Music against Death: Joana Mallwitz conducts Nono and Mahler

Image: Simon Pauly/Bachtrack.

[Extended cut of a review published on Bachtrack.]

Luigi Nono, Como una ola de fuerza y luz; Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 4

Sarah Aristidou (soprano), Tamara Stefanovich (piano), Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Joana Mallwitz (conductor), Konzerthaus: Großer Saal, Berlin, 14th September 2024

In his hundredth anniversary year, Luigi Nono is perhaps more often spoken about than performed. A fixture of the German new music scene for many years, his equal commitment to Communist politics and the musical avant-garde may now make him less palatable in an age of neo-liberalism and—increasingly—neo-fascism. But this is precisely why we should remember it. It was refreshing, then, to hear, paired with Mahler’s Fourth, a performance of his 1972 Como una ola de fuerza y luz (Like a Wave of Strength and Light) at the Konzerthaus Berlin, a large-scale work for orchestra, tape and soloists about memory, remembrance and struggle.

In 1971, some way into working on a piece for Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado to be premiered at La Scala, Nono learned that his friend Luciano Cruz had died in mysterious, seemingly accidental circumstances, “apparently due to the inhalation of fumes from a heater in his house.” Nono had met Cruz, medical student, activist and co-founder of the Chilean Marxist-Leninist Movement of the Revolutionary Left, on previous tours of South America, both before and after the victory of Salvador Allende. Nono’s work ended as a kind of requiem to Cruz, an act of mourning and protest at his death and a pledge of commitment to the spirit of struggle in which he lived his life. Nono used a poem by Cruz’s comrade, the Argentinian poet and “minstrel of the revolution” Julio Huasi, from which the work takes its title: the poem is sung and declaimed by a solo soprano early on, but the majority of the piece is instrumental and abstract, rather than textual and programmatic. As with much of Nono’s work, the politics lies as much in the practices of listening it encourages as in simple mimesis or the straightforward presentation of dogmatic messages.

 
The collaboration with Nono and Abbado came at the height of their visible commitment. Documentary footage from the work’s premiere at La Scala shows the three engaged in a post-performance discussion with a large and attentive audience, fielding a listener who suggests that people would rather be listening to the music of King Crimson. Following the Gramscian principles by which the PCI, of which Nono was a long-term member, saw ‘high’ culture as one facet in the struggle for establishing hegemony, rather than something fatalistically compromised and bourgeois, this was a time of experimentation and struggle, culminating in the premiere of Nono’s ‘azione scenica’ Al Gran Sole Carico D’Amore at La Scala several years later. This struggle, however, did not simply mean producing or reproducing a music which laid Communist messages on top of conventional forms. And if to present a political message without transforming form would be to banalize that message, to experiment with for without attending to its political significance would be to abrogate political responsibility. Political meaning, then, emerges in and through form as site of dialectical contestation.

   

A deep admirer of Pollini’s virtuosity, Nono, he later explained, didn’t want to write a conventional concerto, nor to concern himself simply with musical innovation, but neither did he want to write programme music. The elegy for Luciano Cruz expresses itself, not just in the setting of Huasi’s poem, but in the form itself, but the form cannot be reduced solely to elegy—or at least, an elegy removed from the broader questions of the revolutionary process to which Cruz had dedicated his life. “I wanted my music”, Nono later remarked, “to be like a space that opens and closes, something like a life that extends and closes again, something like a programmatic metaphor, but free.” Onstage, five loudspeakers behind the orchestra echo the games with depth in Baroque basilicas—a spatial experimentation to be explored at length in Nono’s later Prometeo: “an alternation of bursts, violence and silences”, moving to and away from the audience. Nono had earlier written an elegy for Lorca, while Al Gran Solo Carico D’Amore would function as a kind of gigantic tribute to largely female secular martyrs, revolutionaries who’d perished in the struggles of the past century, from the Paris Commune to Bolivia. He was, however, interested in death “not as something that ends, but as something that transforms”. This is not the melancholic pathos of ending, but the struggle of continuing: the work is dedicated, in Spanish, “Luciano Cruz para vivir”, “that Luciano Cruz may live”.

 
This is an “extreme work”, conductor Joana Mallwitz emphasized several times in her typically astute pre-concert talk. While, during her exposition of the Mahler symphony, she was able to illustrate her points with melodic excerpts played at the piano, the sonics of Como una ola are harder to render in reduced form, concentrated as they are in questions of timbre and coloration as much as line or melody. The orchestra is large, whether coming together in gnarly, clustered tutti, or divided into echoing instrumental groups; the solo piano part is demanding, making liberal use of clusters and low notes that threaten to blur individual notes and lines; the words sung by the soprano alternate between the clarity of declamation and a fragmenting into pure syllables and vowels. The tape part, meanwhile, is central to the piece. Sometimes, indeed, it can seem as if orchestra and soloists are playing around the tape, rather than vice versa: what Nono called “an acoustic game of rebounds, echoes, beats and pulsations”, of movement between absence and presence, all the more emphasized for the fact that the tape contains the playing and voices of the previous performers of the work, Pollini and soprano Slavka Taskova, rather than tonight’s soloists. Extremity here is not just a case of volume, noise and dissonance—though the work has these in abundance. It’s also about those moments when the music falls away, leaving tape or soloist or a sudden silence, forcing us to re-adjust our focus, to concentrate and contemplate: it’s a work where pathos and drama are inseparable from thought and intellection, where we are not always quite sure where we are.

The work begins with a piercing yet quiet cluster of winds and high strings. It sounds once, then again, briefly, the strings this time cutting in like a knife. Echoing voice in the tape part briefly forms a virtual choir, simmering down to near silence, then joined by the live soprano part, at first wordless, then, in the opening words of Huasi’s poem, first singing, then shouting “Luciano!”, an appeal or cry to the dead, the syllables of the name melismatically extended. The live soprano part unfolds solo, save for the accompaniment of the tape, alternating high, sung lines with phrases shouted out in defiant appeal. Lament becomes call to arms, call to arms lament. It’s a demanding part, the singer having to balance intimacy with public exhortation, all while traversing the voices upper reaches. Over-emphasize, and it becomes shrill: let the strain show, and it loses force. Sarah Aristidou pulls it off with verve. The entry of the piano signals a new phrase. Once again, it’s a challenging part, sounding often in the extreme lower end of the piano in clusters and concatenating hammer blows, through which the pianist must retain clarity of line, even when thrown off by blurring effects of lower-register pedalling and echoing tape. Tamara Stefanovich clearly articulated individual notes without sacrificing the part’s fundamental drama, as the piano alternated with interjections from percussion and orchestra. This section, Mallwitz suggested in her talk, is Luciano’s struggle. Tonight it sounds somewhere between dancing and marching, but with both transformed to become ghostly versions of themselves, as much dream vision as clear portrait. Could we hear the clusters in the piano and the orchestral tutti as representing the mass, the solo line as the guiding vanguard, according to Cruz’s (and Nono’s) Marxism-Leninism? That might be too vulgarly schematic for Nono, yet one can at least note here that the interplay of individual and collective pertains, not just to the interaction of soloist and ensemble but within the solo line itself, as single notes merge to form clusters.

For this is a music of constant transformation. Brass, double basses and low wind (including two contrabassoons) swell in the titular waves, die down again. Clarinets, underscored by the sounds of harp amplified with contact mics, and sounding something like distorted strums from a mutant guitar, flutter as if hovering on an edge, rising and falling, a figure amplified and extended by the piano, now taken up by thick brass, passed around orchestral groups over rumbling bass drums: a music constantly seething, yet in check. A piercingly sustained high note whistle on tape brings the hall to a stop, and the orchestra surge back in, shadowed by the Tonband ghosts. The piano returns to its opening territory of clusters, low end “struggle music”, before falling silent as we end with a passage on tape, from these speakers above the stage which have something of the abstracted gravestone or obelisk about them.

 
Nono would later link his more elegiac works to his interest in the Jewish music of lamentation heard and suppressed throughout Europe from the Middle Ages on, and continued in the work of modernist poets like Edmond Jabès. There are no specific echoes of that tradition here, but this remark nonetheless comes to mind as the pianist falls silent and Aristidou sings over the virtual choir on tape. Under Mallwitz the performance lent, perhaps, more into the contemplative aspects, an undeniably effective approach. Carefully beating out the regular tempo by which each bar lasts the same length, she conducts with a cool precision and poise. This unshowy approach enables the music’s own extremities to emerge unforced. For this is not a concerto or soloistic work: soprano and piano spend much of the piece silent, waiting. Neither, for all its volume, is it fundamentally a music of energy: instead, it offers a drama of stillness as well as activity, of intimacy as well as massiveness, the present and the ghostly sounding at once, the live musicians constantly stopping for the tape, expectant, funereal. In this music of contrast, extreme pitches, high or low, silences and near-silences followed by fortissimo orchestral outbursts, intense outward drama juxtaposed with inner stillness and contemplation, so that all these opposites become dialectical counterpoints of each other, transforming into and out of themselves, inextricably woven. Above all, this is a music of listening, a work in which massive orchestral resources are used as much for the heavy silences they carry as for Romanticist drama, in which piercing dissonance can give tender remembrance.

Nono realized the original tape at the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano alongside original performers Pollini and soprano Slavka Taskova. Of these, only the 87-year old Taskova is still alive. What we hear in live performance, then, is the sound of live musicians duetting with ghosts. These ghosts are, too, perhaps, ghosts of revolutions that never were, revolutions that were defeated by coups, reaction, internal dissent. “Luciano! Joven como la revolución” (“Luciano! Young, like the revolution”) declaims the soprano. But at this point in time, the revolution is no longer young. In Chile, the year after Como una ola premiered, the CIA helped depose the democratically-elected Salvador Allende, while today, Nono’s Italy is currently ruled by a neo-fascist government for the first time since the days of Mussolini. But Nono’s music refuses defeatism. Near the end of the work, we hear a section which Nono, nodding to Mao, called “the long march”, as the orchestra gradually, painfully moves from low to high notes, in what may be the closest to a passage of ‘programme music’ in the work, the struggle personified. But, typically for Nono, that’s not the end: instead, in a passage Mallwitz drew particular attention to in her pre-concert talk, we hear a kind of cloud of sound heard in the tape, replaying echoes of previous music. There is no final conclusion, for time leaps forward and back, like the revolution itself. And, like the revolution, or so it can seem, it falls silent. All the more urgency, then, when defeatism and pessimism threaten to settle in, to hear this music of another time, this music of commitment. Nono saw death, “not as something that ends, but as something that transforms”, and the work is dedicated, in Spanish, “Luciano Cruz para vivir”, “that Luciano Cruz may live”. It’s a reminder that death—the death of a comrade, the apparent death of the revolution, of revolutions plural—is never set in stone, that change can, and may come, through struggle—the struggle to listen, to play, to organize, to continue.

 

***

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, wrote Theodor Adorno, “avoids all monumentality”. In comparison to the massive scale of his previous two symphonies, the Fourth is relatively short. For Adorno, it’s something like a children’s symphony, in which evocations of marching bands, of triangles and sleigh bells, offers a child’s untainted vision of music. Through this faux-naïvety, however, the adult composer can offer glimpses of the violence present in these apparently innocent evocations—war and the military band, the spectre of child death in the child’s concluding image of heaven, the shadowing violence of its Christian religious imagery—and the anti-Semitic usages to which it had been. In some ways contained and concise, the work is also fragmented, awkward, proceeding through episodes of chamber music-like texture, dances and marches, parodistic folklore, distorted echoes of Schubert, Beethoven and Wagner. With its grandiose, Beethovenian choral ending, the Second Symphony had offered an affirmatory image of resurrection undeniably powerful, gloriously moving, yet troubling in its perhaps too-excessive celebration of religious assimilation on the part of the Jewish composer. A vision of heaven without judgment becomes the ultimate judgment, the vision of inclusion that which abolishes the image of the outsider in love, yet which would reveal itself in its full force in the decades to come in the German-speaking world, with the horrific demonisation and exclusion of the outsider turned into a systematic programme of mass murder. In the Fourth Symphony, we hear the Paradisal vision of resurrection and inclusion once more, but this time replayed, as it were in miniature, as a children’s song. Before this conclusion, all sweetness and piety, however, the work is, as Mallwitz commented, of “scurrilous, grotesque figures”: a work of jumps and discontinuities as much as sweetness, nostalgia and consolation. 

 
The second movement is, in part, a Totentanz: in an early draft Mahler suggested that its solo violin part evoked Freund Hein, a folk personification of death, leading us up to heaven in a dance. Tuned higher than normal, so that it is not quite in tune with the orchestra, Mahler suggests that the violin part be played aggressively, with a deliberate roughness, suggesting a folk fiddle. Adorno points to “possibly synagogal or secular Jewish melodies” here, while Norman Lebrecht describes the solo as “a migrant threat to sedate society”. This is the music of outsiders, who, in a closed and racist society figured as death itself. As with the ländler that suffuse Mahler’s work or the sleigh bells that begin the symphony, we here hear the violin intruding the high art space of the orchestra, not as the kind of decorous folk playing that would suffuse the nationalisms to come—with disastrous consequences—but as the eerie, the sound from outside, the sound of the outsider. It’s as if the soloist in a concerto turned up with a battered fiddle and proceeded to play, the orchestra playing along or contrasting. At the Konzerthaus, the unnamed soloist played it with aplomb: not too grotesque or overdone, not too sweet or smoothed over.

 
So to the finale, with its child’s image of Heaven. There’s something artificial to this paradise, its source, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Armin’s collection of German folk poetry Das Knaben Wunderhorn, having altered its folk sources in order to make them seem more “authentic”. An image of a child’s image, a fin-de-siècle pastiche of an idealized image of the medieval, the song is not, quite, placed in quotation marks—Mahler made it clear that the work was to seem sweetly authentic—but it is troubled by shadows that Mahler makes no attempt to hide, most notably, in the image of “the butcher Herod”, infamous for the Massacre of the Innocents, slaughtering animals for the heavenly feast. Even in Paradise there is no vision of a world without hierarchy and without slaughter.

 
In Nono’s work, suggested Mallwitz, the first half evokes and laments Luciano himself, while the second half becomes a vision of the socialist future for which he died—a vision which converts lament into struggle, yet a struggle which, in that coda, retains the trace of lament. In Mahler’s fourth, meanwhile, the concluding vision of paradise has an element of horror and terror within its serenity. What Mallwitz calls “the borderless imagination of a child” is not immune from the violence of “das irdische Leben” evoked earlier in the work. “These are not only the modest joys of the useful south German vegetable plot, full of toil and labor”, writes Adorno, “Immortalized in them are blood and violence; oxen are slaughtered, deer and hare run to the feast in full view on the roads. The poem culminates in an absurd Christology that serves the Savior as nourishment to famished souls and involuntarily indicts Christianity as a religion of mythical sacrifice”. The piece echoes strains of the prior movements, as when the sleigh bells of the opening come in just before the mention of the “butcher Herod”—just as those movements contained fragmentary motifs from the song itself, in order to make it seem the work’s natural culmination. As such, for Adorno, the work seems “like a long backward look that asks: Is all that then true? To this music shakes its head , and must therefore buy courage with the caricaturing convention of the happy close.” There is, then, a sadness to this apparent fairytale. “If it dies away after the words of promise ‘that all shall awake to joy,’ no one knows whether it does not fall asleep forever. The phantasmagoria of the transcendent landscape is at once posited by it and negated. Joy remains unattainable, and no transcendence is left but that of yearning.” “There is no more music on earth”, repeats the singer quietly as the work ends. Yet earth is where we hear this music. Consolation is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing of all, if it only acts as compensation for present suffering.

 
Aided by Mallwitz’s resolutely unsentimental approach, Aristidou balanced sweetness and irony, the voice’s final fading seemed rendered as anti-climax, symphonic scale falling away to powerless song. Throughout, Mallwitz’s rigour was refreshing in this music today played so often as to risk seeming hackneyed. This does not mean that it lacked emotion: for to treat the symphony solely as ironic critique and passive defeatism would be to do equal violence to the work as to take it at uncritical, pietistic face value. “Mahler’s humanity is a mass of the disinherited”, wrote Adorno. “He promises victory to the loser”. As Adorno notes, Mahler’s achievement lay in defamiliarizing clichés, joining disparate and incongruous materials in a fragmentary whole. In the Fourth, a symphony that picks up songs, folk dances, marching band music, whose protagonists are the fiddler and the child, a high culture symphony in which music ‘from below’ brings it down from within. It’s this Mahler that we might couple to Nono. His irony, lament and sentiment, apparently polar opposites to Nono’s interrogation, commitment and struggle, in fact reveal themselves as part of the same urge to reconfigure, both the ritual of the Concert and Work, and the same urge to transform the society of which they are a part.