Luigi Nono was born and died in Venice, and though he was one of the leading figures of the 1950s European avant garde, he was always first and foremost a Venetian composer, and much of his music is as inseparable from the city of his birth as that of his great baroque predecessors, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. The centenary of Nono’s birth fell on 29 January, and the Venice Biennale has marked the occasion with his greatest and most ambitious work, Prometeo, performed in the same space, the deconsecrated church of San Lorenzo, where it was premiered in 1984 (conducted then by Claudio Abbado).
In the UK, Nono’s music is still much less often performed than that of his close contemporaries, perhaps because of its unswerving political dimension – he was a lifelong Marxist, who firmly believed that every composer should take political and social responsibility for their music – and his works have often been dismissed superficially as agit prop. But by the time he began to work on Prometeo, his whole approach to composition had undergone a radical change, and the bold gestures and poster-paint slogans of his earlier works had been replaced by music that seemed to teeter on the edge of silences that threatened constantly to overwhelm it, and which now carried more philosophical, contemplative resonances.
Prometeo took Nono and his librettist, the philosopher and fellow Venetian Massimo Cacciari, nine years to complete. It is the ultimate expression and exploration of that late, etiolated but often exquisitely beautiful sound world, in which real-time digital enhancement and transformations came to play an increasingly important role.
Nono regarded the legend of Prometheus as the story of man’s first attempt at liberation from the gods, and taking Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound as his starting point, he had originally conceived the work as an azione scenica, literally a “stage action”, the designation he had also given to his previous two operas, Intolleranza 1960 and Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore. But what emerged in this “tragedy of listening” as Nono labelled it, was far more complex, and far more radical, with no hint of narrative continuity or explicit dramatic content. Cacciari’s intensely intricate final text explores different aspects of the Prometheus myth by weaving together passages from a wide range of authors including Aeschylus and Hesiod, Hölderlin and Rilke, Walter Benjamin and Cacciari himself.
The libretto determines the formal plan of the nine movements that make up the two-and-a-quarter-hour score. The result is like a sequence of self-contained cantatas, each employing a different selection of voices and instruments. In performance, though, none of the words are audible; the text is either buried within the shifting, shimmering vocal microtones and their electronic transformations, atomised into syllables and phonemes, or sometimes it crystallises into polyphony of renaissance purity. The solo singers and instrumentalists, chorus and an orchestra ring the auditorium so that the sounds move in space around the audience in a minutely choreographed scheme – for the 1984 premiere the architect Renzo Piano designed a multi-level wooden set like an upturned ark within San Lorenzo.
Piano’s structure has long been dismantled, and for these performances it was replaced by platforms supported on scaffolding around the church. Hearing this strange, introspective, almost hermetic work, which is so hugely demanding for performers and audience alike, in the very space for which every detail of its complex scoring and minutely specified electronic soundscape were originally designed proved a hugely involving and intense experience. More so than either of the previous two performances of Prometeo that I’ve heard live (in Amsterdam’s Beurs van Berlage and the Festival Hall in London), in Venice it really did become an exercise in listening on the most profound level.
The composer’s widow Nuria Schoenberg Nono, now 91, was among the audience for this very special and scrupulously prepared revival, which was conducted by Marco Angius with the Coro del Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto. And among the solo performers were two of the instrumentalists – flautist Roberto Fabbriciani and brass player Giancarlo Schiaffini – who had taken part in the premiere 40 years ago, and who have become a central part of the performing tradition that’s already been established for realising this extraordinary work.
