The Contemporary Generation - III

"We come to the River" received its world première at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 12 July 1976. Hans Wener Henze produced the opera himself, assisted by David Pountney, and Henze's youngest brother Jürgen, designed the scenary and costumes.
In the programme booklet, Bond ( Edward Bond, the left-wing British playwright) and Henze jointly published a statement concerning the political nature of art:


Men without politics would be animals and art without politics would be trivial...

Art isn't involved in itself. If there are H-bombs and concentration camps art either acknowledges this (and makes these things its subject, literally or analytically) or it deliberately turns its back on them and so falsifies reality. It can't turn aside and pursue its own path, it has no path. Art is realism or it is trivial, and there's nothing much in between.

We could rewrite the parable of the man who fell among thieves: an artist came down the road, saw the wounded men in the gutter, crossed over to pass by on the other side and fell in a ditch and broke his neck.

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