Prometeo: tragedia dell'ascolto by Luigi Nono

Abstract

Reviewed by: Prometeo: tragedia dell'ascolto by Luigi Nono Martin Iddon Luigi Nono. Prometeo: tragedia dell'ascolto. Nuova edizione. Edited with notes on performance by André Richard. Milan: Ricordi, 2021. [ 2 volumes (1 score [xxi, 231 p.]; 1 commentary [ 513 p.]) Pub. no.: 139789. ISBN: 9788881920853. ISMN: 9790041397894. $490] The publication of this performing edition of Luigi Nono's Prometeo, tragedia dell'ascolto (Prometeo, a tragedy of listening) (1975–85) is unambiguously a cause for celebration. Despite the fact that Prometeo is arguably one of the finest pieces by one of the most prominent post-war composers, I suspect it is little enough known that a review of it ought also to try to provide some additional contexts in framing the value and significance. This useful and usable edition is accompanied by a rich and extensive—some two hundred pages in the English version of the trilingual text—set of notes on performing the piece, principally from the pen of André Richard. As Richard's foreword notes (p. 315), he had a major involvement with all performances of Prometeo, from its premiere in Venice in 1984 to, over thirty years later, its 2015 performance in Paris, "from preparing the Chorus and Vocal soloists to leading the Sound Direction, and since 1991 [he has] supervised the design of the sonic space for the many different performance venues, by planning the setup of the sound-emitting bodies and the live electronics" (p. 315). Richard was, too, able to draw on the experience and insights of working with Nono on performances of Prometeo until the composer's death in 1990, as well as with Hans Peter Haller, whose work at the Experimentalstudio in Freiburg was fundamental not only to Prometeo but to all of Nono's work with electronics from the early 1980s on. In a sense, this necessarily implies that the 'authorized version' of the text is André Richard's version of Nono's Prometeo, in a way which might be thought to detract from at least some of the resistance to performability which Prometeo seems to encode and might even be part of its character (Jonathan Impett, Routledge Handbook to Luigi Nono and Musical Thought [London: Routledge, 2019], 410). As Marco Mazzolini's note on the nature of the edition makes clear, much of the development of the piece was undertaken in a dynamic collaborative environment, captured in the score in a jargon understood to those in the group, but impenetrable from the outside. More, Nono intervened in the score, adapting and varying it in each performance he was involved with (pp. 317–18). Yet, in the face of a piece lasting two hours or so, for massive forces (four orchestral groups, six instrumental soloists, five vocal soloists, two actors, a twelve-voice choir, three glass bells—requiring two-to-three players—and live electronics, as well as two independent conductors), there could be no more expert guide. Indeed, it is probably not too much of a stretch to say that nobody else could have done it. Also included is a fine essay by Carola Nielinger-Vakil (pp. 330–50), a skilful abridgement of some eighty pages of commentary on Prometeo in her 2015 monograph (Carola Nielinger-Vakil, Luigi Nono: A Composer in Context [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], principally drawn from pp. 237–316), transforming scholarly essay into an excellent guide for listening. It is probably worth confessing right at the outset that, though I am always interested in or intrigued by the music I write about, in the case of Luigi Nono, I am also, straightforwardly, a fan. My shelves contain, for instance, no fewer [End Page 442] than five recordings of his La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988–89), alongside multiple other digital versions on my hard drive. Each one is remarkable in its own way, though the version I heard live—performed by Mieko Kanno with electronics provided by Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer—in a chilly St. Oswald's Church in Durham, during a northern English March when spring had assuredly not yet sprung was, I think, the first occasion on which I felt I truly 'got' the music of Nono's last period, music characterized...