Never mind the physical strains of being sixty-seven years old, Hans Werner Henze was in buoyant mood. Despite a wrist injury, he had finished his new symphony. Now here he was in Symphony Hall, doing his utmost to disregard a damaged knee, marching down the aisle without his stick to acknowledge the applause for that symphony's first performance, by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony. The spectacle was that of a man still robustly upright in his bearing: in the dark three-piece suit and bow tie he chose for this premiere, he looked like a count, or the director of a Gymnasium. And the formal attire set off the pushing energy of his head, a head which seems to have been not only baldened but dynamized by time, so that it is now a vigorous egg of flesh, fronted by a muscle of a face.

As is the physical appearance, so is the music: thoroughly groomed, making a proud show of the most conventional dress, and bursting with being. The bulging catalogue tells the same story of capability. One could build a whole orchestral season out of Henze's works—symphonies (the Boston commission is No.8), concertos and other pieces—or a whole opera season out of what he has produced for the stage. He is, in everything, the complete professional, fulfilling those nineteenth-century demands of form and genre which continue to rule our concert and operatic life.