Guai ai gelidi mostri (Luigi Nono)
(Woe Betide the Cold Monsters)
In March 1983 Nono wrote to a close friend, the painter Emilio Vedova, whilst staying in the Black Forest: “I felt at the time, and still feel that I have to compose unforeseen and unforeseeable music for the Carnevali. What interests me personally is [...] not only the grey, not only the prefabricated ruptures, but also the beautiful newness that explodes – tragically – also violently – but which aspires towards the most gentle newness.“ At that time, Nono was in a preparatory phase at the Freiburg Experimentalstudio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation where, together with director Hans-Peter Haller, he was able to explore new possibilities of structuring time and space and to study live electronics.
The postmodern philosopher Massimo Cacciari was also inspired by Vedova’s mask-like pictures and sculptures. Since the early 1980s, Cacciari had accompanied Nono’s work as a friend and author also, providing the libretto for Guai ai gelidi mostri. Drawing on the principle of free association, the philosopher arranged a number of fragmentary quotations in a certain order. The act of reading these multilingual texts takes the reader into mythological and philosophical areas of thought.
The text is divided into four sections, whose titles refer to the pictures of the same name by Vedova, and paraphrase with ambiguous wordplay the “stato” (i.e. the “state” or the “State”), describing it as the “coldest monster ”. Cacciari opens the first section of In Tyrannos! with the vocabulary of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, using quotations from Franz Rosenzweig’s Das Wort der Gewalt to point this up with telling effect.
There follow quotations from works by Gottfried Benn, Ezra Pound, Lucretius, Ovid, Walter Benjamin, Carlo Michaelstaedter and Rainer Maria Rilke, which allows Cacciari to evoke a utopian condition of ideals in the Nietzschean sense, one in which human beings may not continually be alienated from themselves and thereby become superfluous. Simultaneously, Cacciari gives us an insight into a future, one in which man is capable of breaking out of the icy grip and learns how to live with the “discontinuous gods”, finally abandoning all disquiet (“Pone Metum”).
Guai ai gelidi mostri is a work of extremes, one in which Nono’s desire to avoid predefined focal points and musical gestures becomes concrete. Placed in a semicircle in front of the audience, all eight interpreters are treated as soloists and amplified by microphones. Their sounds are transformed by live electronics and distributed in space by loudspeakers that must be placed in the concert hall as asymmetrically as possible.
In a self-referential manner, Nono draws the entire material for Guai ai gelidi mostri from earlier compositions such as Das atmende Klarsein or Quando stanno morendo. Diario polacco n. 2. Nono transposes these sonic fragments, distributes them among different instruments, and places them in a new order. Nono also experiments with the music’s temporal structure, encroaching on it by leaving the parameters of time to chance and determining new note values by the roll of dice.
The frequent annotations “Josquin” and “Dadi” (dice) in the sketches clearly demonstrate Nono’s musical thinking, in which any given aleatoric moment is intimately connected with historic-cultural phenomena. The three low string instruments create a rhythmically fluctuating continuum of sound in sustained note values. Their parts are furnished with a plethora of performance markings, similar to the score of the string quartet Fragmente – Stille, an Diotima. Gently, as if hidden behind acoustic masks, their chords begin to glow. The sounds emerge from the halaphon – a device that can control sonic movement in real time – and roam around the concert hall.
The two altos weave sustained syllables within this fragile architecture of sound, whereby Nono in no way sets Cacciari’s text to music, but alights on single words that for him would seem to hold meaning. Nono often allows the vocal part to fan out in its lowest register, achieving this by adding alternating fourths and fifths as live electronic intervals. Suddenly, striking wind chords disrupt the fitful continuum of sound. Their attacks undergo upward, microtonal transposition with the publison and are layered in feedback loops, the acoustic result becoming hardly bearable.
These assaults on the audience can, in terms of the text, be understood in a political way. However, when Nono integrates them at a later point into his “tragedia dell’ascolto” (a tragedy of listening), Prometeo, they become more a radicalised sign of his aesthetic programme, and are designed to cause of maximum irritation so that the consciousness may be opened for otherness and the sense of reality be expanded to one of possibility.
Birgit Johanna Wertenson, translation: Graham Lack
Text: Massimo Cacciari
In Tyrannos!
Stato si chiama
Il piú freddo
Di tutti i gelidi mostri-
A dryness calling for Death
Il suo Segno
Predica Morte
Ulceribus taetris
Sepulta
Paupertas horrida
Corruttore di tutto
Luogo
D’ogni luce mute
Mente in tutte le lingue
L’idolo
Essere-stato
Funera respectans
das recht was nur sein ersts
Wort
Nun aber spricht er sein zweites
Wort
DAS WORT DER GEWALT
Lemuria
Quando non può
Farsi piú buio
Di quest’ora che affonda
Quando
Dalle foreste d’ombra
minacciano i Lemuri
Ille Memor
Scalzo si leva
Schiocca le dita
Getta le nere fave
Dietro alle Larve
Scrosciano allora scorze di parole
Morti vermi ne generano vivi
Corruptio Faetor Fungus
Temesaeque concrepat aera
Nec requies erat
Ed è l’Aria senza
Rifugio di Pace
Das Grosse Nichts der Tiere
Suona profondo l’Aperto negli occhi dell’Animale
Il grande Nulla dell’Animale
Libero da Morte
E i Fiori
Unendlich
Ne sono Io Specchio
Questo si chiama Destino
Essere sempre di fronte
E null’altro –
Stare di fronte
Dove vediamo futuro
Egli vede il Tutto
E se stesso nel tutto
E se stesso salvo per sempre
Nel Tutto
Egli
Fast tödliche Vögel der Seele
Entwicklungsfremdheit
E nella Mente tua bellezza Questa non è vanità
Da beginnt erst der Mensch
Der nicht überflüssig ist
Nell’aria
Unico Irraffigurabile Onnipresente
Il Canto persuasi
Vuoto lucente
Senza Imago
Misurato pietra su pietra
Là dove lo Stato finisce
Nell’aria
Discontinuous gods
Metum
Pone Metum
Pone
