Seven Boleros

Maurice Ravel was a Basque and wrote very fine Viennese Waltzes: Mozart came from Bavarian Salzburg and wrote Italian Arias. Stravinsky was from Petersburg and produced Norwegian atmospherical settings, the white Gershwin created the best Negro Spirituals and so on and so forth. As early as the Baroque period, composers of all nations were interested in the phenomena surrounding Spanish music: the rhythms, the harmonic progressions, the resulting melodies and also the cultural-historical backdrop in front of which the magic contours of this timeless music existed.
I come from Westfalia (like Voltaire’s Candide) but my first opera, the one-act Das Wundertheater, takes the form of a literal musical setting (in German) of an intermezzo by Miguel Cervantes: El teatro de las maravillas. Many years later, I wrote the orchestral work Aria de la folia Espanola, variations on the famous chaconne which had already interested so many composers before me. Approximately 10 years later, about the middle of 1980, I created an orchestral fantasy on the fascinating, gipsy-like harpsichord fandango by Padre Soler. In this way, I was gradually preparing myself for the present Seven Boleros which originated from my pen without a prior quotation and which, in my view and manner of hearing, is genuine Spanish music, or rather my conception of what is Spanish in art: one must forgive me.
These Boleros have a past history inasmuch as their characteristics could be discerned in another context with different instrumentation, namely in my opera Venus and Adonis (1997), where they were instrumental in creating the passion-filled climate of the theatre plot, but could not throw off the subservient role of being an accompaniment for solo voices. Now detatched from the theatre and the human voice, these Boleros should be valid as purely instrumental music and be understood as such – yes, and as greetings to a faraway, wonderfully beautiful land of which we foreigners know so little that we constantly dream about it.

- Hans Werner Henze