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In the beginning of the 1950s, Hans Werner Henze wrote two radio operas for the former North West German Radio. The genre was developed around the 1930s and means a form of opera without any visual elements and hence without a stage. Under such circumstances the plot has to reach the listeners' ears by other means - by making the text exceptionally easy to follow, and by means of acoustic special effects like echo or sound collages. With this CD, WERGO publishes the première of the revised versions on Sept. 27, 1996, in the Philharmonie in Cologne Franz Kafka's oppressive surrealism in InchEin LandarztInch (A Country Doctor) and Wolfgang Hildesheimer's scathing satire in InchDas Ende einer WeltInch (The End of a World). In InchDas Ende einer WeltInch, Henze himself took the role of the narrator, which underlines how topical the subject matter of this work remains for him.On the occasion of the première of the revised versions of these two operas the composer wrote of the Inchinner connectionInch between the works InchThere is, first, the state of a man who has taken leave of his senses, of being exposed, of the most terrible isolation, as if 'ordered' by invisible powers acting on a 'higher level.' There is talk of deception, of self-deception, of deceiving and being deceived, of the volatility and unreliability of life matters, beginning with the most simple (or most banal) and ending with the metaphysical and the grotesque.Inch It is also conceivable that the increasing disquiet that took hold of Henze in the early fifties with regard to an evolving society that nonetheless remained the same at it's core (InchEverywhere the old was not yet old enough, while the new pointed to a future that did not look very promising, Inch wrote the composer in his essay InchNach dem KriegInch [After the war]) took musical form in his two radio operas on the one hand, a nightmare
