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König Hirsch

Music by Hans Werner Henze · premiered 1985 · at Theater des Westens

König Hirsch (in English, The Stag King) is an opera in three acts by Hans Werner Henze to a German libretto by Heinz von Cramer after Il re cervo, a theatrical fable (1762) by Carlo Gozzi. He revised it as Il re cervo, premiered in 1963 at the Staatstheater Kassel.

Text from the Wikipedia article "König Hirsch", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

About the Composer

Hans Werner Henze (1 July 1926 – 27 October 2012) was a German composer. His large oeuvre is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Neoclassicism, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition. In particular, his stage works reflect "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life". Henze was also known for his political convictions. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality. Late in life he lived in the village of Marino in the central Italian region of Lazio, and in his final years still travelled extensively, in…

Text from the Wikipedia article "Hans Werner Henze", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Other Operas by Hans Werner Henze