From analogue to digital in correspondences research: tracing the potential of encoding letters within the Henze-digital project

The correspondences between Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) and personalities of his artistic network contain valuable reflections on his activities as a composer and on the political and cultural history of the second half of the 20^th century. Moreover, they offer insights in the most intimate field of his affections, concerns, fame and thoughts about his position in the art world. For musicological research, postal documents – such as letters, telegrams, postcards, etc. – constitute precious sources for the investigation of the genesis, development, and reception of his (often collective) musical works. Despite their wealth, most of Henze’s correspondences are not published, apart from those with Karl Amadeus and Elisabeth Hartmann (“Offenheit, Treue, Brüderlichkeit...” 2022) and with Ingeborg Bachmann (Briefe einer Freundschaft, 2004), both of which have been available in book form. Since September 2021, the DFG-funded Digital Letter Edition: Hans Werner Henze’s Network of Artists research project has been working on the digital publication of Henze’s correspondences with some of his librettists (such as Wystan Hugh Auden/Chester Kallman, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Grete Weil/Walter Jokisch, Friedrich Hitzer), with the ethnologist Miguel Barnet, author of important texts for some of his compositions, and with the patron and client Paul Sacher.

In this talk, I intend to introduce the project, tracing the potential of correspondence encoding, reflecting on the possibilities, limitations, and challenges of the transcription of the original postal documents according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and its correspondence-specific mark-up forms and how to handle the incompleteness and ambiguity of the postal materials, with which editors sometimes have to deal. Considering in particular the content of the threefold correspondence between Henze and his librettists Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) and Chester Kallman (1921-1975), it will be observed how the digital edition allow 1) temporal analyses of the communication’s chain among them three, 2) spatial analyses of their movements, 3) relational analyses both internal and external, and, finally, 4) thematic insights, particularly into the creative processes that gave rise to two operas by Henze, of which Auden and Kallman were the librettists: Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1966).