Elegy for Young Lovers – Elegie für junge Liebende

The poet Mittenhofer has assembled his circle of loyal companions at a mountain inn in the Alps: his patron and secretary countess Carolina, his personal physician Dr. Reischmann, his lover Elisabeth and, above all, Hilda Mack who has been waiting for forty years for the return of her fiancé who disappeared in the mountains. Their visions and hallucinations nourish Mittenhofer’s artistic inspiration. The arrival of Dr. Reischmann’s son Toni disturbs the fragile balance of the reciprocal dependencies: Toni falls in love with Elisabeth, observed with increasing jealousy by Mittenhofer. Simultaneously, Hilda’s fiancé is discovered, her visions have evaporated and she wants to break out of the enforced community. Toni and Elisabeth also wish to leave the hotel. Mittenhofer asks for a final favour: they should bring him an edelweiss from the mountains. Mittenhofer and the countess omit to inform the mountain guide who is concerned about an approaching snow storm that Toni and Elisabeth are on the mountain face, despite being aware that their life is in danger. This catastrophe provides new inspiration for Mittenhofer. At a literary event in celebration of his 60th birthday, he recites his latest poem – The Elegy for Young Lovers, dedicated to Toni und Elisabeth – to his audience who hang on his words with bated breath The Elegy for Young Lovers is Henze’s first opera in collaboration with the authors Auden and Kallman. The most incisive stylistic facets of the music are on the one hand the vocal parts ranging from parlando and arioso sections to a variety of ensemble pieces and on the other hand the dramatic stringency of assigning specific instruments to the individual characters. This provides a commentary to the actions on stage and the psychological entanglements as a form of audible magnification.

"What we experience is essentially the birth of a poem: the poem evolving during the course of the three acts which we are able to observe right from its moment of conception up to the culminating first public reading. The grotesque, ridiculous, vulgar, iniquitous and cruel accompaniments to this birth process are all levelled against the figure of the artist as a hero: the concept of a heroic life which was never really relinquished by the 19th century. – One factor of this concept is the catastrophic vision of the artist living in isolation for the good of his creativity: his enforced existence as an outcast, outsider and pariah, as someone forced to suspend his own self and live according to other existing principles than are applied to normal persons. The harrowing essence of this concept is revealed to us in the culminating scene of the opera. The central figure of the work is the fêted poet Gregor Mittenhofer who could have been the model for a number of prototypes within the literary world around the turn of the twentieth century. His destiny is his obsession with his work, his inability to communicate and his alienation from his environment. Mittenhofer is like a Moloch who is prepared to sacrifice everything for his creative work. In his own fascination, he appears as a medicine man and his mania and demons can be viewed as a part of his mythical form."