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Luigi Nono: Al gran sole carico d'amore

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historical political imagery has never allowed itself to be a simple task for opera, in fact most avoid the subject and its challenge altogether. The likes of Donizietti and Bellini,if you happen to scan their life work, you'd think both these um-pah composers delved deeply into the quagmire of politics, but alas, all their operas treat their subjects in a one-dimensional, safe complaisant manner.Likewise Meyerbeer who utilized the massacre of the Hugenots as a safe dramatic backdrop, never revealing what the source of embattlement existed,just pure spectacle and memorable song for the Paris Opera. Verdi is a little closer to the integrity of this subject in that the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy was in the streets, and Giuseppe had no choice,but to shrewdly veil his operas as powerful metaphors for the politics occuring around him. It's not until Modest Mussorgsky where we actually see proclaimed the masses,the peasants, the unwashed,the dispossessed as an important integral role within bourgeous opera. In fact he with Stasov devised a means of simplifying the delivery of text, to render it more realistic. 'Khovanchina' and 'Boris Godonuv' are operatic testaments, and even there history needed to be altered ever so slightly at the service of dramatic integrity,and momentum.

The 20th Century has seen no shortage of the political subject for opera, in fact the 20th Century turned out to be,to outdo,accelerate and summon the greatest dimensions of evil, the brutality,the terror,genocide,murder,political intrigue,corruption than all of past history.

With the work of Luigi Nono we are no longer within the strictures of opera. He wanted nothing to do with logical,predictable telling discourses of stories, or discreet narrative, all realism now,hard facts. He found the work of Meyerhold, and Piscator,as well as Brecht to be his dramatic icons. He has referred to his operas, as 'azione scenica',stage activity,a series of self-contained scenes which is simply drawing from events,utilizing,borrowing songs(not his),poems,documentary evidence and historical fact as his libretti.There is a working montage which Nono had learned from 20th Century drama. That's what this work does, it begins with revolutionary icons, as the Paris Commune of 1871 where the toiling masses actually seized power unfurling red flags throughout the streets.However with the help of foreign bourgeois forces, international troops the seizure was quickly eradicated. This opera then proceeds to the 1905 Russian Revolution with text from Lenin, then including the strikes in Turin in 1950,and Castro's Cuba, and Che Guevara, Vietnam,and Chile.With the image of South Vietnam for instance Nono utilizes the images of three prisoners who represent historical time, Antonio Gramsci(rise of the Left prior to the Second World War), Georgi Dimitrov(Nazi corruption, burning of the Reichstag for which he was blamed) and Fidel Castro(post-war leftism,national struggles),all this is as an elliptical collapsing of time.The loss of the Democratic Movement in 1973 in Chile with the murder of Salvador Allende was a low point for the activism of the Left throughout the world and is also a point in this opera.

The political movement in Italy, as all over the globe in the late Sixties, early Seventies was festering, Nono as many artists and intellecturals remained card carrying members of the PCI, the Italian Communist Party,and grudgingly accepted the historical compromise of its leader Enrico Berlinguer,of not recognizing the importance of the Soviet Union.The era of Eurocommunism is the real backdrop of this opera,and is a response/dialogue to that.Recall that Tito had earlier broke with the Kremlin,blocking,or refusing the Russian Mother's Milk , and the Chinese even earlier than that saw the Soviet Union not as a partner,nor as a harbinger for revolution around the globe,but as a self-contained nationalism.

The fascinating dramatic feature here is Nono adopts a kinda elliptical frame, where time collapses into an interreferential dramatic points,of present,past,future,present,past, with cogent and meaningful dialogues occuring throughout this opera.So for instance the Russian Revolution is followed by Vietnam. Also the chorus here becomes the voice of individuals representing for instance women guerilla fighters,a Turin prostitute, and artists.,as well as reflecting upon events. The poetry of Louise Michel, a Communard, makes for beautiful settings in the fourth Section of the First part for chorus.However the music overall is rough going,with intermittent slaps from the percussion, and overwhelming walls of brass timbre concluding sections, The fragmentariness of the music makes for difficult listening, Nono wants the situation,the ambience of the drama to be ugly, to be repulsive, this is the height of the expressionist credo.This found its visual equivalent in Yuri Lubimov of the Taganka Theatre in Moscow had done the job of directing. In the original Milan premiere,he has the Communards for instance laying on propped up half way wooden racks, bare torso with huge floodlights bearing down.The stage sometimes is simply lit with flashlights, and stage backdrops are simply bare wooden tablet shaped screens. Nono seems to have abandoned and or accelerated the marvelously powerful compositional means he had developed in such works for orchestra and chorus with soloists as 'Canti d'vita e amore', or 'Canto sospeso', based on Resistance Fighter's letters. Nono had developed the dodecaphonic means into impacted 12 tone clusters, all reiterated in different timbral positions stridently, the effect is like the tension of a suspension bridge pulling at itself inward. Those kinda moments are fragmentized here, Nono opting instead to render the legitimacy to the spoken and sung word, music takes a second function here.Nono in his score includes no stage directions,he after multiple performances simply wrote notes. But the work stands open as to interpretation of the variegated textual sources. There is tortured like singing as well, gut wrenching like and difficult to take. This opera in many ways sealed Nono's creativity and extroverted left activism, before he then embarked upon the richly diverse abstract hypnotic music the last ten years of his life,culminating in his equally powerful 'Prometeo' the music that is mostly heard today, and recorded. This CD recording suffers from not experiencing the visual stage actions which in Nono's aesthetic pallette is most important.Some of the stage noises come across as interruptions,rather than integral active stage meanings. Nono scholar Jurg Stenzl writes a wonderful essay included in the CD booklet.

I cannot stop listening to this work! For years I've known about Nono but until recently, I've never heard an actual note of his music. So this CD has come as a revelation to me. In it I find a composer who is rigorous, sonically interesting, dramatic, lyrical, passionate, and yet avant-garde. It makes for a powerful experience.

As has been stated so eloquently below, Nono's work isn't really an "opera" at all. The work has no straightforward dramatic structure. The text is carefully assembled from a variety of sources. The opera centers around the event of the 1870 Paris Commune and the 1905 Russian Revolution, but presented in an elliptical manner, with references to Che Guevara, Castro, Vietnam, Turin and other abortive revolutionary movements. As a result the work is more of a grand staged meditation on revolutionary courage and the sufferings of people, particularly women, who don't give up their ideals.

In many ways it seems to me that the work is really a Passion, but a Passion of the Common Person rather than a religious Passion. The chorus parts are strong. Soloists are presented against the choral background, rather than above it as in traditional opera. And the chorus itself becomes a character. Add to that the fact that single roles are sung by multiple singers and you get something that is much different than traditional opera. Even the structure of the text, with it's eyewitness excerpts and commentaries, reminds you of the structure of Bach's Passions.

Musically, the work is luminous. Nono is a serialist, but one who knows how to make music sing and make music dramatic. The piece is full of powerful moments. Much was made of the inclusion of worker's songs including the Internationale when the piece was premiered. The use of such straightforward tonal material in an avant-garde piece was against the grain at the time. After 25 years, this doesn't shock anymore. What does stay with you is how well integrated the tonal material is with the serial material. Nono uses similar procedures on the worker's songs as he uses on his tone rows. The result gells nicely. It does not have the pastische quality that quotations in Berio's Sinfonia have. Rather, it packs emotional punch.

Nono was always considered to be the most politically committed of the Darmstadt set of the 50s and 60s. (Though Xenakis certainly was as well.) This may explain why his music retains such a powerful impact. Where Boulez was looking for an almost mathematical approach to composition, and Stockhausen was alternatively a musical explorer and a mystic, Nono was motivated by deep love for people. As a result his music retains a humanity that is more readily apparent than in other Darmstadters. It certainly appeals to me.

Though Nono later dismissed this work as being too "heavy with" specific historical references, I believe it is a masterpiece. This live recording is the premier recording of the piece, written in the early 1970s and first performed in 1975. Not an opera, exactly, Nono called it "aziona scenica" -- stage activity. Based on photos in the luscious Teldec booklet, much is missed by not seeing "Al gran sole" on stage. Claudia Baransky is spectacular in the lead soprano role. The text concerns failed revolutions -- the Paris Commune, Russia, Cuba and Bolivia -- and the music is tragic, not heroic.

I recommend this to anyone as an introduction to Luigi Nono, one of the greatest 20th century composers. There is much more to hear, from his 1950s works such as the key serial composition for voice "Il canto sospeso" to the electro-acoustic works of his 1980s "late period." But if you had only one recording by Nono, I believe "Al gran sole" would be apropos.

With typically gorgeous packaging from Teldec, this release is unsurpassed as a visual artifact. And the good news is that it seems to be part of a trend of new recordings of Nono compositions -- see for instance "A floresta e jovem e cheja de vida," recently issued on "Voices of Protest, Volume 1" on Mode Records (see my review).

The New York Times dismissed this work after its 1975 world premiere, comparing it negatively to PLI SELON PLI by Pierre Boulez. The comparison is absurd in itself, comparing a stage work to a concert work. Surely their goals were totally different. The critic from Opera Magazine (UK)refused to review it at all.(Although they did review subsequent productions.) What fools they seem. This is clearly one of the great sound edifices of the 1970s. For all of its violent musical sounds,there is also an intense lyricism in the sequences for four interweaving coloratura sopranos and in the scenes for the contralto role of the mother (derived from Gorki and Brecht) who first appears in the first act finale and sings throughout the second act.
A pageant-like work, the first act centers on the Paris Commune of 1871 and the second mostly on the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. (There are also flashes forward to Cuba, Bolivia and Vietnam.)It is hard to imagine a more powerful listening experience. The composer may to some degree have been influenced by Bernard Alois Zimmermann's DIE SOLDATEN, and may in turn have influenced Henze's WE COME TO THE RIVER. All three scores have political goals, and all three feature, multiple events happening at the same time. The Nono work seems to be the best focused of the three.
No matter what you think of Nono's politics, this work certainly deserves to be heard for the sheer magnificence of the composer's vast musical concept. Although fundamentally serial, he has worked in several revolutionary songs from France Cuba and Russia to telling effect.
The performance, under Lothar Zagrosek from the Stuttgart Opera, is superb. Special mention must be made of Claudia Barainsky who soars through the high notes with spectacular ease, and contralto Lani Poulsen as the mother, who brings real "espressivo" and beautiful tone to her portrayal.
The sound recording is generally first rate, although there are a couple of passages that seem to overwhelm the microphones.
There is a text (original languages only) and some somewhat pretentious liner notes.

Luigi Nono's second opera (or "azione scenica" as he called it) "Al gran sole carico d'amore" was composed in 1972-74 and premiered in Milan the following year. This Teldec release, sadly out of print, documents a performance in Stuttgart in 1999. Lothar Zagrosek conducts the Staatsorchester Stuttgart

Written when Nono employed openly Communist programmes, "Al gran sole" is divided into two acts that, if you see them on stage, evoke the Paris Commune and the Russian uprising of 1905 among other failed revolutions. Photos in the booklet give you an idea of what revolutionary fervor and what sorrow at the oppression of the proletariat is acted out. Other reviewers here have explained the drama of the work. On disc, however, it's impossible to discern any clear plot and the opera is a purely musical pleasure.

Many moments of this opera are impressive, even downright beautiful. Just as in perhaps my favourite Nono work "Como una ola de fuerza y luz" (hear it on a DG disc) the orchestral writing evokes a huge behemoth in motion. Although there is the whole range of solo voices and a chorus, the opera is dominated by sopranos, of whom Claudia Barainsky's voice persists through the entire work with awesome stamina. Far removed from Nono's work of the 1950s or 1960s, this is a new genre that might be called "epic serialism".

I cannot rate this a full five stars because, as a purely auditory experience, it runs overlong. There are just some empty moments that doubtless on stage are filled with visuals. Nonetheless, I do enjoy putting this on occasionally and basking in the bright sun of melismatas.

Luigi Nono didn't write operas. He adamantly rejected the word and the form, and all the linear and psychological story-telling narrative processes associated with it. What he wrote, he preferred to call, in those years from "Intolleranza 1960", premiered in 1961, to Al Gran Sole whose first performance was in 1975 in Milano, "azione scenica" - stage action. What he did was to make a montage of texts of various origins. Most of those utilized in part 1 deal with the French Commune, the short-lived popular and pre-communist take over of Paris in 1871 after France's defeat against the Germans, which ended in a bloodbath but was seen by the contemporary and later advocates of the Communist Revolution as the scale model of the Communist government and society to come. So you get excerpts from Marx's The Civil War in France, an newspaper article by Lenin, Brecht's play "The Days of the Commune", quotes from Louise Michel (a famous female revolutionary figure of those Commune days), a poem of Rimbaud (with the verse that gives the composition its title: "in the great sun loaded with love"), but also quotes from Che Guevara and his revolutionary companion Tania Bunke, and a few more.

Part II (CD 2) changes time and place and deals with the aborted Russian Revolution of 1905, centering on the figure of Gorki's "Mother" (from his 1907 novel, adapted by Brecht as a play in 1932) and using, among other sources, excerpts from Brecht's writings on Gorki. But there are other threads: one relates to the struggles of the working class in Torino/Turin, the Northern Italian industrial city, in 1950, with some street slogans and excerpts from poems by Cesare Pavese centering on the figure of the Prostitude Deola (the liner notes are silent about the poems' origin. Some at least come from Pavese's first book of poems "Lavorare stanca", which I think means something like "working to death"). There are also quotes from Haydée Santamaria and Celia Sanchez, two woman companions of Fidel Castro in the failed attack of the Moncado barracks in 1953 which was a preparation for the successful seizure of power in 1959, and obviously chosen by Nono as counterparts to Guevara's Tania Bunke; and testimonies of North-Vietnamese women imprisoned in South Vietnam camps.

From these choices it is clear that while "Al Gran Sole" doesn't tell a "story" in the traditional operatic sense, with conflicting characters enacting a certain plot, it definitely tells A story: and that is the story of the "people" in Revolution. More specifically, it is about failure, failed attempts at Revolution, probably, in Nono's intention, to be taken as annunciatory of later successful bids. The meaning is reinforced by the fact that, at the end of his piece, Nono has the Mother, after her son, assassinated by the forces of repression, which I think happens neither in Gorki's novel nor in the play that Brecht drew from it. Possibly Nono's message is (to quote a revolutionary song used as a seminal germ for a wide-scale composition by another highly politically-minded composer, Frederic Rzewski) "The People United Will Never Be Defeated" - at least not in the long run.

One may adhere to the political message and intentions or be ruffled by them. But the paradox is that ultimately, the political content doesn't matter so much. Nono has written music of intense and almost painstaking beauty. There are soprano and mezzo lines of painfully tense lyricism over dreamy choruses drowned in resonance; there are dreamy tape utterances as if coming from afar, and percussive interjections from the orchestra. Nono doesn't really try for the text to be intelligible, as in CD 1 track 7 when he attributes the lines of Louise Michel to two interlacing vocalists, and all over when he has the four sopranos sing the lines of Louise Michel and Deola.

In CD 1 track 6, the chorus is treated as a shouting mob, to great effect. There is a short, epic male chorus in Part 2 Scene 4 which made me think of the crew of Britten's Billy Budd. There are orchestral outbursts of extraordinary power and drama, even near-unbearable violence, such as in the finale of Part 1 (track 11), or in Part 2 Scene 3, depicting the "deployment of the repressive machine". Don't put these discs on to soothe a head-ache!

It is ironic perhaps that Nono chose to honor those failed revolutionary attempts. Indeed, the paradox - and perhaps the limit, if not the failure (I mean, in view of the goals he set to himself) - of Nono's concept of a politically meaningful azione scenica is that the melismas he writes and the atmospheres he conjures are so beautiful and gripping that you don't need to listen to the text and make the effort to understand what is being sung and what it is all about. After a while you just lay aside the libretto (and the booklet doesn't help by providing no translations of texts sung in Italian, French and Spanish) and revel.

Ultimately then, this music, meant to have a political and even subversive, revolutionary, "anti-bourgeois" (whatever that may mean) impact, is ideally suited for "bourgeois" consumption - meaning, an enjoyment that is purely aesthetic, pleasure-centered.

After all, the portrait of Guevara has been for decades all over the T-shirts worn by burger-eating, SUV-driving Western teen-agers.

Detailed liner notes, although they don't not even provide precise information on the texts assembled by Nono and their origins (I did much of the research myself on the Internet), and the second text contained therein, by the dramaturg of the 1999 Stuttgart production from which this recording is derived, is needlessly wordy. But these are small matters in view of the beauty of this music.