Giovanni Muro (s) - Luigi Nono and the “tragedy of hearing”; Chiesa San Lorenzo, 25.09.1984

Giovanni Muro (1948-2009), was an Italian expressionist artist, operating on the fringes of the last glimmers of the Povera Arte and Minimalist movements . Yet again Giovanni, who neither read music nor had the ability to play an instrument, found himself in the dark, waiting to listen to a new work by Luigi Nono. The first time had been way back in his childhood, maybe the early autumn of 1960, when Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso had been broadcast live on the radio. His father, Stefano, had tried to get tickets , as the performance that was being broadcast was taking place in Venice in a celebration by the City of its then young, radical composer, but he had been unsuccessful. Not to be defeated ,after supper Stefano and Antonia, Giovanni’s mother, had carried their four dining chairs across the hall and into the middle of the living room, where they had re-orientated the rug, so that it was square-on to the radio that sat on the side-board on the far wall. Then they had drawn the curtains and with Lucia, Giovanni’s younger sister, they had all sat there in the dark, holding “programmes” that Giovanni and Lucia had made that afternoon, staring at the glowing dial and waiting for the performance. Twenty four years or so later and Giovanni had yet to hear that work again . Not that that was surprising ,for not only was there still no recording available , but also ,while deeply respected, like serial music more generally, it had yet to become a fixture in the classical repertoire, at Il Fenice or elsewhere. Nevertheless, even if over the intervening period Giovanni had not heard the work again, he had learned a lot about the anecdotal contexts and substantive issues concerning Il Canto Sospeso, not least the severe critique by Stockhausen of the alleged indecipherability of the sung texts (in contrast, say, with the pitchless enunciation in Arnold Schoenberg’s “A survivor from Warsaw”), and the outraged response to that attack by Nono and his supporters. Giovanni had even acquired a copy of the original Einaudi edition of the compilation “Lettere Di Condannati a Morte della Resistenza Europea (1943-1945)”, from which Nono had extracted his libretto, a volume which still kept its place on Giovanni’s book-shelves, alongside Gramsci’s and Bonhoeffer’s respective “letters from prison”, a trilogy of works that together left Giovanni with a sense of hope, if only because he was free to read them and they existed to be read, although in truth they rarely were , at least by Giovanni. As for the music of Il Canto Sospeso itself, Giovanni could not really remember anything specific about it at all other than a highly generalised impression of stops and starts , highs and lows and, to his young ears, strained vocals. What he could remember vividly though was the anxious feeling of not knowing if the work had ended or, indeed if it was coming to an end (and he ( and he suspected his parents) had been surprised and, frankly relieved , when the sound of applause had suddenly, confidently and rapturously broken out in an urgent and intense tumult , like some standpipe gushing onto the stone of a dusty campo on a hot, sticky day). But more than the anxious enduring of a sense of indeterminacy, what Giovanni recalled most clearly about that evening all those years ago was that it had been suffused with a powerful sense of he and his sister being initiated into something that was intensely grown-up and mildly self- congratulatory, something that he could surely put into his next daily entry in his school diary and that his language and literature teacher might approve of for once. And now he was again in the dark, in the decommissioned and broken church of San Lorenzo, sitting in a folding chair made of wood and canvas , waiting for Claudio Abbado to draw out the first notes from the musicians of Nono’s “ Prometeo, tragedia dell’ascoloto”, having its world premiere. It was the 25th September 1984. Giovanni twisted in his seat and turned to Giulia beside him. “This chair already feels worse than what Saint Lawrence had to endure…” he whispered. Giulia ignored him. The grand building had had a wooden ,ark-like, framework assembled inside it to a design by Renzo Piano and a multi- levelled gantry built around the walls , where the musicians and chorus sat and moved about, and from which loudspeakers were hung. The audience, including Giovanni and Giulia, were cradled within. In front of them and to their right, Nono himself could be seen perusing the score and glancing up and around. The lighting , such as it was, under the supervision of Emilio Vedova, dimmed further and the characteristic stillness fell upon those present. In his mind Giovanni started a sort of inventory: the wallet in his right-hand trouser pocket; the household keys; a piece of folded lined paper in his jacket’s inner pocket that contained the address of a man who had a small table for sale; a scent of perfume (Giulia’s?)that could not veil the smell of plaster and dust; the now invisible semi circles of metal- work, up in the arches of the transepts; the alleged resting place of Marco Polo; the lives and deaths of the nuns who once worshipped here; the embarrassment he had felt earlier in the day when asked if he had crossed the previous week’s picket line at the University….last week ,last Tuesday, 10.20; a queasy feeling. Giovanni roused himself to try and tune in on the sounds that were coming at him through the dark, from above, to the side, loud, then soft, the singers urgent in their recital but not quite accessible, at least to him. Already he was drowsy. Why was that? How much longer? Was there a phrase of melody or lyricism that he could somehow cling onto? He remembered without warning Lucia slipping off her chair, evading Antonia’s out-stretched hand and her leaving the room. All those years ago. At the time he had felt stubbornly proud to have stayed in place, knowing he would thereby please his parents. He had swung his dangling legs , gripped the chair’s sides and focused on the radio’s yellow dial. But maybe , deep down, they had respected his sister’s authenticity more? A pause. A cough. A shuffling in the gantry. It started again. “Silence. Listening is very difficult. Very difficult to listen to others, in the silence. Other thoughts, other noises, other sounds, other ideas. When one comes to listen, often one seeks to find oneself in others. To rediscover one’s own mechanisms, system, rationalism in the other. And this is a form of utterly conservative violence. Instead of listening to silence, instead of listening to others, one expects to hear oneself once again. It is an academic, conservative and reactionary repetition. It is a wall against thoughts, against what is not yet possible –even today– to explain. It is the consequence of a systematic mentality, one based on a priori (inner or external, social or aesthetic). Comfort, repetition, myths are loved; people love to always listen to the same, with those little differences that allow them to show off their own intelligence. Listening to music. It is very difficult. I think that, today, it is a rare phenomenon. We listen to literary things, what has been written, we hear ourselves in a projection…” An extract from “Error as a Necessity” ;Luigi Nono, 1983. Translated by Pedro Alvarez After the premiere of Prometeo in Venice , Nono reworked the piece before it was performed for the second time in Milan in 1985, again presented within the complex gantry and cradle created by Piano. Below are some images from the Venice performance and of Luigi Nono (29.01.1924-08.05.1990), to whose memory this board is ,with respect, dedicated.