La piccola Cubana

The world premiere of the stage version of the grand vaudeville La Cubana oder Ein Leben für die Kunst, originally created as a television opera, on 28 May 1975 at Munich's Gärtnerplatztheater was a failure for its otherwise successful creators, the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the composer Hans Werner Henze. Enzensberger later described this humorously in a book entitled 'Meine Lieblings-Flops' [My Favourite Flops]. Henze sums it up in his autobiography, and you can almost hear him sigh: ‘I had a hard time inventing the music for La Cubana.’ Nevertheless, the composer kept returning to this ambitious and lively piece. He quickly realized that the subject matter, with its lively imagery, might be more effective in a slimmed-down ensemble version than in the original's realistic battle of matériel. As early as 1990/91, he worked with Hans Magnus Enzensberger on a new version of the libretto, and in 1993 he took the opportunity to arrange a small ensemble version of individual chansons and dances from La Cubana for the singer Maria Husmann. Shortly afterwards, Henze wrote down the instrumentation of a salon ensemble found there in his catalogue of works for a planned new version of La Cubana, titled La piccola Cubana. For various reasons, however, this new version was never realized during Henze's lifetime.

In my arrangement of the piece for chamber ensemble, I follow Henze's specifications to the letter. Both the current instrumentation, based on the 1993 ensemble with the addition of a solo violin, and the reduction of all vocal and choral parts to four singers and two performers are Henze's own ideas. The ensemble, which vacillates between salon orchestra and new music group, between opera and variety show, is required to produce a multitude of colour nuances and tonal shades to characterize the various musical styles of this vaudeville. Even the musicians' participation in the staging is quite in keeping with the spirit of Hans Werner Henze, who, in the tradition of Brechtian theatre, always had in mind the real connection between scene and music. His ideal was the ‘musical performer’. Even the singers have to slip into a variety of roles. Based on the present version, it is possible to stage both a small ensemble performance with four singers and ten musicians, in keeping with the spirit of ‘poor theatre’, and a slightly expanded ad libitum version, in which the vocal and choral parts are distributed among several performers or, for example, the Cimarrón scene is performed by four percussionists in the original version. The staging of this vaudeville for performance is therefore left to theatre practitioners. This also applies to the interludes, which were included in both the longer original version from 1973 and – where available – in the abridged new versions of the libretto from 1990/91.

While working on this music, I was constantly struck by composer Hans Werner Henze's characteristic irony, which is literally present in every note. I also repeatedly noticed the composer's subtle delight in travesty and parody of popular music styles, which are, however, transformed into a cool, lean, I would say abstract Henze style. There are no catchy tunes here. The composer's sympathy for his characters is limited in this piece. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that the ‘mélange’ inherent in this music, which Henze himself always admired so much in Mozart, will prove its intellectual richness and wit. Jobst Liebrecht