Boulez & composer-performers

[heliocentric]

I hope you will not mind my saying that when Nono discovered what the USSR was really like, it killed him. At least he did not recover from the blow. The meaning he gave to his life collapsed

can't be historically correct, surely?

Nono first visited the USSR in 1963 and of course a large proportion of his "agitprop" works date from after this time (although their subject matter refers very seldom to Russia, centring more often on freedom movements in Asia, Africa and Central and South America). The earliest reference I can find to an unequivocal opposition to Soviet policy is in 1981 when he published a condemnation of Soviet intervention in Poland against the Solidarity movement. I imagine that Nono's withdrawal from the explicitly revolutionary material of his work up to and including Al gran sole carico d'amore (completed in 1974) parallels the same kind of turn in the thinking of many artists and intellectuals who had aligned themselves with the anti-establishment tendencies of the late 1960s. Nevertheless, in retrospect I think there's more continuity between Nono's revolutionary works and his "late period" than it seemed at the time. No doubt Boulez knows things that the historians and scholars don't, but I don't hear in the development of Nono's music a loss of meaning or commitment.

[heliocentric]

Straying even further from Boulez...

Henze's "Nachtstucke und Arien" - a very beautiful orchestral song cycle, in which Henze's definitive departure from serialism in his own music for an idiom much more obviously in the Mahler-Berg lineage became fully apparent. In a fairly recent radio interview Henze expressed his sadness at that breach, and the fact that it had never been repaired, given that their political views had not seemed so far apart, from his point of view

For Nono, the radical rethinking of social relations involved in revolutionary socialism necessarily involved a radical rethinking of music, so that Henze's neoromantic tendencies would have appeared to him inappropriate to their time and context when composers "should have been" using their abilities and opportunities to explore uncharted artistic territory - for which purpose serial composition techniques for various reasons would be considered an appropriate vehicle, subsequently supplemented and/or replaced by electronic and concrete music, collage-like forms, live electronics, improvisation and so on. But in 1958 Henze was by no means politically radicalised. By the end of the 1960s (the break occurring between the still mostly neoromantic Floß der Medusa and the much more spiky and "experimental" Essay on Pigs) his music underwent another fundamental change, embracing sounds and techniques which his more "avant-garde" colleagues had developed in the preceding years, and which they tended to regard Henze's adoption of as superficial and modish.

Which might all seem to some like ineffectual exchanges of hot air, but my feeling is that back then (though I should say "back then" is actually before my time!) many more composers (and not only composers of course) seem to have felt that there was actually something important at stake in their work and the attitude they took towards it. These days very few do.

[Sydney Grew]

. . . I know one or two people who were personally acquainted with Nono, and they speak of him as a deeply inspiring personality. . . .

Henze in his 1996 Autobiography has two particularly telling passages about Nono (whom he refers to as "Gigi.") The first (on page 90) is full of praise:

"I particularly remember the 1950 Darmstadt summer school since it was the first time that I really began to feel bored there. My only other memory of the occasion was a visit by Luigi Nono, a man of marmoreal beauty for whom I spontaneously felt great sympathy and whose very nature I came to love in spite of all the difficulties involved, since I not only felt but knew that he had great music in him. We wrote lots of letters to each other and, for better and (unfortunately) for worse, were often in contact during the years that followed."

I don't think I could ever be persuaded of the "marmoreal beauty," but otherwise that is favourable enough.

Then comes another passage, on page 173, about what happened during and after a performance of Henze's Elegie in Munich in 1961, which the composer conducted.

"It was not until a few days later that I discovered that by the middle of the first act Luigi Nono had had enough and that he and Nuria had forced a whole row of people in the stalls to struggle to their feet in order that they themselves could leave as quickly as possible. It transpired that, at a lunch given by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, the local critic and writer on music, Ulrich Dibelius, had asked Gigi why he had left in the middle of the act and not waited until the interval. Instead of answering the question, Gigi had overturned the dinner table, reducing the Meissen porcelain from Elisabeth's [Hartmann's] dowry to smithereens. . . . I could not help wondering what was the reason for his sudden anger, his rejection of me and my works, not to say his hatred. In all my later dealings with him, I invariably pretended that I knew nothing of the affair with Elisabeth's Meissen. He always suffered from an irascible temper, there was always something or some one to upset him, and there was nothing that any one could do about it. It was a kind of Weltschmerz. And he was always unspeakably rude to women, especially those he had ogled. What a remarkable character he was, and what a difficult life he led! In Darmstadt he booed Stravinsky's Mass. It grieved me deeply when, towards the end of his life, he refused to acknowledge me, and, instead, let me feel his contempt . . . . Surely he can't have been jealous? After all, he was well-to-do, one of the wealthiest men in La Serenissima, it was said, and highly regarded not only as a composer but in other respects as well."

For my own part I do not at all care for people who act like that (and I have encountered a few in my time). It is uncivilized behaviour, even savage, I find; I am all for reason and manly self-control. Faced with a sudden outburst of the Nono variety I say nothing, and calmly leave the room at the earliest opportunity.

[Sydney Grew]

[For some reason the above was posted twice - a message appeared saying "This page has requested you confirm that you want to leave - please confirm." Then when I responded "No" it posted the message a second time . . .]

[heliocentric]

Call me uncivilised, but I think I have more sympathy with someone who cares enough about new music to overturn a table than with someone who seems to see the event principally in terms of broken porcelain and who wants to see the reason for it in terms of material envy.

[JohnSkelton]

Nevertheless, in retrospect I think there's more continuity between Nono's revolutionary works and his "late period" than it seemed at the time. No doubt Boulez knows things that the historians and scholars don't, but I don't hear in the development of Nono's music a loss of meaning or commitment.

I've never felt there's discontinuity - Quando stanno morendo doesn't sound to me like a work of disillusionment, but rather one where Nono's passion for justice and equality burns just as powerfully (and La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura is ambiguous not resigned). It also seemed an odd thing to say given the hostility to the USSR within most radical Marxist and anarchist thought in Europe in the 1960s.