Hans Werner Henze is one of the world's leading composers. His autobiography is frank, impassioned and alive with memorable images and characters and graphic accounts of the creative process and performances of his music.

Henze's unhappy childhood during the onset of Fascism found release in music, which, in spite of the disruption of the war, became the center of his life. He studied composition but began to make a career as a ballet conductor, until his creativity found expression in music that, by the early 1950s, had begun to distance itself from the fashionable but dogmatic rules of serialism in favor of his own individualistic conception of beauty.

In both the political and sexual spheres, Hans Werner Henze is an outsider whose utopian dreams of a humane communism have always had to contend with reality. 'Bohemian Fifths' are intervals that were played by Bohemian horn players, and which, according to Baroque and Classical rules, were proscribed. Henze's writing protests at the lack of freedom that such a prohibition implies, both in music and in life.