Erased: A Portrait of Hans Henkemans

Dutch pianist, composer and psychiatrist Hans Henkemans (1913-1995) spent his entire life searching for "the essence" of music. Revered in his native Netherlands as a composer and as an interpreter of Mozart and Debussy, things changed for Henkemans in the 1960s when he clashed with composers from the experimental music movement, claiming that they had become creators of sound rather than music — after which he was ostracized from the music scene, his name progressively erased from the history books. In 2023, however, his onetime "spiritual sons," Ed Spanjaard, Jac van Steen and Melchior Huurdeman, came forward to speak about this remarkable figure of Dutch classical music, in a stellar documentary by his son Harro Henkemans.