Il canto sospeso (The Suspended Song) is a cantata for vocal soloists, choir, and orchestra by the Italian composer Luigi Nono, written in 1955–56. It is one of the most admired examples of serial composition from the 1950s, but has also excited controversy over the relationship between its political content and its compositional means.
Contents
History
The title Il canto sospeso may be literally translated as "The Suspended Song", though the word sospeso may also be rendered as "floating" or "interrupted". The title is actually taken from the Italian edition of a poem, "If We Die", by Ethel Rosenberg who, together with her husband Julius, was tried and convicted in America of espionage and of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their execution on 19 June 1953 caused outrage in Europe. The phrase in the English original is "the song unsung" (Nielinger 2006, 87).
Nono chose his texts from an anthology published in 1954 by Giulio Einaudi as Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza europea, a collection of farewell letters written to loved ones by captured European resistance fighters shortly before their executions by the Nazis. The score is dedicated "a tutti loro" (to all of them) (Nielinger 2006, 85). The premiere was given under the direction of Hermann Scherchen in Cologne on 24 October 1956. Four years later it was performed at the twenty-third Festival of Contemporary Music of the Venice Biennale under the direction of Bruno Maderna (Mila 1975, 382; Nielinger 2006, 83). This Venice performance was recorded for the radio on 17 September 1960 and in 1988, nearly three decades later, became the first commercially released recording of Il canto sospeso.
Four years after completing the work, Nono incorporated its entire fourth movement into his opera Intolleranza 1960 (Nielinger 2006, 83).
Scoring
Il canto sospeso is set for solo soprano, alto, and tenor voices, mixed choir, and an orchestra consisting of:
Analysis
The work is divided into nine movements with changing forces:
The movements are grouped into three large segments of four, three, and two movements, marked by a short pause between groups (Mila 1975, 283).
In its alternation of instrumental, choral, and solo movements, as well as in some internal details, Il canto sospeso resembles a Baroque cantata or mass setting. Although it is in no way a neoclassical composition, the Darmstadt ideology to which Nono subscribed at the time shared with neoclassical aesthetics a commitment to the notions of purity, order, and objectivity (Fox 1999, 122–23). Nono himself referred to the work as a "cantata" (Nielinger 2006, 86).
For its pitch material Il canto sospeso employs an all-interval twelve-tone row sometimes called the "wedge" series because of its presentation of all the intervals within the octave in expanding order. It is a symmetrical series, whose retrograde is identical to the prime form transposed by a tritone (Mila 1975, 384; Bailey 1992, 281; Fox 1999, 119, 121).
Reception
Il canto sospeso is regarded today as a "serial masterpiece", and is admired for the variety of ideas achieved with the compositional technique of serialism (Nielinger 2006, 88–89, 136), while at the same time the work’s expressive content is considered to be unsurpassed by Nono's subsequent works (Fox 1999, 127).
Although the premiere under Hermann Scherchen's baton in Cologne on 24 October 1956 was a success, the direct reference to Nazi crimes was bound to be controversial at a time when such things were not generally spoken of in Germany (Nielinger 2006, 83). Herbert Eimert, reviewing the concert (on which it appeared in the company of Anton Webern’s opp. 6 and 10 orchestral pieces and Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden), declared that Il canto sospeso "probably left the most significant impression to date of any concert work of the young generation of composers today. … This one work would be enough to legitimize the enigmatic 'legacy of Webern' once and for all" (Eimert 1956, translated in Nielinger 2006, 84–85).
The choice of texts, however, provoked protracted dissension over the appropriateness of Nono's compositional means to its political content, particularly in the context of Theodor Adorno's recently published "Das Altern der neuen Musik", which associated integral serialism with totalitarian regimes, and his famous phrase, "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Nielinger 2006, 83, 89). Sides in the debate were largely along national lines, between West Germany and Italy. Heinz-Klaus Metzger attacked Nono as "a serial Pfitzner" who exploited such texts "in order to present them at the next important festival to the applause of a delighted bourgeoisie" (Metzger 1980, 120–21), while Massimo Mila defended Nono against Metzger's attack (Nielinger 2006, 92–93).
In at least one case opposition to Nono's composition went beyond words. A terror bombing at the Munich Oktoberfest on 26 September 1980 killed 13 people and injured more than 200 others. It is believed to have been directed at the scheduled performance of Il canto sospeso, which was cancelled as a result. The political message of the work, rather than its use of integral serialism, is presumed to have been the provocation for the attack (Bailey 1992, 279–80).
Though largely overshadowed by the political debate, various aspects of the composition have attracted a steady stream of analysts (Unger 1958, Stockhausen 1958, Mila 1960, Smith Brindle 1961, Ekbom 1962–63, Gentilucci 1967, Huber 1981, Stoianova 1987, Balázs 1987, Bailey 1992, Hercher 1997, Fox 1999, Motz 1996, Motz 1999, Hermann 2000, Feynerou 1993, Feynerou 2002, Nielinger 2006, Okuneva 2012).