Digital letter edition: Hans Werner Henze's network of artists, short title: Henze digital

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Antje Tumat-Schnurr
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 459602398

The project ‘Digital Letter Edition: Hans Werner Henze's Artistic Network’ (‘Henze-Digital’), applies for the edition of selected correspondence of the important and internationally networked opera composer Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012), which is of great interest to musicology, literature and contemporary history. After a first phase of work, which is successfully completed at the end of the project period, the planned selection of correspondence with Henze's librettists and his patron Paul Sacher will be available in digital form. The final follow-up application for the publication of the correspondence with Henze's composer colleagues will follow, in order to present a differentiated picture of the discourses on content in Henze's post-war network at various artistic levels. The selection of unpublished composers' correspondence (already authorised for publication by the copyright holders) is intended to supplement the picture of Henze's librettist correspondence created by the letters edited as part of the initial application with a focus on the performing arts and composers in a self-contained corpus that is also indispensable for cultural studies research: Luigi Nono, Benjamin Britten, Ruth Zechlin and Paul Dessau are to be made visible in dialogue with Henze - i.e. in the international context of England, Italy and the former GDR. To this end, correspondence with relevant patrons, i.e. representatives of New Music institutions such as Herbert Hübner and Wolfgang Steinecke on the one hand, and performers such as Peter Pears and Ruth Berghaus on the other, will be edited. With the end of this second project phase, a new and hitherto unknown view of political discourses, especially in the context of Henze's relationship to socialist movements of his time between utopia and disillusionment, will be revealed. The letters will continue to be published digitally on the basis of transcriptions in accordance with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and its correspondence-specific forms of labelling. The scholarly annotated edition according to historical-critical standards (including the source texts and the HenDi-WebApp) will be made available in open access; its metadata will be fed into letter databases such as correspSearch, so that various functions for filtering, searching and linking work-, person- or topic-related data will enable user-orientated indexing of the material. To this end, textual aspects and works mentioned in letters are systematically labelled, annotations with critical comments are assigned, links to standard data records are created and indices are generated. The project is intended to open up new research perspectives on Henze's work in 2026, the centenary of his birth.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants