Hans Werner Henze and Germany since 1945. This summarises the third RTÉ Living Music Festival, which takes place in the Helix from the 18th until the 20th of February 2005. Why this music and why now? Modern German music is in a peculiar position. Germany has the most glamorous of musical pasts, and the modern German composer is the lucky inheritor of an astonishing tradition. But how much of Henze, Rihm, Glanert or even Hindemith do you know?

There is of course Stockhausen. He was a dominant figure of the post-war period, but he has suffered the fate of all innovators. With his innovational period over – some would say long over – listeners seem to have lost the point of him.

So what of Hans Werner Henze? Now seventy-eight, he is considered by many to be the greatest living German composer. He is certainly one of the most productive. The range of his output is astonishing: operas, symphonies (his No. 10 received its London premiere last summer), vocal works, a breathtaking quantity of chamber works for every conceivable medium. It has been a composing career on the nineteenth-century scale. Add to this that he is a voluminous writer (his Memoirs are a 500-page book), teacher, festival organiser and political activist, and you begin to wonder how one life has had room for all of it.

You could describe the sum of these Herculean labours as ‘The History of Modern Germany in Sound’. Henze was there for all of it: the rise of the Nazis, Hitler Youth, conscription into the Wehrmacht, post-War re-building, the troubled sixties and seventies. He became a communist and revived the German tradition of activist music-theatre in works like El Cimmaron and the Raft of the Medusa. These works can be brittle, aggressive, unlovely in their appeal for greater love between people.

The political works have their fascination, but I confess they do not for the most part contain my favourite Henze. His second guise is that of the aesthete, the creator of Mozartian balance and beauty. It is this Henze that I have chosen to emphasise in the RTÉ Living Music Festival 2005.
Listen to the finale of the Seventh Symphony and something happens which was rare in music of the eighties: a hymn to sanity and beauty in their almost conventional senses. But then there is a bar of silence followed by dissonant mayhem. We cannot so easily get away from pain and chaos. Henze’s music constantly swings between these states of Apollonian calm and Dionysian fury.

This music was not in fashion when I got to know it. When I was a student in the early eighties Henze simply was not mentioned. Stockhausen was the ‘Important One’, and Henze a kind of neo-romantic sideshow. This situation has changed utterly, and just how utterly you can measure from listening to the other composers in the RTÉ Living Music Festival. Rihm, Glanert, Pintscher (the German Thomas Ades), Knussen and most of the other younger composers represented in the festival are Henzean composers. They have the same humanistic bias (not a Sirius-gazer among them); they have the same desire to create audible beauty.

I was still living in Northern Ireland in the eighties when terrible things were happening. I remember after the Enniskilllen bomb that Beethoven’s late Quartets were my only listening and Dante my only reading. This may appear pretentious now; but these works were the only ones that seemed to address the horror at all adequately, to give Beauty and Truth their counterbalancing but also contradictory rights.

Among living composers Henze was one of the very few who had this power. He lived in a world like the one I lived in, where you were despairingly trying to answer pain and despair with affirmation and music, hopelessly inadequate though the response often seemed. Above all he has given other and especially younger composers a model of what it is to be a composer in this era. He is engaged, intelligent and literate; he is a German who is a citizen of the world. He can say with the poet: the imagination is my only nation. He has said that his career has been about people more than music. There are meaner examples to live by

Henze has had close connections with Britain for the whole of his professional life. He was a friend of Britten and Walton, and Auden was his librettist for several of the operas. In planning the programme I included a large amount of British music almost without knowing it, and British music finally became a kind of sub-theme. Dublin audiences will thus get their first chance to hear works by Bainbridge, Goehr and Birtwistle which I and many composers have treasured for years. This incidentally has been the greatest single pleasure of planning the festival. A composer principally wants to share his own music with the listener, of course; but a close second to this is the pleasure of sharing his formative enthusiasms.

The Irish element in the RTÉ Living Music Festival will be provided by the three RTÉ commissions. I am grateful to my colleagues Frank Corcoran, Fergus Johnston and Rachel Holstead for their commitment to the festival. I am confident that they will make the Irish thread in this complex musical weave glitter.

This brings me to my final point. It might surprise the music lover who goes to concerts to know that the endless planning meetings supplemented by emails and phone calls do not centre on composers, soloists, orchestras and workshops so much as they do on him and her. How to get people to show up – this is the first and most pressing pre-occupation of the concert-planner. And the RTÉ Living Music Festival 2005 has been designed mainly with the listener in mind. I am not fond of the new music scene or contemporary music festivals in general. The pervasive sense of what’s in and out, who’s up and down, and the focus on middle-class rebellion (everyone wants to be like Mick Jagger) is dispiriting and demeaning. I have planned this festival as much as I can by asking: what is likely to move and touch and provoke people? When we musicians stop asking these basic questions, the game is up for all of us.