Tanzstunden.

At seventy-one, Hans Werner Henze is the elder statesman of German composers. Long interested in ballet, he wrote Ondine in 1958 for Frederick Ashton and Orpheus in 1979 for William Forsythe.

As Henze approached his seventieth birthday, the Schwetzingen Festival, near Heidelberg, commissioned three ballet scores from him. Delayed for a year, they premiered under the collective title Tanzstunden ("Dance Lessons") on May 25 in performances by the German State Opera Ballet. Sebastian Weigle conducted the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The new scores -- Le Disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella, Le Fils de l'Air, and Labyrinth -- emerged as very much a mixed bag, with one common denominator: all are based on material dating back several decades.

Le Disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella ("Signor Pulcinella in Despair") derives from music Henze composed originally for a Moliere play, which had already been recycled once for an earlier ballet. Revised again, with some Neapolitan songs interpolated, the new work was choreographed by Dieter Heitkamp, a contemporary dancemaker from Berlin. A terribly dated cartoon, it looks like a grandson of Stravinsky's Pulcinella transferred to the Naples of the 1960s. Betrayed by his wife, who prefers an Elvis Presley -- style playboy, Pulcinella suffers all sorts of trials and humiliations. He's still the eternal loser and odd man out. In the title role, Amaury Lebrun seemed modeled after Jean-Louis Barrault's portrayal of Baptiste in the famous film Children of Paradise.

The middle piece of the triptych was no better. Le Fils de l'air ou l'Enfant Change en Jeune Homme ("The Son of the Air, or, the Child who Becomes a Young Man"), is based on a libretto by Cocteau first used by Maurice Bejart. Typically, it features a young boy who runs away from his mother to join a troupe of strolling players, where he matures into a sexually aware young man. The tale needs the poetic touch of a Roland Petit. Alas, Jean-Pierre Aviotte, a former soloist with Petit and now artistic codirector at the Prague Laterna Magika theater, has set it as a rather banal classical ballet. Steffi Scherzer, prima ballerina of the German State Opera Ballet, has the role of the mother, while Jean-Marc Thill is her Son of the Air.

The concluding Labyrinth was the one redeeming piece on the program. Henze has reworked an earlier sketch into an exciting score for seven percussionists on twenty-five instruments. The book is an adaptation by choreographer Mark Baldwin of Andre Gide's novel about Theseus exploring the Cretan labyrinth and encountering the Minotaur. Far from engaging the beast in battle, Theseus wins him over by teaching him how to dance. There's even an amusing Minotaur blues. In fact, the two get along so well that Ariadne has to turn up personally to lure Theseus back to daylight.

Formerly of Ballet Rambert, Baldwin works in the by-now-commonplace fusion of classic and contemporary techniques (with some ironic twists). Labyrinth makes clever use of the corps for the patterning of the maze (which Theseus and his friends enter as joggers) and has good roles for Marek Rozycki as Theseus, Michael Rissmann as the Minotaur, and Beatrice Knop as Ariadne.

In October the Henze triptych will enter the regular repertory of the German State Opera Ballet, which looked somewhat lackluster on this occasion. Small wonder, as the troupe faces its third season without an artistic director.