While Kabul falls, Intolleranza rules
NewsFew critics have remarked the disconnect between a moneyed Salzburg audience warching Luigi Nono’s salon-socialist opera and the unfolding tragedy in Afghanistan where a medieval clique has siezed power with western arms.
Nono, a pet composer of the leftwing Abbado clique, based his ‘scenic action’ on Brecht and his music, in part, on the atonalities of his father-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg.
The only performance I ever heard was a patchwork quilt of scenic inhumanities, a very long 80 minutes.
Its revival this summer seems at once timely and unworldly. It will make little difference to Nono’s dated reputation.
Zubin Mehta also had this planned for La Scala this season.
Metzmacher is excellent.
A typical offering of theoretical, middle class pseudo-socialism.
It is a product of the postwar period when the world seemed surprisingly clear-cut: marxism = good (and the Russian version excused), Mao = good, the USA = bad, the working class = good, the boozjewazee = bad. Confused splinters of humanism pumped-up to kleinbürgerliches Theater.
As always, please stick to music, about which you are knowledgeable and well-connected.
Have you not read Tolstoy? Afghanistan being ruled by the Taliban was as inevitable as France conquering most of Europe and then over-extending itself in Russia; as inevitable as the Sun rising and setting!
Maybe not so dated. The plot is about a migrant who travels from Southern Italy looking for work. Along the way, he encounters many misfortunes and a society in turmoil. He ends up in a huge detention camp. Sounds strikingly current. And with the situation in Afghanistan, the immigrant problem is going to get far worse. Now back to the usual SD comments and their intolleranza….
Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-1jx05xPhQ
To have to listen to this turgid, pretentious neo-expressionistic music, in the service of humanism, is certainly creating intolerance.
Why should the immigration problem get ‘far worse’? Far worse than what? I thought open doors was a good thing.
Afghanistan must fight for its own freedom but the fact is the majority support the Taliban. Not so western Europe and its allies from 1939 to 1945 when it withstood Hitler and the Japanese – at the cost of over 55 million lives. The price of freedom is very costly, but if your army runs away when it’s been trained and resourced by the US and its allies it’s very hard to be sympathetic.
Fight or die on your knees anyway. The west cannot be bailing out nations which are afraid to fight for freedoms.
Nono’s music is LOUD as Barone wisely reported on the NY newspaper. It is intentional and Metzmacher a great Conductor. I also found the production very boring notwithstanding the restless chorus and the atletic ballet. The opera starts in the same way of Don Giovanni, with a servant complaining for the work and the way in which he is considered. There are still thousand ways to say things. The music is very intetesy. The production will be easily forgotten.
We instinctively look for accidental parallels and commonalities in our local art when something momentous happens in a far off part of the world. In Los Angeles over the weekend, almost under the Hollywood sign, another bourgeois audience saw a double-bill of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” with its nocturnal intimations of death and Kate Soper’s anthology of literary misogyny, “Voices from the Killing Jar” presented by Long Beach Opera.
Soper’s female protagonists from Clytemnestra to Emma Bovary to Daisy Buchanan are a parade of women trapped in hopeless situations. In the madrigal vignette, “The Owl and the Wren,” it was hard not to think of the Kabul death watch as Lady MacDuff sang, “They come anon with daggers drawn —
They come, they come and we await.”
I don’t understand this at all. Please make the case.
Forget (if possible) the politics and listen to Nono’s amazing lyrical music. I’m not a fan of his later work but this one is terrific, when his post-Dallapiccola vocal lines had some melodic continuity to them (or did at least the last time I listened to it).
Have you heard Nono’s work for nine woodwind players, based on themes from the Broadway musical “No, No Nanette”? . . . It’s the Luigi Nono “No, No Nanette” Nonet.
Fortunately we still allow different opinions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/arts/music/intolleranza-1960-nono-salzburg-opera.html
I attended a performance of it years ago in Stuttgart (my seat was relatively inexpensive!) and it made a deep and lasting impression on me.
Yes, the human condition remains the same-so it is always relevant. Maybe its lack of popularity is because it offers no escape?
No, it is because the musical language is too literally as awful as the subject is. For instance, Götterdämmerung’s subject is also awful, but the music forms a narrative that carries the listener along, also through the most unpleasant scenes, without excusing anything that is happening on stage. Too much awfulness however, in one single work, things piled-on thick, results in blandness, strangely enough. The lack of contrast flattens the listening experience. The same problem with Berg’s Wozzeck, however good the music is in itself. Expressionism does not lend itself very well to opera, because you sit there locked-up in your seat for a whole evening.
When you go to Strauss’ Salome, a truly awful subject with tasteless scenes and vulgar sensationalism, the work is saved by the musical contrasts, and the fact that you are liberated after one hour, not longer.
I believe it’s generally questionable when critics turn to review the audience – especially when they reflect on what they take to be the audience’s “moneyed” status or political stance when they themselves usually get their tickets for free (I pay to go and while, yes, I can obviously afford it, I’m certainly not “moneyed” – I just prioritise how I spend my money) and their own politics are not exactly neutral.