Whoever does not get hold of it has no heart. And no brain either. At the Salzburg Festival, Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960” becomes a scream from a hundred throats, an explosion of anger, indignation and despair. Extreme noise and bitterest sweetness tell of what man could be, but what he is seldom. The eighty minutes of this “scenic action” tell of torture, flight, exploitation and violence, of oppression and the fight against all of this. When the performance is over the Taliban overran Kabul. Nono ends with the idea borrowed from Brecht that man is a helper to man. The reality is against it.
But is that why art is powerless in its accusation? Immediately yes, but not in its further effect, you have to believe in it, otherwise everything is pointless. In 1961, Nono defied all opposition at the world premiere of “Intolleranza” at the Venice Biennale, which is also heralded by an exhibition in the festival halls. In the 1950s Nono began to look for expression and content in music, turning against L’art-pour-l’art thinking and purely aesthetic awkwardness. “Intolleranza” is the culmination of this, in which Nono also included particles from earlier work. He built the text from various sources, including reports of torture under the Nazis, interrogations in the Algerian war and political slogans, references to real accidents such as the flooding of the Po in Italy or a mining accident in Belgium. This only needs the reference to reality insofar as it is legitimized as a necessity and is not an artistic nonsense. But not a docudrama either. That is why “Intolleranza” is still making an impact today.
The link between the individual images is a refugee who initially works in the capitalist exploitation machinery of a mine, longs for his homeland, evades the emotional blackmail by the “woman” and sets off. He got caught in a peace demonstration, was arrested, tortured, was sent to a concentration camp, escaped, and found a new companion. In the end, the river overflows its banks and washes everything away.
With Nono’s political furor, Lauwers gains new strength
A basis of Nono’s composition are series of tones, which he spans up and down starting from a key note and then brings them back together again; this principle is also found in the treatment of dynamics, albeit in a much more attack-like manner. This pulsation, and this is absolutely amazing, is now being reflected in the staging. You have to go back briefly. The director Jan Lauwers founded the performance group “Needcompany” in 1986, staged an opera for the first time at the Salzburg Festival in 2018 (Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea”) and most recently with his troupe reflected the obsolete existence of his own artistic existence as an old, white man . With Nono’s political furor, he is now gaining new strength, putting a dance troupe made up of members of the Bodhi Project and the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance on the stage, plus the Vienna State Opera Choir, creating a permanent movement that precisely reproduces Nono’s (harmonic) pulsation. And beyond that, this crowd has its own storytelling, physically discussing the relationship between the individual and the masses, and can actually depict oppressive torture scenes. A live video on the porous stone wall of the Felsenreitschule enlarges, multiplies the events and makes the movement visible from above.
The people are the stage design, that’s what Lauwers did with “Poppea” and that has been done several times in Salzburg this summer, and the sound is the space in which they move. On the left, twelve drummers occupy the gallery above the huge stage, on the right there are more percussion devices – grandiose noise frames the action, if necessary. The choir, before whose unleashed precision you have to kneel down, sounds in two short a cappella passages as a prefabricated playback in surround sound and in the middle, in the raised ditch, the gifted Vienna Philharmonic play with the greatest emphasis.
Conductor Ingo Metzmacher had got to know Nono personally, he knows his work, which Markus Hinterhäuser, meanwhile director of the Salzburg Festival, began to establish there in the 1990s in the “Zeitfluss” series like hardly anyone else. And he can conduct it with a grandiose melos that carries expressively over every construction plan and possesses the truth of the greatest emotionality, even in the most fragile quiet. In this free and controlled hullabaloo, the few soloists that are needed in addition to the choir shine, the human touching Sean Panikkar as a refugee, Anna Maria Chiuri, who almost iconically acts as a woman, the fabulous body and vocal appearance Sarah Maria Sun, as a companion denouncing the possibility of love with frenzied expression. Antonio Yang (as Algerian) and Musa Ngqungwana (a tortured man) complement the soloist ensemble in the variety of colors that Lauwers loves. At the beginning you can read in projections that 167 people perform here for 1388 spectators and come from more than 40 countries. It should be added that eight women play in the Vienna Philharmonic, one as concert master.
At the interface between the first and second part, Nono pauses the music, the world premiere is followed by a litany of everyday nonsense, here a blind poet, Lauwer’s son Victor Afung Lauwers, speaks. He speaks of flight and persecution, of war and destruction. Then the choir breaks out in laughter. In long, excruciating laughter that cynically wipes away every empathy, every compassion. The hall light comes on. It’s us who are laughing. Kabul fell.