Glissando: Resonating Breath of Air. Impressions of Prometeo by Luigi Nono
Publikováno: 3.2.2023
The Czech premiere of Prometeo – The Tragedy of the Hearing by the Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono was realized as part of the NODO / New Opera Days Ostrava festival on June 30, 2022. The report from that hot early evening in Triple Hall Karolina was brought, among other things, by the Polish music magazine Glissando. The original text can be found under this link, the English translation by Pavel Bakič can be read below ↓
GLISSANDO (DANIEL BROŻEK, MARTA KONIECZNA) / July 8, 2022
photos from the performance
Marta Konieczna: Ascolto! There’s a peculiar soundscape even before we enter the theater: the fluttering of pages. On this particularly stifling day, the audience are fanning themselves with their copies of the libretto. Ascolta! – this call to committed listening, to absolute listening, woven into Prometeo’s structure, has obviously reached me even before the performance has even started. And yet: it’s the visible aspect of what’s going on inside Trojhalí Karolina that captures our attention. There seems to be a construction going on inside the wood-and-steel hall, with parked trucks, tippers, jibs, decks and shelves. Musicians and conductors are spread out across all this, waiting. Would Nono like this stage design?
Daniel Brożek: When Prometeo was first performed in Venice, it called for a custom-made construction so that the performers could surround the audience. The proletarian-spirited ready-made in Ostrava, assembled from industrial vehicles, was surely meant to acknowledge that Luigi was a leftist at heart. Undoubtedly, this stage design reflected earlier performances of his works in industrial halls (including Wrocław – this is something Sławomir Wieczorek has written and spoken about a lot[1]). Let’s point out, however, that this opera resulted from a disillusion with communism and that the performances Nono supervised were all very ascetic from the visual point of view. At Trojhalí, the venue design was very imposing – a sophisticated gesture, though it took some toll acoustically. But the Italian team that supervised the spatial aspect of the sound did their best, I suppose?
MK: I think so. As you’ve mentioned, this hasn’t been the first performance of Prometeo to surround the audience by the performers. It’s an inversion of the usual visually-anchored concert that gives you a clearly given place to look: the stage. In this case, you are constantly invited to think about your choice of the place you listen from. During the Czech premiere, the sound moved around in an orderly fashion: starting from the musicians, reaching us live and, at the same time, feeding into the mixing desk from which its digital copies went to the speakers and beyond, into the acoustically unique space of the hall. In my case, following the sound resulted in, let’s say, an adventure of perception that segued into outright meditation. The chairs themselves, facing in different directions, were also a clear invitation to follow the sound, and there were even cushions on the floor. Sadly, only a handful of people took up the hint and decided to follow this (literal) track…
DB: Partly, this was due to the visually cluttered venue design, which made people less excited about exploring different places to listen from. The acoustics was affected, among other things, by birdsong pouring in through the open emergency exit and the hum of the passing trains, which made for another layer to the work. The primary additional layer, electronics, infused the space in a very subtle manner, which was really interesting. A lot of the time, it was hard to tell the actual reverb of the hall from what was coming from the PA. And we’re talking about a fairly modest set of different speakers suspended overhead. Hence my admiration for the acousmatic craft of the Italians, who successfully managed to guide us in our listening experience (even though we only got a digital simulation of the legendary halaphone). During the performance, I think very few people were checking out the libretto, but that was exactly what it was there for – to guide the listener. Yet only a minority actually followed it. That said, did we actually hear less?
MK: More, perhaps? Keep in mind that the libretto was seemingly not written to be set to music. You have words chopped up into syllables that are not meant to be spoken except in the singers’ minds. That night in Ostrava, however, I had a feeling of amazing precision – the shimmering (insular?) sound wasn’t fragmented into individual parts. It remained whole and cohered well with the electronics, and with that reverb as well. I just wonder whether the prevailing timbres weren’t too classical, not “mystical” enough. It might also be the result of industrial – as opposed to religious – acoustic environment. Which brings us back to our key questions about this particular performance. Was there a chance of this being an actual liturgy of listening? For me, the answer is an emphatic yes. Despite the fact that the lights in the hall remained on for the whole time and there are written accounts of previous performances in the dark, sometimes in complete darkness.
DB: I also left the performance speechless. While it lasted, I definitely prayed to the bass tones generated by those glass dishes (are we alone in linking Nono to Harry Partch?) that were so amazingly amplified, filling the whole space. In the Prometeo recordings I’m familiar with, they vanish in the background, along with a lot of echoes and little acoustic nuances (that bass clarinet and tuba!). In any event, listening to a stereophonic recording makes little sense, even when it’s a binaural version that seeks to approximate the spatial experience[2]. Translating the opera’s subtitle as “A Tragedy for Listening” reflects the composer’s intention, but this late-June Ostrava evening has solidified my opinion that Nono is talking about space – and the singers let that space sing. Does it have to be a tragedy? A few years after the Prometeo was first performed, Pauline Oliveros opened a new chapter in sound-art history. Deep Listening is what she chose to call it, bringing us to the realization that listening contributes to psychological resilience!
