Das Vokaltuch der Kammersängerin Rosa Silber

The strange-sounding title for this ballet score written in 1950 to a commission by RIAS Berlin and dedicated to Boris Blacher was not invented by Henze himself but was taken from a work by the painter Paul Klee (1879-1940). Klee, an enthusiastic opera-lover in his Munich years before World War I had often heard the singer Rosa Silber at the Munich Opera and admired the artist so much that he placed a painted memorial to her in two of his works. The concept “Vocal Cloth” is to be taken literally: on a canvas with a light wash, Paul Klee placed in small letters the initials “R.S.” together with the five vowels “a”, “o”, “u”, “i” and “e”, thereby creating a kind of sound picture. 

"[The work] is related to Klee’s gouache in that it is a set of variations on the French nursery rhyme, « C’est le mai, c’est le mai, c’est le joli mois de mai », which remains clearly recognizable throughout the entire work, its notes representing the initials R.S. that appear in the upper middle section of Klee’s canvas. As with Klee, more and more particles and variations splinter off, squares of differing sizes, delicate blue splashes of the most disparate density, tiny areas of deviation that create a sense of nearness and remoteness, warmth or coldness, dissolution or stasis. After looking at it for some time, the observer has the feeling of entering a magic garden, a park in springtime – the tenderest moods arise, all is light and cheerful. The music tries to reflect all this in its own particular way by means of timbre, ideas and atmosphere."