel. He embraced Communism and campaigned for homosexual causes, yet still accepted patronage from ...

His opera König Hirsch (King Stag), which in its richness and exoticism widened the gap between him and his avant-garde contemporaries, had its premiere in Berlin in 1956 in a version that was ...