About the work
El Cimarrón is a music-theatre work by Hans Werner Henze, who called it a recital for four musicians: a baritone, a flautist, a guitarist and a percussionist. Hans Magnus Enzensberger fashioned the German text from Miguel Barnet's book Biografía de un cimarrón (1966), which records the memories of the former slave Esteban Montejo. Henze composed the roughly 75-minute piece in 1969/70 in connection with his stay in Cuba; it premiered on 22 June 1970 at the Aldeburgh Festival with William Pearson, Karlheinz Zöller, Leo Brouwer and Stomu Yamash'ta, directed by the composer.
Plot
In fifteen song-like tableaux the baritone, as the cimarrón, tells the life of Esteban Montejo, born in 1860: slavery on a Cuban sugar plantation, flight into the forest, the world of spirits, a freedom that turns out to be false, then women, machines and priests. The work closes with the uprising against Spain, the Battle of Mal Tiempo and the "evil victory". The score asks the singer to laugh, whistle, scream and use falsetto, leaves the players fields for improvisation and adds Caribbean and African percussion to the classical instruments, played by all four performers.
Cultural significance
The piece is one of the works in which Henze's political commitment around 1968–1970 fed directly into his music, as did his Sixth Symphony, which he premiered in Havana in 1969. After the premiere the original ensemble took it on a festival tour that included Spoleto, Munich, Edinburgh, Berlin and Avignon; Leo Brouwer also drew on the material for his guitar piece Memorias de El Cimarrón.