Il canto sospeso (The Suspended Song) is a cantata for vocal soloists, choir, and orchestra by the Italian composer Luigi Nono, written in 1955–56. It is one of the most admired examples of serial composition from the 1950s, but has also excited controversy over the relationship between its political content and its compositional means.
History
The title Il canto sospeso may be literally translated as "The Suspended Song", though the word sospeso may also be rendered as "floating" or "interrupted". The title is actually taken from the Italian edition of a poem, "If We Die", by Ethel Rosenberg who, together with her husband Julius, was tried and convicted in the United States of espionage and of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their execution on 19 June 1953 caused outrage in Europe. The phrase in the English original is "the song unsung".
Nono chose his texts from an anthology published in 1954 by Giulio Einaudi as Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza europea, a collection of farewell letters written to loved ones by captured European resistance fighters shortly before their executions by the Nazis. The score is dedicated "a tutti loro" (to all of them). The premiere was given under the direction of Hermann Scherchen in Cologne on 24 October 1956. Four years later, it was performed at the twenty-third Festival of Contemporary Music of the Venice Biennale under the direction of Bruno Maderna. This Venice performance was recorded for the radio on 17 September 1960 and in 1988, nearly three decades later, became the first commercially released recording of Il canto sospeso.
Four years after completing the work, Nono incorporated its entire fourth movement into his opera Intolleranza 1960.
Scoring
Il canto sospeso is set for solo soprano, alto, and tenor voices, mixed choir, and an orchestra consisting of:
Woodwinds: 4 flutes 2 oboes 3 clarinets 2 bassoons
Brass: 6 horns 5 trumpets 4 trombones
3 timpani
Percussion: 5 snare drums 5 suspended cymbals glockenspiel 12 bells marimbaphone vibraphone xylophone
2 harps
celesta
Strings: first violins second violins violas cellos double basses
Analysis
The work is divided into nine movements with changing forces:
The movements are grouped into three large segments of four, three, and two movements, marked by a short pause between groups.
In its alternation of instrumental, choral, and solo movements, as well as in some internal details, Il canto sospeso resembles a Baroque cantata or mass setting. Although it is in no way a neoclassical composition, the Darmstadt ideology to which Nono subscribed at the time shared with neoclassical aesthetics a commitment to the notions of purity, order, and objectivity. Nono himself referred to the work as a "cantata".
For its pitch material, Il canto sospeso employs an all-interval twelve-tone row sometimes called the "wedge" series because of its presentation of all the intervals within the octave in expanding order. It is a symmetrical series, whose retrograde is identical to the prime form transposed by a tritone.)
Reception
Il canto sospeso is regarded today as a "serial masterpiece", and is admired for the variety of ideas achieved with the compositional technique of serialism, while at the same time the work's expressive content is considered to be unsurpassed by Nono's subsequent works.
Although the premiere under Hermann Scherchen's baton in Cologne on 24 October 1956 was a success, the direct reference to Nazi crimes was bound to be controversial at a time when such things were not generally spoken of in Germany. Herbert Eimert, reviewing the concert (on which it appeared in the company of Anton Webern's opp. 6 and 10 orchestral pieces and Arnold Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden), declared that Il canto sospeso "probably left the most significant impression to date of any concert work of the young generation of composers today. ... This one work would be enough to legitimize the enigmatic 'legacy of Webern' once and for all".