What is difficult for an artist is to free oneself from the "Spirit of the times."
<<I composed a Concertino for piano and wind instruments, an allegro piece, light music style, deliberately soulless, as was prescribed by the fashion of that time in the figure of Strobel, director of the musical section of the Baden-Baden radio. A look of frigid inhumanity was required, which indirectly contested not only the sentimental music of Beethoven and the Romantics, but also metaphysical performers of the stature of Furtwängler—as if they were the culprits of the German dilemma. On the contrary, French music by composers such as Poulenc, Milhaud, and Satie was praised, and we Germans were encouraged to imitate it. However, even this trend exhausted itself in 1948, when the French composer René Leibowitz arrived in Darmstadt, introducing us to Schönberg's serial theory and having us listen to the early works of Messiaen>> (H. W. Henze, "Travel Songs". Ed. Il Saggiatore)
Hans Werner Henze: Concertino for piano and winds with percussion (1947)
