Through the 1960s Hans Werner Henze’s music became ever more politically engaged. Some of those pieces have not worn well, but one of the exceptions is the “recital for four musicians”, El Cimarrón, which Henze composed in 1969-70, while living in Cuba. With a text by the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, it’s based upon the autobiography of the Cuban Esteban Montejo, who at the age of 104 had told the story of his remarkable life as a runaway slave to the writer Miguel Barnet.
Henze and Enzensberger present this tale as an 80-minute song cycle, in which the part of El Cimarrón (a 19th-century Spanish term for a runaway slave) is taken by a baritone, accompanied by flute, guitar and a vast array of percussion. It follows Montejo from his birth through to the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886 – when in reality conditions on the sugar cane plantations changed very little for the workers – to the arrival of mechanisation and the corruption of church and state that eventually made revolution inevitable.
