The »Darmstadt School« was the label that came to refer to the group centring on Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and György Ligeti in the years following the end of World War Two. Starting in 1946, budding composers began attending annual summer courses with a view to finding their musical identities, rediscovering the pre-war avant-garde works of exiled composers and primarily kick-starting a radical new music after a war whose horrors were still keenly felt.

It was what Germany termed its »zero hour«. At this tabula rasa point in German history the arts, too, reached for a new beginning, seeking to free themselves from the ballast of their fathers, a well of poisoned values. And they found a purificatory freedom in modernist abstraction, creating new aesthetic, structural and formal parameters and developing new language, colours, sounds and modes of expression. Luigi Nono was one of the most radical pioneers of New Music. A highly original innovator, politicised and abstract in approach, he continually returned to the human singing voice as his zone of placidity and assurance. His early material – sharp-edged, abrupt, highly expressive – gave way to softer, more conciliatory, more introverted pieces. Underlying everything, however, was the Italian tradition, with Bellini, Verdi, Puccinia and Respighi discernible even in his most radical work.

Luigi Nono's manuscripts are legendary, testifying to expressive impetuosity far more than strict construction. Luigi Nono used scissors and glue to assemble his sheet music, painting thickly over some passages with coloured pencil - all in a handwriting that could often only be deciphered by the initiated © Marcello Mencarini / Bridgeman Images

 

In Nono’s centenary year the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin presents »Italia Nera«. This sombre homage begins with Ottorino Respighi’s »Feste Romane«, a rendition of the Roman arena, and ends with Act 4 of Verdi’s OTELLO, one of the grimmest of operatic acts. The bridge between these dark pieces is provided by Luigi Nono’s »Canti di vita e d’amore. Sul ponte di Hiroshima«.

These »Songs of Life and Love: On the Hiroshima Bridge« were performed for the first time in 1962. The composition for soprano, tenor and orchestra is made up of three very different sections. Nono describes the first movement as addressing »the criminal madness of our time« and is based on Günther Anders’s »Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki«. In the second movement Nono sets Jesús López Pacheco’s poem »Esta Noche« to music, casting the tale of the torturing of the Algerian resistance fighter Djamila Boupacha as a »Song of Hope«. The third section, a rendition of parts of a Cesare Pavese love poem, is a gesture of confidence in the future.

Content and music are marked by extremes and contrasts. Yet the music strains towards hope just as the poems do. Nono’s »Canti« are written for a full-scale orchestra and open with a first movement at full volume that is then broken up, huge eruptions of sound dissolving into delicate arcs of melodiousness allowing singers to shine, culminating in an unaccompanied soprano solo in the second movement.

The third movement thrusts percussion instruments to the fore: bells, cymbals, tam-tams, timpani. Nono’s code for visionary passion. And here, too, an abrupt, rough-edged, thundery storm of sound gives way to a brighter firmament, with a tenor promising us: »Sarai tu – ferma e chiara« (You will come to be – real and light). We can look forward to an evening of music as moving as the last century was – and the present day continues to be.

Ralf Grauel, Sebastian Hanusa