Al gran sole carico d'amore

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Work data
Original title: Al gran sole carico d'amore
Communard women fighting on Place Blanche, 1871

Communard women fighting on Place Blanche, 1871

Shape: Scenic action in 2 parts
Original language: Italian
Music: Luigi Nono
Libretto : Luigi Nono and Yuri Lyubimov
Literary source: Texts by Gramsci , Marx , Gorki , Brecht , Pavese , Rimbaud , Lenin , Fidel Castro , Che Guevara
Premiere: Version 1: April 4, 1975
Version 2: June 26, 1978
Place of premiere: 1st version: Teatro alla Scala in the Teatro Lirico ( Milan )
2nd version: Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt , Oper Frankfurt
Playing time: approx. 1 ½ hours
Place and time of the action: Russia, France, Cuba, Latin America and Vietnam, in times of revolution (19th and 20th centuries)
people
  • Tania ( soprano )
  • Thiers ( tenor )
  • Favre ( bass )
  • Louise Michel (4 sopranos)
  • L'ufficiale, officer (tenor)
  • Il soldato, soldier (tenor)
  • Bismarck (bass)
  • La madre, mother ( old )
  • Deola (4 sopranos)
  • Pavel ( baritone )
  • Il direttore di una fabbrica russa del 1905, head of a Russian factory in 1905 (tenor)
  • Il delatore, spy (tenor)
  • Haydée (soprano)
  • Una madre e donne vietnamite, mother and Vietnamese woman (soprano)
  • Gramsci (baritone)
  • Dimitrov (2 basses)
  • Castro (bass)
  • Male and female Communards , guerrillas, comrades, the people of Paris, modern workers, mothers, Sicilian immigrants, Cuban women, prisoners

Al gran sole carico d'amore (“Loaded with love under the great sun”) is an opera by Luigi Nono from 1975, which he describes as a “scenic plot in two parts” (“Azione scenica in due tempi”). The librettists Luigi Nono and Juri Petrowitsch Lyubimow tell the story of communism and the class struggle based on the fates of several women , using texts by Gramsci , Marx , Gorki , Brecht , Pavese , Rimbaud , Lenin , Fidel Castro and Che Guevara .

The work is considered the only revolutionary opera of the 20th century and is innovative in three ways:

  1. Because of the history of its origins in the collective
  2. Musically as a major work of the avant-garde
  3. Scenically as a montage and a foray through history without a plot in the classic sense.

Emergence

Luigi Nono (1979)

Shortly after the premiere of Intolleranza in 1960, Nono planned a new opera in 1961. In a letter to Carla Henius on May 15, 1964, he described the work in progress La fabricca illuminata as “a fragment of my new theatrical work”, at the center of which should be two figures by Cesare Paveses : Masino and the delighted girl Deola. Even then, the idea was to cast the Deola with four sopranos and to achieve a specific form of simultaneity through the extensive use of the tape recorder and the choir. Nono had already taken up the subject of the Paris Commune together with Giovanni Pirelli in 1970 with regard to a scenic work, which was not carried out.

In 1972 Scala commissioned Nono to compose a new opera. In close collaboration with Lyubimov, the director of the Taganka Theater in Moscow , whose first directorial work in the West was to be Al gran sole carico d'amore , the documentation, poems and texts for the libretto were compiled. Lyubimov intensified the influences of Russian avant-garde theater from the interwar period , which had already been processed in Intolleranza 1960 . Nono's concept of a theater of situations and ideas was combined with Lyubimov's theatrical work, which used extensive text editing, rearrangements, montages and multi-layered scenarios.

In this way, the opera was created in collaboration between the composer, director, conductor Claudio Abbado and the set designer Dawid Borowskij . The score, dedicated to Claudio Abbado and Maurizio Pollini , was completed on August 15, 1974 and was published by Ricordi in Milan. The world premiere, staged by Lyubimov, took place on April 4, 1975 under the direction of Claudio Abbado at the Teatro Lirico in Milan .

Nono subjected the work to a rework for the Frankfurt production, which concerned a new instrumentation and partly new composition as well as the revision of the tape parts and their length.

Work description

The work in two acts is written for orchestra, solos (soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass), choirs, speakers and silent roles.

The first part of the scenic action deals with the events of the Paris Commune of 1871, the second part spans a wide range from the Russian Revolution of 1905 to the Fiat workers' strike in the 1950s, the Cuban Revolution , Che Guevara's guerrilla war and that Allende's social commitment in Chile until the Vietnam War .

The title is the Italian translation of the 54th line of Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie , in German: The hands of Jeanne-Marie , a poem by Arthur Rimbaud . Here lines 53 to 56:

Elles ont pâli, merveilleuses,
Au grand soleil d'amour chargé ,
Sur le bronze des mitrailleuses
À travers Paris insurgé!

 

Full of love in the sun
Are you pale and an ornament,
You carry the guns bronze
Through Paris that rebels!

Since all productions in German-speaking countries have so far chosen the original language, the original title has always been used. Only the Frankfurt production added the German version Unter der große Sonne laden with love to the original title . The only French production to date in Lyon in 1982 used Rimbaud's original text, supplemented by the Italian version. According to Wikipedia, the English translation is: In the Bright Sunshine Heavy with Love .

Rimbaud's poem, written after “ Blood Week ”, celebrates the heroic deeds of the women of the Paris Commune who defended the barricades on Place Pigalle , Place Blanche and in Batignolles . The last stanzas of the poem describe the cruel repression and the brutal convoy of prisoners in which the Versailles towed away the shackled Communards. Karl Marx writes - in The Civil War in France - about the heroism of Parisian women : “The cocottes had found the trail of their protectors - the fugitive men, the family, religion and above all property. In their place the real women of Paris came to the surface again - heroic, generous and self-sacrificing like the women of antiquity. "

“The basic idea of ​​'Al gran sole carico d'amore': the continuity of the female presence in life, in struggle, in love; yesterday, today, tomorrow - superimposed, anticipatory and fragmented. "

- Luigi Nono

"Beauty and revolution are not a contradiction in terms" is one of Ernesto Che Guevara's sentences . Jürgen Flimm: "This sentence hangs like a banner over the work of Luigi Nono, this Italian composer who has been good for heated arguments for so many years." The sentence is a title above the prelude to Nono's work and defines the aesthetic and at the same time revolutionary claim of the librettist and composer.

The content does not consist of a linear narrative, but of a sequence of individual scenes from revolutions and attempts at revolution in Russia, France, Cuba, Latin America and Vietnam. The opera only records moments and episodes. The focus is on revolutionaries and women who perish trying to stop the violence. These include Che Guevara , the anarchist Louise Michel , Haydée Santamaría and others.

The libretto uses texts by Fidel Castro , Che Guevara, Tania Bunke , Karl Marx and Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin and on excerpts from works by Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Rimbaud . Cesare Pavese and Maxim Gorki's novel The Mother resorted to.

Orchestra and sound engineering

Nono makes use of a significantly reinforced orchestra for the musical implementation. The sounds of the orchestra mix with the sounds of industrial plants, played back via a tape recorder with two loudspeakers each on the stage and in the back of the hall.

flutes and 4  piccolos , 4  oboes , 4  clarinets and bass clarinet , 4  bassoons , 4  horns , 4  trumpets , 4  trombones , 11  timpani , drums (4 barrels without strings , drums with 2 ropes, 2  tom-toms , 2 large boxes , bells , Marimba , pool ), reinforced harp , strings and a 4- track - tape recorder .

effect

Lyubimov had staged the work as a dark, abstract, brilliant oratorio and Nono was so convinced of this implementation of the themes that he initially did not accept any other implementation. Planned performances in Berlin and Nuremberg failed because of this and there was only one concert performance in 1975 under Abbado in Cologne .

Nono saw Jürgen Flimm's attempt in the world premiere of the second version under Michael Gielen to concretize the situations and to tell stories as a compelling scenic alternative to Lyubimov's work.

The French premiere took place in Lyon in 1982, directed by Jorge Lavelli and under the direction of Michael Luig .

Discography

Award

literature

  • Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater. Volume 4, edited by Carl Dahlhaus and Research Institute for Music Theater at the University of Bayreuth under the direction of Sieghart Döhring, ISBN 3-492-02414-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Al gran sole carico d'amore on the website of the Luigi Nono Foundation , accessed on April 4, 2018.
  2. “Al gran sole carico d'amore” on opera-guide.ch , accessed on March 8, 2016.
  3. ^ Piper's Encyclopedia of Music Theater , Volume 4, pp. 461/462.
  4. Le poème intégral sur Wikisource , accessed on March 10, 2016
  5. Klaus Zehelein: Luigi Nono - Al gran sole carico d'amore, laden with love under the great sun . Program of the Frankfurt Opera, 1977/78 season
  6. ^ Au grand soleil d'amour chargé, Al gran sole carico d'amore, Luigi Nono , Program de la représentation de l'Opéra de Lyon, season 81/82
  7. Al gran sole carico d'amore in the English Wikipedia , accessed on March 10, 2016
  8. ^ Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin ( Memento from May 23, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 22, 2013
  9. ^ Archive of the Salzburg Festival , accessed on September 22, 2013
  10. Piper's Encyclopedia of Music Theater , Volume 4, p. 463.