Creation: March 15, 1986, Germany, Cologne. June 6, 1986 (second version), Italy, Turin, by Susanne Otto: contralto, Roberto Fabbriciani: flute, Giancarlo Schiaffini: tuba, Peter Hirsch: conductor, Experimentalstudio der Heinrich-Strobel Stiftung, Luigi Nono: sound control. October 8, 1987, France, Paris (final version), by the same interpreters.
Duration: 40′
Dedicated to: Massimo CACCIARI
Musicians: Contralto solo, flute, tuba, 6 percussionists and electronic device in real time.
Publishing : Ricordi
By its radicality, is a work emblematic of Nono’s search for innovation after his play Prometeo. Premiered in Cologne on March 15, 1986, it was reworked several times by the composer for a series of subsequent performances. It is a work of “wandering resonances” of the instruments and the voice. For his final version, Nono chose only isolated words from the four poems from Herman Melville’s Battle Pièces (1819-1891) and from Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem Keine Delikatessen: “deep abyss”, “pain crime”, “Hunger – Tränen – Finsternis”, “despairing”, “death”, “Verzweiflung”, a landscape of abandonment, despair and death. Rizonanze erranti is Luigi Nono’s “winter journey” which ends with a final Fragment sospeso! on questions – ich? du? er? sie? wir? ihr? (me? you? him? her? it? us? you?)- the last one with the indication “duro, wie Anklage, lasciando sospeso” (hard, like an accusation, left unsaid). But they also conceal another, historical dimension: the title page of the score states “echoes of Guillaume de Machaut, Josquin Desprez and Johannes Ockeghem”. Nono, however, cites only two or three initial notes from these works of early music dating back to the distant fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They are sung by the voice as well as by instruments and transported by electronics into ever-changing sound spaces; unlike Melville’s fragments from the American Civil War or Ingeborg Bachmann’s catastrophic “thirtieth year”, which are assigned specific sound spaces. The instruments create violent contrasts of range and dynamics, but at the same time Nono experiments with imperceptible transitions between vocal, instrumental and electronically transformed sounds. It is like an invocation of the vast spaces of Dante’s Inferno (3’22): “Quivi, sospiri, pianti et altri guai / Risonavan per l’aer senza stelle” (there, sighs, sobs and piercing cries / resounded in a sky without stars) – a world both very close and very strange. And again and again the hard blows of the bongos, the delicate resonances of the rattlesnakes and the mysterious beating of the Sardinian bells seem to get lost in the spaces and long silences that separate the islands from the fragments. “She did not sing roles, but lived on the edge of the razor” wrote Ingerborg Bachmann about Maria Callas. In Melville, Bachmann and Nono, it is exactly these same extreme situations. The aim for the listener – according to Nono – is “to broaden everything, to deepen everything, to bring about other changes, human mutations, feeling, social, reform, thought…”.
Jürg Stenzl
Traduction : Catherine Fourcassié
Booklet (detail, author): Ingeborg Bachmann et Herman Melville