The project "Digital Letter Edition: Hans Werner Henze's Artistic Network", in short: "Henze-Digital", applies for the continuation of the edition of selected correspondence of the important and internationally connected opera composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012), which are of interest for musicology, literature and contemporary history.

As an artistic and internationally connected public figure, Henze always played an active part in the political and cultural-historical debates of the post-war period and discussed these intensively with his pen pals in his letters, alongside artistic concerns. The selection of correspondence now presented in this continuation request, previously unpublished and approved for publication throughout by the rights holders, is intended to supplement the picture of Henze's artistic network that has emerged so far: In the first phase of work, the focus was on the correspondence with Paul Sacher and the dialogue with Henze's librettists. Now, on the other hand, composing colleagues such as Luigi Nono, Benjamin Britten, Ruth Zechlin and Paul Dessau are to become visible in dialogue with Henze - in the international context of England, Italy and the former GDR. To this end, correspondence with relevant patrons, especially from Henze's early period (1945-1960), i.e. representatives of New Music institutions such as Herbert Hübner or Wolfgang Steinecke on the one hand, and performers such as Peter Pears, here complementing Britten as a correspondent, and Ruth Berghaus, on the other, will be made available.

The letters are published digitally on the basis of transcriptions according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and their correspondence-specific markup. The scholarly annotated edition according to historical-critical standards (including the source texts) will be made available in open access, its metadata will be fed into letter databases such as correspSearch, so that a user-oriented indexing of the material is made possible through various functions of filtering, searching and linking work-, person- or topic-related data. For this purpose, metadata, textual aspects as well as works mentioned in letters are systematically labelled, critically commenting annotations are assigned, links to standards data sets are created and indices are generated. The project is intended to provide new research perspectives on Henze's work for the composer's 100th birthday in 2026.