Felsenreitschule
Nono: Il canto sospeso
Dallapiccola: Il prigioniero (concert performance)
Caroline Wettergreen (soprano)
Freya Apffelstaedt (contralto)
Robin Tritschler (tenor)
Tobias Moretti (reciter)
Mother – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Prisoner – Georg Nigl
Jailer, Grand Inquisitor – John Daszak
First Priest – Andrew Lepri Meyer
Second Priest – Timo Janzen
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| Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli |
If the ‘mainstream’ operatic fare of this
year’s Salzburg Festival looks a little thin on paper – certainly for those of
us resistant to the alleged charms of Tsar Currentzis’s new clothes – this concert
of two masterpieces of mid-twentieth-century music proved a more or less
unqualified success. It clearly made a deep impression on the Felsenreitschule
audience, bearing witness in ways faithful to, yet extending, the intentions of
the works’ creators: Luigi Nono, this year celebrating his centenary, and Luigi
Dallapiccola, twenty years his senior.
Performances of Nono’s music have proved a welcome, sustained focus of the
Festival during Markus Hinterhäuser’s intendancy. Il canto sospeso, once
past a (very) brief early passage of uncharacteristically tentative playing
from the ORF Symphony Orchestra under Maxime Pascal, received a performance of deep
comprehension and commitment, framed by readings by Tobias Moretti of the texts
set by Nono in what he considered, as in the music of Gesualdo, to be a ‘pluridimensional
whole’, a counterpoint of sounds in musical declamation. Even in that first, orchestral
movement, the burning humanity of Nono’s vision seemed to possess all who
listened (and played). Taking its leave from Webern, Schoenberg, and Mahler
too, the music’s fragility, darkness, and perhaps hope were rendered immanent.
The second movement’s a cappella writing from the excellent Bavarian
Radio Chorus offered a contrast remarkable for its different yet complementary
conception of beauty and what – terrible and wonderful things alike – that might
mean, or at least be. Solo vocal lyricism, Freya Apffelstaedt’s deep mezzo and
Robin Tritschler’s passionate elegance included, cast its own spell as modernist
fragments both retained their integrity and constructed something beyond
themselves. The expressive quality of listening as well as writing and
performing music can rarely have felt more apparent.
The Dies irae-like sixth movement could hardly have reflected Esther Srul’s 1942 witness more powerfully in the most ‘direct setting’; indeed, it would surely have done less so.
The gates are opening. Our murderers are here. Dressed in black. They’re wearing white gloves on their dirty hands. They drive us out of the synagogue in pairs. Dear sisters and brothers, how hard it is to say goodbye to this beautiful life. You who are left alive, never forget our innocent little Jewish street. Sisters and brothers, avenge us on our murderers.
Sweet musical agony at its close spoke of overwhelming pain within, turned inward and outward, as did a spellbinding, harrowing account of the next movement, for alto, chorus, and orchestra, in which every note as well as every interval seemed to take upon itself the weight of the world. Following Moretti’s last readings, the final two movements sounded as if more tender, readily communicative progenitors of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, profound differences in aesthetic and technique notwithstanding. Closing silence, magical yet fragile, may not have ‘transcended’ – can or should anything, following the horrors of which this music was born? – but it moved nonetheless, not unlike Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, which Nono greatly admired.
Dallapiccola came from the generation in between Schoenberg and his posthumous son-in-law Nono, a living link to complement Nuria Schoenberg-Nono. In Con Luigi Dallapiccola for six percussionists and live electronics (1979), Nono honoured the memory of his predecessor, whom he had first met in 1947, the year in which Dallapiccola completed his one-act opera. Il prigioniero, here unstaged and seemingly in no need of staging, so powerful was the performance (as it usually is) from its twelve-note Puccini opening to the final question, ‘La libertà?’ and similar, unbroken silence to that which had followed Nono’s cantata.
There lies a world in between, though: one that belies the work’s brevity—again, as in Nono and indeed Wozzeck, whose example looms large. The passionate precision of that opening was matched and heightened by similar passion and precision from Tanja Ariana Baumgartner as the prisoner’s Mother, so vivid one could ‘see’ the scene she painted before us, dream of Philip II and all. The chorus’s interventions overtly reinstated a liturgical quality already implicit in Nono. All the while, the workings of the ‘system’ seemed not only to mirror but also to create an antinomy between freedom and determinism Dallapiccola may have inherited from Schoenberg, but which he made indelibly his own. Mahlerian marching, Tosca-like torture, and the twin contrast and complementary between the Prisoner’s anger and his Gaoler’s wheedling insinuation sent us hurtling toward the tragic denouement, hope unmasked in devastating inversion of Fidelio as the greatest torture of all. John Daszak and Georg Nigl gave defiantly un-score-bound performances, to which one might possibly have harboured purist objections on paper, but any such objections evaporated into thin air in the heat of such committed performance. Deafening bells and sonically disappointing organ likewise mattered not a jot in practice. This was a confession to which all, listeners and performers alike, must contribute and did.
