Considerable documentation in the form of the composer's own written notes and narratives accompany his seventh symphony but his academic and technical descriptions do not convey the severe, angry nature of the work. He writes of using "free tonality" to create "contrasting elements" and then tellingly admits: "Those elements can then be fired off against each other and thereby generate perpetually new musical material on the basis of the subject matter contained in the conflict." Conflict indeed. The symphony is literally barrage after barrage of furious volleys of strident chords and ripping, dissonant shrieks across the sonic canvas. As a German and survivor of his nation's darkest and most violent era, Henze may have had reason to create such angry music and he also tellingly says "My seventh symphony is a German symphony and it deals with matters German." Commissioned for a rather happier occasion—the 1982 centenary of the Berlin Philharmonic—the piece was first performed two years after this event. Henze describes the symphony as among his works for orchestra "the one most closely based on classical models." But as one of the most relentlessly violent and angy large symphonic works of the late twentieth century, it masks its structure with towering tantrums of rage and vast abysses of despair and the effect is visceral rather than classical in any sense of the word. The opening movement, an eleven-minute dance which the composer unbelievably describes as "exuberant," is so dark and violent one suspects a lapse in translation of the word from German to English. An ominous opening darkens and builds slowly to a thunderous, slamming and shrieking finish. Of the second movement, the composer states: "I see it as a kind of funeral ode, a song of lamentation, a monologue." In this description, he is dead on accurate. Although at its outset the atmosphere could be described as pensive, and references to the earlier twelve-tone works of Henze's predecessors Alban Berg and Anton Webern are in evidence, the section descends into misery and despair the likes of which would depress even Tchaikovsky. Nor will listeners hoping for relief in the third movement, a sort of scherzo with varied repeats, find it there, either. In it, the composer evokes scenes of the suffering of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who was confined in an insane asylum where he was restrained and given powerful psychoactive drugs and even poisons. Swirling hallucinations interspersed with cries of agony give way to a convulsion of hideous proportions and the movement collapses to silence. Having thus prepared listeners for the worst, Henze gives over the fourth movement to an orchestral setting of a poem by Hölderlin entitled "Hälfte des Lebens" (Half of Life) which, again in the composer's own words, "depicts a final apocalyptic vision of a cold and speechless world devoid of human life." In spite of its blatant and relentless nihilism, the symphony is incredibly brilliant and effective and may be compared to such as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, and, more recently, American composer John Corigliano's rant against AIDS, his Symphony No. 1.

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