Sinfonia N. 10

One evening, several years ago in London, Simon Rattle described to me the sort of music that he hoped I might write for him one day. I remember the conversation well, especially his remark that, if possible, it should be something that reflected his – Simon’s – character or at least the impression that he might possibly make on my aural imagination.

I immediately heard something crystalline and clear and English in my mind’s ear, and during the years that followed, while I was working on my Ninth Symphony, certain musical images began to emerge, gradually an unhurriedly taking shape, so that I was able to make a start on realising these ideas immediately after the first performance of my Ninth Symphony in Berlin on 11 September 1997. Among those present on that occasion was Paul Sacher, who thought it a good idea to start at once on another symphony and complete it as soon as possible in order to counter the old superstition that it is a composer’s ninth and tenth symphonies that pose the greatest threat to his mental and physical well-being. But I took my time, calmly working away at the symphony’s four movements between 1997 and 2000. The first of these movements, ‘A Tempest’, was given its first performance by Sir Simon in Birmingham on 30 March 2000 within the context of his ‘Towards the Millennium’ Festival. While writing the work, I also thought of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which hat already had a number of highly successful encounters with my music an which was to give the new symphony’s first performance in Lucerne in 2002. In short, my music is not unknown to an orchestra of which we all think so very highly. Its second part is a song of praise – in praise of an individual? of Nature? of its creator? – that I wrote for the strings alone in order to allow them to display their qualities to the full, at the same time bringing my listeners closer to the intermediate world of images of the traditional symphony, so that it should come as no surprise to discover that this second section, calm and serious in its bearing, is followed by a dance – not a scherzo or a minuet, of course, but a logical continuation of what we have just head, scored for concertante percussion, wild and grotesque and perhaps even a little demonic. And so we come to the end, a dream (‘a dream, what else?’ as Kleist says), in which all the instruments reassemble in order to sum up the dreams that had already begun to haunt me in my Eighth Symphony and that I shall continue to think about in my new work for the theatre, L’Upupa, and The Triumph of Filial Love, a full-length grand opera or ‘comedy from the Arabian’ planned for the 2003 Salzburg Festival, the sounds of which are very far removed from the horrors and concerns of the age in which we live and in which we all must die, an age to which someone like me can respond only by rejecting it and turning away with a note of finality and farewell.

This was the last work that Paul Sacher commissioned from me, with the result that it is not only the ‘Portrait of a Young Artist’ requested by Sir Simon Rattle but also, at my own request, an ‘In Memoriam’, a tribune to Paul Sacher, who was not only a great patron of the arts but also a very dear friend. Hans Werner Henze, November 2001