An Intimate Economy

The 1957 Donaueschingen Festival provided high-profile visibility for Nachstücke und Arien, a new work in which Gloria Davy sang Hans Werner Henze’s settings of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry. Only moments into the first movement, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono left the performance in protest at Henze’s stylistic conventions, thereby missing the opportunity to hear the first work with a text written by a woman and the first performance featuring an African American woman in the festival’s history. This article details Nachtstücke’s genesis in order to interrogate the dynamics of a creative coalition that disrupted the festival’s largely white, heteropatriarchal constitution. I nevertheless argue that the political optics of its premiere were the result of a series of conflicting intimate relationships rather than of a coordinated effort to challenge high modernist hegemony. Instead of resuming the aesthetic battles waged at Donaueschingen, I trace how Bachmann and Davy were brought to the festival through a series of decisions made in the name of love, money, and beauty. Cumulatively, these decisions make up what I suggest is an “intimate economy”—the patterns of investment that prioritize the material and emotional support of specific relationships over that of others. Focusing on intimate relationships rather than fixed social identities, I account for the incorrect and, in some cases, injurious assumptions that Henze, Bachmann, Davy, and the festival’s management made about each another during their collaboration. Thus, I consider the “how” rather than the “who” of the intersections of minoritized identities in an attempt to develop a mode of political redress beyond individual recognition.