Royal Winter Music — First Sonata on Shakespearean Characters

Henze's Royal Winter Music (First Sonata, 1975–76), written for Julian Bream and premiered by him at the Aldeburgh Festival, stands alongside Britten's Nocturnal as one of the two supreme achievements in the 20th-century guitar solo repertoire. The work draws its six movements from Shakespearean characters — Richard Gloucester's menacing soliloquy, Romeo and Juliet's yearning dialogue, the comic Bottom, the stormy Ariel — treating each as the basis for a character study of remarkable dramatic intensity and compositional sophistication. Henze's harmonic language is richly chromatic without being systematically serial, and his understanding of the guitar's idiomatic possibilities — extended techniques, harmonics, pizzicato, col legno effects — is exceptional. The sheer technical demands of the work are formidable: the first movement alone is considered one of the most difficult single movements in the solo guitar literature. Henze later composed a Second Sonata on further Shakespearean characters, but the First is the more frequently performed and celebrated.