With no pretence as to completeness or methodicity, these remarks are a reflection on recent musical theater in Italy, with particular emphasis on important works presented by the leading figures of new Italian music during the course of a twenty-year period: from 1970 to 1990. During the decade preceding this period, composers like Bruno Maderna (1920-1973), Luigi Nono (1924-1990), Luciano Berio (1925) and Giacomo Manzoni (1932) had already been among the first to put aside the diffidence - nurtured by many at Darmstadt from a perspective of puristic rigor - towards the "hybridism" involved in musical theater:

Allezhop by Berio and Calvino was performed at Venice's Biennale in 1959, Manzoni's La Sentenza was composed in 1959 and premiered in 1960, Nono's Intolleranza 1960 set off a famous scandal when it was performed at Venice in 1969, Berio's Passaggio (text by Sanguineti) was written from 1961-62 and it, too, had a stormy premiere at the Piccola Scala in 1963, Maderna's Hyperion began to take form at the 1964 Venice Biennale (but Maderna continued it as a work in progress until 1969), Manzoni's Atomtod had its Piccola Scala premiere in 1965. It should be observed that Italian composers were among the first (of that generation) to take an interest in a new musical theater, in the name of the richness that theatrical experience involves and also of a deliberate communicative urgency which, especially on the part of composers like Manzoni and Nono, directly concerned the relationship between artist and society.

For Berio, Manzoni and Nono, the years between 1970 and 1990 were distinguished by a continuity of interest in the theater, with exceptionally important experiences, linked to different stages of their research. Even if there can be no common denominator in these experiences, they always evidence, albeit in very different ways, the problematicality of musical theater today, primarily by means of the "difficulty" of a continuous and linear narration linked to the psychology of the characters. Many of the most recent Italian works avoid narration in a more or less radical way or even leave it out altogether. For this reason, all of them involve a new type of relationship with the work of the director, by pursuing unprecedented dramaturgic potentialities, which place musical and theatrical aspects on two different and partially self-sufficient - almost independent - planes. ù

The difficulties of continually inventing a dramaturgy without falling back on unproposable, hackneyed schemes had rendered this interest in theatrical experience even more exciting: actually, from the 70's on, it seems to have infected almost everyone, even musicians who might have seemed far removed from problems of the stage.

There was a need, I believe, to accept the challenge of situations opening up in different directions, to sound out the possibilities and riches implicit in a superimposition of different planes, i.e. theatrical and musical. Starting from the hypothesis of a collaboration between equals, these two planes can encounter each other in new ways and offer the spectator-listener incitements that are not necessarily unidirectional.

There was investigation into the representative implications of the musical gesture and the very feasibility of projecting it on the stage. This aspect too - the suggestiveness of a theater born from the projection of instances of musical poetics on the stage - can be found in all the major works of the last twenty years.

During the 1970's this situation corresponded with the opening of several Italian theaters (notably La Scala) to the experiences of
the protagonists of "neue Musik".

The Seventies and Eighties in Italy, therefore, saw the intensfication and spread of interest for the theater of the preceding decade, the key texts of which were especially Intolleranza 1960 by Nono, Hyperion by Maderna and Passaggio by Berio (but let us not forget Atomtod, which represents a very important moment in Manzoni's artistic development, on the threshold of maturity).

Rejection of traditional narrative characterized, in different ways, Intolleranza 1960 (where there does exist, however, a theme tied to the figures of the Emigrant and his Companion) and Passaggio (the "passage" of the sole heroine through the six stations of a profane "via crucis": the woman, in whom we can recognize references to Kafka's Milena and to Rosa Luxemburg, undergoes torture, prison and being reduced to prostitution without the specific circumstances of the oppression she suffers ever being narrated; the chorus, divided into two groups placed in the orchestra and among the audience, interferes with comments and interjections reflecting the conformism, banality and assuredness of the conventionalists).

Another example is Hyperion, where reference to Hölderlin and his novel Hyperion does not create a precise dramaturgy as little is directly drawn from his text: the piece clearly maintains the central idea of the poet's (impersonated by the flute soloist) desperate, solitary, and rootless existential condition in today's society and opposition between his individual voice and the world. However we may arrange the pieces Maderna composed for Hyperion, the contrast between violent dramatic tension and moments of yearning lyricism is evident in the music, with an eloquence and suggestive power that contain within themselves a latent theatrical potential which obviously cannot be interpreted in a traditional narrative way.

This very rejection of linear narrative which, in Italian music history had an important antecedent in Gianfrancesco Malipiero's Sette canzoni, will later be found again in the works, even in those of wider scope, of the
following twenty-year period.

As Maderna died prematurely in 1973, he was not able to see the theatrical works of Nono, Berio and Manzoni staged between 1975 and 1989; however he returned to the theater before they did with Satyricon, which occupies a place of its own at the end of his last, extraordinary, creative season, as an experience of disenchanted comic theater.
In this case as well, it would not be correct to speak of narrative drama in the traditional sense.

Maderna set to music several fragments of Petronius, using translations in different languages (English is prevalent, but there are also German and French) and preserving some Latin phrases.
There is no story, there is no dialogue or even a definite order for the succession of scenes: the speeches of Trimalcione, of his wife Fortunata and their guests maintain their character in any case, and each fragment is self-sufficient.

Faced with the incisive evidence and with the complexity and richness of Petronius' language with its multiplicity of stylistic levels, Maderna opted for a "pastiche" (a continuous game of quotations and allusions) from Carmen and Aida to the Ring of the Nibelungen, from Bohème to Louis Armstrong. Playful irony, broad or subtle comedy, grotesque and obscene emerge from his skillful manipulation of well-known material or from the evocation of languages and stylistic attitudes from the past, all accomplished with that taste for uncommitted fun with an undertaste of disenchanted bitterness which made up Maderna's personality as well.

Although linked to a taste for "pastiche" and ironic divertissement, Satyricon, too, avoided traditional narrative. The problem of this possibility is posed in an explicit, extreme and paradoxical way in the only theatrical work of a composer like Franco Donatoni, who is basically extraneous to the "representative" dimension: in the production of the Veronese composer Atem is a particular incident, perhaps destined never to be followed up; but just because it is an extreme case, it possesses its own exemplariness.
The absence of a story was probably to be expected: nothing is more extraneous to Donatoni's poetics than the idea of "applied" music didactically destined for the narration of a scenic event. And, as a matter of fact, the starting point of Atem is not a "libretto", but the simple observation that some of Donatoni's music contains a sort of inner theatricality, resolved exclusively in music, which is not composed "for" the theater but harbors within itself the evidence of abstract "theatrical" gestures.
"It was always a question of "theater in composing" and certainly not "composing for the theater"", observes Donatoni, apropos of theatrical traces in his work from 1967 on, far removed from any scenic plans; but his observation holds true in a more general sense. Towards the end of the presentation text written for the La Scala program notes (Atem was premiered there on February 16, 1985), the composer insists: "The singer is not a scenic persona but a vocal instrument.
The text he sings is provocative of formal events, not a narrative conductor of actions. I feel that (my) music cannot tell anything: it is a tale of itself and that which is told in it is identical to its own formal appearance. It cannot abide any dependency that limits the autonomy of its own processes of growth but it is open to any transposition that, in reciprocal autonomy, establishes a parallel formal possibility in its regard".

In the case of Atem, therefore, Donatoni started with an affirmation of extraneousness, not to renounce theater but to risk wide-open theatrical transposition. He tried to "theatricalize" music without damaging its absolute autonomy, associating it with scenic events that should constitute a parallel plane, but independent and uncoordinated. Donatoni prepared his two-act score like a montage of pieces which in part had already been composed (quoted in full or modified or reduced to fragments) and in part written purposely in function of the comprehensive design (from which, contrarily to the others, they cannot be separated).
This montage embraces a chronological period of a quarter-century, from a fragment of Sezioni (1960) to Per orchestra I (1962), to pieces from the 1977-85 period, which occupy a prevalent space.
The variety of instrumental and vocal groupings, character and style is intentional and the general impression is primarily based on the suggestion of the fragmentary character and stylistic discontinuity deriving from the evidence of distance between the different phases of Donatoni's output, even if several essential constants of his inventive gesture may be slimpsed in the surge of seething, restless sonoral material.
In his more recent works Donatoni tends to allow himself attitues of freer and more immediate evidence, allowing that which in the past had been, in a manner of speaking, suppressed by auto-compulsive procedures to surface, causing the re-emergence of various allusions and reminiscences.

There is often a sort of febrile tension, furious and livid, in the agitated concentration of inventions, and the brilliant proliferation of images seems to call up a vacuum; it is charged with mortal allusions. The listener is sometimes jolted by a sort of apocalyptic aggression; but there is space as well for the soaring and nervous inspiration of pages like She (1983): in any case, the presence, wholly internal to the music, of an abstract theatrical gesture is patently clear.

How can the inner "theatricality" of this music be transferred to the stage? From his conviction that music cannot tell much of anything by itself, Donatoni concludes the necessity of consigning it into the "extraneous" hands of a director and waiting to see what happens. He does give the director, however, a sort of vague indication, the volume Antecedente X, which the composer defines as "an attempt at self-analysis through the recounting of dreams".
This is evidently based on the hypothesis that the music of Atem might be associated with the primarily oniric images which had accompanied its composition. Atem, therefore, as a descent into the hell, abyss and nightmares of inwardness: a choice consistent with the central importance taken in Donatoni' poetics by reflection on the crisis of the subject.

This is not the place to relate how this paradoxical theatrical experience was actually achieved under Giorgio Pressburger's stage direction.
The results were mixed (but the task was arduous): Pressburger chose which dreams to stage and decided to confer on them a sort of narrative continuity, too explicit, perhaps, and not fragmented enough in respect to the music. But beyond the value of musical roads and the difficulty of their scenic transpositions, the extreme and paradoxical case of Atem raises questions that are far from easily answered. Can music, today, "tell" a linear story, a tale?

The all-too-abvious answer might lie in the list of operas which, in recent years, have used more or less traditional dramaturgy; but it would be necessary to see with what means and with what results such dramaturgy has been recovered.
It is natural that this method should be used mainly by composers estranged from radical research and inclined toward a language of retrospective character and a certain eclecticism such as, to cite a composer of the same generation as Berio and Nono, Hans Werner Henze.
But for those who make more radical choices, the question as to what music can "tell" in the theater might also be formulated in another way. One might ask, therefore, to what degree a composer may use a dramaturgic hypothesis that does not involve him directly right from the very first ideative stage. Can he carry on the traditional relationship of collaboration with a "librettist", can he rightly compose for the theater or is it theater which is seen in a new light as space for a possible new projection, more open, more complex and stratified, of the composer's sonoral phantasms and the intrinsic nature of his musical poetics?


Theater, then, becomes the expression of such poetics, almost a particular case, with suggestions that are uniquely rich, complex and seductive.
Musical theater evidences the difficulties of not being able to count on pre-established codes and certainties agreed upon a priori ; indeed, by accepting the challenge of these difficulties and this problematic it is still possible, today, to attempt other roads that are new and unpredictable, based also on the coherency of musical poetics that consciously open themselves to the scenic dimension.
Mere narrative continuity seems improbable, or in any case problematic, in music devoid of pre-constituted reference points, which invents within itself, each time, its own formal itinerary and its own possibilities, and which interrogates the sonoral material in ever-different ways. Without a solid system of conventions and codes understood by the listener, it is seemingly very difficult to narrate a story.
But from this observation it does not necessarily follow that outmoded conventions and threadbare codes can be reborn simplistically and directly in order to fultill the desire for "communication" long after having lost their roots and reasons for being, as several exponents of "post-modern" tendencies, for example Italians Lorenzo Ferrero, Marco Tutino, Carlo Galante and Giampaolo Testoni, would like.

There is a risk of paying too high a price in terms of ingenuity, simplification and impoverishment of thought.
I think that a reflection on what has been happening, not only today, in non-musical theater, where similar questions of the feasibility of a theater of stories and characters are being discussed, would be opportune. This is obviously not a coincidence even if fundamental differences do exist between musical and non-musical theater.
Some theatrical experiences aim at overcoming boundaries between different genres and a wider and
more systematic debate would take into account the attention paid by several musicians to research in non-musical theater (for example that of Berio to the Open Theatre in his Opera ). We should also reflect on suggesions exerted by traditions of non-European theater. Here, however, I shall limit myself to several recent experiences of musical theater which arise from vastly different poetics and cannot be retraced to common denominators, but which go beyond narrative linearity, albeit in different ways, always revealing an absolute coherence to the musical poetics of their author, almost as if to create its projection on the stage.

All of Berio's theater could be cited as an example of the search for uncommon dramaturgic roads and the rejection of linear narration.
Obviously, this search and this rejection do not imply a cancellation of all connections with history, a tabula rasa, and this is particularly evident in Berio's theater, nurtured among other things by reflection on the archetypes inherited from the history of melodrama, or by other aspects of our cultural patrimony. But this reflection has always been interwoven in a complex network of relationships, in articulated and not univocal itineraries.
The myth of Orfeo in Opera (Santa Fè, 1970, rev. Florence, 1977) is interwoven with the sinking of the Titanic and with the Open Theatre's Terminal. In La Vera Storia (Milan, 1982), there are, as Calvino reminds us, "situations evoking the essence of operatic theather, reduced to its primary elements" by means of reference to the scheme of Trovatore indicated as the "archetype of opera librettos" and placed as the background of a situation of popular feast in relation to the "ambivalence and polyvalence of the feast", framework essential also in determining the presence of the chorus as a collective personage.


Calvino goes on, "Berio has fixed a number of key moments, each with its precise dramatic and musical structure, and for each of these moments he asked me to write words which, without being too specific as to the action, render the substance of lyric communication ... On a more explicit level, the gamut of emotions is that of nineteenth-century opera:
justice and oppression, generosity and vendetta, romantic abnegation and jealousy, liberty and prison, in their individual and collective expressions; on the multiple levels of its specific density, La Vera Storia proposes a fusion between a universe of popular passions and the multiform complexity of Berio's musical world".
These reflections regard the first part of the opera and its recovery (through reflection and analysis) of elementary images and conflicts,those of popular stories. Such a recovery serves as the premise for the second part, conceived in a completely new way and radically different from the first part although it shares the same materials.
It, writes Berio, "tends not to tell anything anymore: it thinks about Part I", and is totally anti-realistic, oniric and "vertical" in comparison to the "horizontality" of the preceding part. In the last paragraph of the brief text penned on the occasion of the premiere of La Vera Storia (at La Scala on March 9,1982), Berio wrote: "The origins of La Vera Storia are lost in my own personal story which has always been influenced by popular music (Quattro canzoni populari, Folk Songs, Questo vuol dire che, Coro, Il Ritorno degli Snovidenia) and by the need to doscover the ulterior functions implicit in the same musical fact (Chemins I-IV and Corale).
La Vera Storia is partially the synthesis of these two interests of mine which are aimed, together, at the search for a musical and dramatic space that is open yet not empty, a space, that is, which can be inhabited by figures and characters that are indeed concrete but mutative as well: a space not inhabited by ghosts and personages imprisoned by a libretto".


From the concording testimonies of Berio and Calvino it appears evident that the dramatic conception of La Vera Storia in its essential features not only belongs completely to the composer but is inseparable from what Calvino calls " the multiform complexity of Berio's musical world".
It was born as the scenic projection of some of the essential characteristics of his musical poetics, as their synthesis. The success of this and other of Berio's theatrical works does not depend on a dramaturgic functionality to which his music must conform and even less on respect for abstract theatrical "laws". The complexity of his music itself in its intrinsic nature tended to become musical theater, with differing degrees of "abstraction".

Thus, in his production, the so-called theatrical works might, within bounds, be considered a sort of particular case of the internal potentiality of his music, a case, indeed, in which the composer is seeking, as we have seen, " a musical and dramatic space that is open yet not empty", with concrete but mutative personages, and in any case not inhabited by "ghosts and personages imprisoned by a libretto".


With its very references to the archetype of Trovatore and its encompassing of elementary conflicts as well, La Vera Storia evidences in particular an inevitable distance from linear simplicity of narration and traditional dramaturgic schemes. The first act is conceived so as to exclude any psychological-narrative continuity; it proceeds situation by situation and mediates the reference to the Trovatore archetype by the alienating techniques of epic theater.
The sought-after ambiguity of the first act is proposed both as the negation of the possibility of opera (in the traditional sense) and as an attempt at saving some essential principles and making elementary schemes come to life an another plane, even though it be for just this once, inimitably. This ambiguity is reflected in music that revives "closed" forms: choral celebrations, street-singer ballads, "arias", concertati and an orchestral page for the Duel.


There is created a mobile discontinuity, an utterly Berian multiplicity of stylistic perspectives and combinations of very different materials with a certain degree of simplification necessary for the orientation of the work. It might be argued that it is also the premise for the more compact musical result of the second part, in respect to which the first is an alternative possibility, but it is also useful as support, furnishing the listener with precise points of reference.

Actually, the second part is shaped as an enigmatic, difficult reflection - of fascinating complexity - on the materials of the first: it transforms them and places them in a diverse system of relationships and interactions within an uninterrupted flow of music, which to me
represents one of the best results of Berio's later works.
Thus, in La Vera Storia, a bitter, pessimistic, knowingly problematical reflection on the relationship between the individual and society takes theatrical form in two sharply differentiated ways: in a more choral and "social " dimension in the first part and in the second more indecipherable, oppressive and gloomy.

The collaboration with Calvino certainly furnished Berio with precious stimuli due to the quality of the verbal material, but it doesn't seem to me to have had much influence on the basic dramaturgic conception.
This confirms observations on the composer-librettist relationship today and is valid also for Un re in ascolto, although the initial idea here was actually Calvino's (he later brought it to fruition in complete autonomy in a short novel).
The reason that Calvino's project was only a beginning idea and was later radically transformed is due to its very narrative character which was too linear. Berio felt the necessity of bringing other elements into play, of applying a Shakespearian "contamination", or rather Auden's re-thinking of Shakespeare (with an eighteenth-century libretto inspired by The Tempest ). In its definitive form the libretto was signed by Berio and Calvino together.
The initial idea was that of tking who, remaining immobile in the throne room (which he doesn't dare leave for fear of being overthrown), listens to the noises around him and hears, to his terror, about the revolt that will take away his power. But in the opera, called "musical action" and composed between 1982 and 1984, Berio succeeds in bringing forth a coherent vision containing all the complexity of his music and of the dramatic conception, avoiding the linear narration of traditional opera and like his music - interweaving and superimposing a multiplicity of planes and different materials, creating a taut kaleidoscopic variety. In the name of this functional coherence in the conception of the relationship between music and dramaturgy, Berio, in Un re in ascolto, had to distance himself from Calvino's original idea and insert material from Shakespeare's The Tempest, from the German libretto derived from it by Gotter at the end of the Eighteenth Century and from Auden's commentary (The Sea and the Mirror ). Berio's "king" is actually the director of a theater and his name is Prospero: on the stage of his theater a musical spectacle is being rehearsed, based on The Tempest, in a multiplicity of confused and complicated situations, with mimes, acrobats, actors and singers in a kaleidoscope of action full of games and irony. Prospero, in conflict with the director, has no control of how the rehearsals are going and feels a special need of giving ear to other voices, those of dreams, memory, utopia. He dreams about another theater - memories and visions, interior life and that of the theater overlap and blend into a dimension of discontinuous time, and lastly into a journey, the final destination of which is solitude and death.
The reference to the personage of Prospero makes the diverse components of the text (connections which in the case of Opera, for example, were more "open", in spite of sharing the death theme, as David Osmond-Smith has pointed out) converge around a focal point.

In the text, which can be read on different levels, heterogeneous situations accumulate in a non-linear structure, with flashbacks, developments and kaleidoscopic variety: the same thing happens in the score.
The music of Prospero's arias returns; his declamation, based on a fixed field of pitches, stands out in orchestral writing of intense suggestion. The music for the singers' auditions is developed and culminates in the splendid aria of the Protagonist.
Then there are ironic episodes, a great waltz and many other things. Up till the last part of the second act, the multiplicity of elements seems to blend in an almost unifying perspective, and the feverish, visionary density of reflections and memories arranges itself in a sort of long farewell, moving toward a dimension dug deeper and deeper into inwardness. From kaleidoscopic multiplicity, through complex and non-linear roads, we arrive at silence.

Not only in Berio's case is it possible to recognize a substantial unity between music and theater: another meaningful example of musical theater born under the sign of a coalescence between the two dimensions, almost as if the music projected itself on the stage, is that of a composer whose poetics could hardly be further removed from Berio's - Aldo Clementi.
It is this very gulf between the two musicians which renders their partial convergence - on this one point - so meaningful: rendering the theater an extension of an essentially musical onception (even if in Berio, as we have seen, it would be too simplistic to speak only of extension). Clementi's "informal" poetics are practically as extraneous as possible from theatrical dimension. By the term informal, borrowed from painting, ever since the 60's Clementi has referred to the creation of a sonoral flow, uninterrupted and magmatic, in the density of which single sounds or polyphonic lines are indistinguishable.
The idea of anti-dialectic music is a constant of Clementi's output. His music aims at levelling every contrast, almost a dimension of ataraxia, of variegated calm. Time is radically negated and suspended in a sphinx-like rotation of inextricable counterpoint so densely woven as to hinder the perception of lines, the superimposition of which gives rise to continual transformations. Compositions seem like acoustic objects of spatial character, where an infinity of facets of timbre and density are created from the entangled rotating skeins of counterpoint. For Clementi Es, "a one-act rondeau", is his first and, up till now, only true opera (preceded by scenic experiences with non-vocal music), composed from 1979 to 1980 and premiered at Venice on April 28, 1981. In 1994, La Scala is expected to produce his opera Carillon, which carries on the experience of Es.
It is not yet possible to know just how and to what degree Clementi will maintain therein the essential character of his own musical language, which renders inevitable the question he himself asked (in a 1984 article which appeared in Musica/Realtà, n.14): " My music is a pure play of lines; counterpoint only - as scarsely theatrical as can be imagined:
how then has it become theater?" His answer was that, among other things, even in his theater music was conceived principally as a mechanism: "... story and libretto may be substituted simply by the dramatic temperature alone which allows the characters to express themselves without speaking: victim of the sonoral tangle, each protagonist floats like flotsam - and analogously - in the net of his own conflicts..."
Es (the same term with which psychoanalysts indicate the unconscius) takes its starting point from the play of the same name by Nello Saito. Clementi himself wrote the libretto, extrapolating a few short fragments from the play (and adding other verbal material), recognizing in it elements from the myth of Sisyphus and at the same time a "negative" of the myth of Don Giovanni.
Three female characters (a housewife, a secretary, an artist) are vainly awaiting a non existent Don Giovanni who is nothing more than the projection of their own unconscious. They are enclosed in a place where objects are continually falling down and just as continually being uselessly replaced.
The three heroines become nine in Clmenti (respectively three different types of voice - soprano, mezzosoprano and contralto), as each one has three different characters, in a game of fragmentation and dissociation accentuated on the stage by the use of mirrors and dummies. There is no real story, only a blocked situation, with no escape route, presented in diverse, splintered facets.


The "one-act rondeau" is subdivided into six parts, each of which containing a regular succession of scene-dances-berceuse:
in the "scene" the nine performers sing fragments of Saito's text, in the "dances" (which represent moments of uninhibited raptus on the part of the protagonists and which were invented by Clementi who extrapolated the short texts from traditional operas) there is a real, masterly collage, with a delirious superimposition of diverse rhythms, while each "berceuse" (except the last, which signals the funereal, immobile final calm) is an instrumental intermezzo.
The cycle scene-dances-berceuse is circularly repeated six times; the listener hears the continual rotary movement of dense polyphony and the whirl of incessant counterpoint. But in its rotation the colors and ensities are continually varied: the nine singers use four different types of emission (song, Sprechgesang, speech and laughter), the entrances of various instrumental groups are in turn governed by rotatory movement and the dances and berceuses are based on different material in respect to the scenes.
The dances in particular mark a new experience in comparison to the tendency of other of Clementi's works to maintain a rhythmically suspended and indefinite character. In the dances, tangled superimposition of strongly-characterized varied rhythms ( one for each of the nine performers) does not allow us to distinguish them clearly but suggests a total image that is far removed from that of the scenes and the berceuses: in this music, which is, if you like, a concession on Clementi's part to the "laws" of the theater and the scenic demands of variety, can be glimpsed hints of expressionism - almost Berg - like flashes.
The complex and obsessive contrapuntal mechanism constitutes the unifying, unidirectional aspect of a music which collects within itself a variety of materials, all skillfully blended into a whole of gelid delirium: the listener is offered a compact block of sonoral mat erial, within which an ever-changeful kaleidoscope is revealed.

The apparent immobility of this circular succession of situations that are always the same and yet always different leads back to the impossibility of action and the no-escape condition of the heroines (with dissociated kaleidoscopic multiplication of their personalities): there is absolute coherence between musical and dramatic conceptions in the dizzying mechanism of this visionary "meta-theater."
Analogous coherence, though obviously in completely different terms, characterizes the work of Luigi Non for the theater, from his Intolleranza 1960 to Al gran sole carico d'amore and Prometeo.
The second of his theatrical works has the character of a point of arrival and synthesis of a period. Al gran sole carico d'amore (title which translates a verse of Rimbaud, Au grand soleil d'amour charge, from "Les mains de Jeanne Marie") - a dramaturgic formulation once again far removed from traditional form and narrative continuity - concludes the period in which Nono linked his own work directly and explicitly to his political-moral commitment that undertook themes of burning topicality, from the alienating conditions of factory workers (La fabbrica illuminata, 1964) to the struggle for liberation in Vietnam, Africa and Cuba (A floresta è jovem e cheja de vida, 1965-66) and the 1968 upheavals (Non consumiamo Marx, part II, together with Un volto, e del mare, on a text by Pavese, of Musica manifesto n. 1 ). In these and other works of the same period, Nono continued his research on the voice and began to approach electronics, always using it with voices and live instruments, according to a very personal perspctive, working in close contact with the performers. Among his materials, Nono also embraced the vitality of documents of live sounds, like recordings of factory noises or street scenes, but always in a problematic perspective without recourse to all-too-easy effects.

Between the two opposite poles of outbursts of sonoral material and terse, aching lyricism, Nono in his years of explicit political commitment revealed a constant disquiet also manifested in the great synthesis of "scenic action" Al gran sole carico d'amore (1972-1975), where the choice of texts and documents forms a problematic tracery, full of painful questions and motives of reflection, interwoven around a central theme - that of revolutionary struggles and processes of liberation, following the leitmotiv of the "continuity of women's presence in life, in the struggle, in love" (Nono).
For questions arising from human behavior in history, from the meaning of struggles and defeats, Nono composed music full of the complex articulation of relationships between solo singing and choral singing and of the multiplicity of relations and conflicts among the sonoral sources utilized.


The central theme of the first act is the Commune of Paris and the figure of Louise Michel, placed in relation to the struggle and death in Bolivia of Tanya Bunke. In the second act, the 1905 Russian revolution is placed in relation to Turin during the 50's, which is also the Turin of some of Pavese's poems dear to Nono, and later to the struggle for the Cuban barracks of Moncada. As the text excludes any narrative continuity, so is the music composed of short units, using an exceptional veriety of means: solo voices, magnetic tape, orchestra, small and large chorus, speaking voices.
The music envelops also citations from political songs, inserted in various ways.
As far as staging is concerned, there is nothing binding or uni-directional:
the La Scala production, directed by Juri Ljubimov with scenes by Borovskij - heirs to the theatrical research of the Soviet avantgarde - was an ingenious and widely-admired representation, but it did not serve as a reference point for subsequent productions in Frankfurt (directed by Jürgen Flimm) and Lyons (directed by Jorge Lavelli), both of which were quite different.

The first signs that Nono was turning his thoughts toward new directions became evident after Al gran sole carico d'amore, and the turning point was even clearer with the discovery of Freiburg's Experimentalstudio for live electronics and the quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima.
His next opera, Prometeo, already prefigured prior to 1984 in fragments that partially came together in it, went so far as to almost completely reject the visual dimension.
As a "tragedia dell'ascolto " (tragedy to be listened to, trans. note), Prometeo proposes a new conception of musical theater but negatively, with a radicalism that seems dictated by the Biblical forbiddance of images: thre is no story or linear development because each event is produced within the sound and involves not the eye but the ear, thus demanding all the tension and concentration possible from the listener.
There is no plot nor could there be one, because the time of this Prometeo is "polyphonic" (as Massimo Cacciari, to whom we owe the text, has defined it): it interweaves and superimposes, with no linearity at
all, mythical past, present and future utopia according to perspectives that are never univocal. The text makes references to Hesiod and Aeschylus, but only in fragmentary quotations, and "interrogates" the words of the Greek tragedian in a free paraphrase inspired by fragments from Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History. Among the other authors quoted there is also a fragment of Hölderin's Song of Destiny.
In this sense too, for the multiplicity of voices present, it is a "polyphonic" text and it certainly cannot be read in a linear way, according to an univocal itinerary. The music burrows its infinitesimal and intricate channels by taking over the text and using it freely, only partially establishing a non-traditional relationship with it.
In the music of today, however, this is not the only case in which it might schematically be said that the text is both the sonoral material and "private" stimulus of the composer's musical thought.

Prometeo 's "dramaturgy ", then, lies wholly within its sound and in the occurrence of each sonoral event in space, in the composition of space. Nono explained the genesis of this purely musical dramaturgy in the interview with Enzo Restagno which opens the volume of essays and documents edited by Restagno himself and published on the occasion of the cycle dedicated to Nono by the 1987 Settembre Musica (ed. Turin, 1987, pp. 70-71): " Prometeo is based on long conversations with Massimo Cacciari.

... We had no intention of re-proposing a reading of Prometheus tied to mythology and neither were we interested in the image of Prometheus as a progressive. Our reference points were Nietzsche and Benjamin, and thus we found a Prometheus - Wanderer continually searching for new "laws" enabling him to throw away the preceding ones - in a word, the endless promethean continuity. Cacciari's original idea was to conceive the "opera" as an archipelago formed of many islands. From this there evolved our first projects regarding the visual plane. We had spoken with Renzo Piano about the feasibility of having islands suspended in space and various chancels. Navigation from one to another could have been managed by projecting on the walls and on the audience a kind of luminous route in color, like the colored navigational maps of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ... The starting idea was to have a visual part as well and in that sense Massimo and I were very interested in the relationship between sound and color ... Together with Vedova we considered photographic plates and a Kind of undulated projection in motion ... The results were remarkable; but at a certain point I began to feel a sort of anti-visualistic syndrome, which not only soured me on visual projects but made the various experiences I had had in the Freiburg Studio flare up as well. Suddenly, I was totally caught up in a compulsion for listening in itself, in the problematics and enourmous tensions it could cause. I realized that with one single instrument ... with the various transformations in real time, with the use of the halaphon, that is with the possibility of dynamizing simultaneously four or five different spatial itneraries, that which I call acoustic dramaturgy was audible, practicable and achievable" Only the wooden structure by Renzo Piano (in the San Lorenzo church in Venice and later, after modifications adapting it to its new enviroment, in a pavillon at the Ansaldo in Milan when La Scala revived Prometeo in 1985) remained of the original visual project. As well as creating particular acoustic conditions, it enabled the performers to place themselves at different heights around the audience (something has remained, then, of the "islands suspended in space and various chancels" of which Nono speaks). In any case, the next "representation" of Prometeo in Frankfurt, in August of 1987, waived Piano's structure and the same thing happened on October of 1987 in Paris and in 1988 in Berlin. Prometeo 's "theatrical" aspect, therefore, has been reduced to an extreme limit, conserving only just the arcane ritual dimension of the theater. This search for the barest possible essentiality is, in any case, coherent with what happens in the music. Prometeo constitutes a first synthesis of the experiences Nono met with at the Experimental Studio of Freiburg with live electronics and, more generally, of the most recent stage of his musical thought, more than ever attentive to the fragment and the ejection of any rectilinear discoursivity or univocal development. In a conception of vast scope (Prometeo lasts over two hours), the excavation of the instant is deepened, eluding traditional development or order, and the investigation of sound assumes other dimensions in its manifestations, mutations and instantaneous movement, in a suspended time that cannot be defined in a univocal way. The new technical means do not offer Nono a mere enrichment of sonoral possibilities; they are the instrument which allows a thought with an ever-stronger tendency toward proceding by fragments and by illuminations which seemingly emerge from silence to manifest itself. In the transformed, filtered, fractured, multiplied and projected-into-space sound, some of the signs typical of Nono's style may be recognized as traces, echoes and fragments, but they have been dried up, unfleshed and reduced to an essentiality necessary to the radicalism of Prometeo 's conception.

The intuition of a "drama of listening" (drama totally within the music itself, trans. note) with its corollary renuncia of theatrical "representation" is consistent with this process of desiccation and reduction to the essential. At the same time it is consistent with a thought that, as we have pointed out, is becoming more and more complex, extraneous to univocal itineraries and more and more inclined towards the fragment, shattering and illumination. Renunciation of representation is therefore inseparable from the nature of Prometeo and Nono's most recent research.
The two most recent operas by Giacomo Manzoni demonstrate absolutely unconventional characters, albeit in quite different ways. During the 70's Manzoni's research was undertaken with rigorous coherence, characterized by a constant, conscious experimentation, with a critical and problematic spirit, and by a continual interrogation of the sonoral material from various angles and perspectives, with lucid analytic consciousness and with an intellectual rigor and sensitivity often conferring an austere, rugged and almost uncompromising image but revealing diverse aspects, subtle refinements and secret, restless facets as well. Manzoni's matterism (materismo *) first came to the fore with particularly mature and original results immediately afterAtomtod at the end of the 60's, in works like Insiemi, for orchestra (1966-67) and Ombre (alla memoria di Che Guevara), for chorus and orchestra (1968). His research into choral writing continued with two works of vast scope, Parole da Beckett (1970-71) and Hölderlin (frammento) (1972). These experiences were synthesized in Manzoni's third theatrical work, the "musical scenes" Per Massimiliano Robespierre, completed in 1974 and premiered in Bologna in 1975. The libretto is made up of quotations by and about Robespierre: material for reflection collected not to recount the story of Robespierre and the French revolution, but to demonstrate a polyhedric ferment and clash of ideas, condemnations, exaltations, judgments and testimonies.
There are no real characters, even if at the end Charlotte, Robespierre's sister, intones an intense epicedium. Robespierre is de-materialized as a personage because he is musically embodied by a vocal quartet, the Robespierre quartet. The choruses (one large and one small) are exceptionally important, together with the vocal quartet and some interventions by male and femele vocal soloists. It is in the extraordinary richness of the choral and orchestral writing that, as we have said above, the experiences of Parole da Beckett and Hölderlin continue. Also recognizable are Manzoni's matterism (materismo *) his concrete work on the search for a sonority undepleted by banality and convention and his need to continually interrogate his material.
After Robespierre, a new field of investigation already touched on in this opera opened up to Manzoni's matterism (materismo *): research into multiple sounds in the woodwinds, i.e. into a technique enabling instruments traditionally considered monodic to emit two or more sounds contemporaneously and model them into a vast array of new timbral shadings. After digging deeper into the radical newness of these multiple sounds in works like Masse, for pianoforte and orchestra, and Modulor, for four orchestral groups, Manzoni's research turned in other directions and the next large symphonic piece, Ode (1982), makes rare use of them,following new ways of organizing articulation and formal conception. In schematic terms it might be said that there is a complex organization of musical events and their durations along "channels" (or, if you prefer, flow bands) that are parallel and substantially independent. A rigorous structural grid is defined so that its very nature permits an enormous variety of situations, free expansion of different incidents and a system of open and ever-changeable relations, also for the phase displacements between various bands and the introduction of elements of disturbance.

While in a work like Masse research was centered on volumes, "masses" and matteric (materico *) densification, here the multiplicity of situations is more vast and clear-curt and the mobility of fantasy can also avail itself of more trasparent melodic, rhythmic and contrapuntal events, thus creating a complex and restless weave of relationships among "figures" and a continuous tension. The procedures characterizing the composition of Ode will later be found in the polyphony of materials in Scene sinfoniche per il Doktor Faustus, in several chamber works of sharp, disquieting and encompassing inventive variety and in Dedica (1985-1986).

Richness, restlessness, variety and the nervous flexibility of these experiences converge in Doktor Faustus : as in the case of Per Massimiliano Robespierre (albeit in a different way), a new theatrical work represents a climax in Manzoni's production, embodyng both a synthesis and new openings. These "scenes from the novel by Thomas Mann" in 3 acts represent a particular case which, at least from an external point of view, might appear similar to other twentieth-century experiences of Literaturoper, and which presents a story and characters. Actually, his original and extremely personal formulation enable Manzoni to take possession of Mann's novel and overcome the difficulties of recounting a story today in an experience of musical theater.

First, we ought to observe how the short libretto was constructed. Manzoni himself distilled the libretto from Doktor Faustus, directly using Mann's text (in Italian translation) and concentrating exclusively on the principal experiences of the protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, from his first encounter with Esmeralda (as Adrian calls the prostitute from whom he contracts syphilis) to the great dialogue with "He", from the heart of the novel, from the death of his nephew Echo to the darkness of insanity. In some scenes the text is extremely brief, limited to a few words: this moving ahead by means of foreshortenings and rapid, dazzling illuminations reveals itself as theatrically and musically enthralling; however, there is no lack of more ample scenes, the above-mentioned dialogue with "He" and the protagonist's final monologue. The synthetic slant of the libretto guarantees the composer both free independence from the novel and a density of meaningful implications which echo the complex thematics by means of allusion. Manzoni can thus skip over some of Mann's central themes (for example the idea of art as a sickness, the relationship between music and the German soul or the interweave between Leverkühn's destiny and the fall of Nazi Germany), and re-examine under a new light the "pact" with the devil, which Manzoni experiences especially as the propulsive force, rational and innovative, toward research. Free re-thinking of Mann's novel enables him to saturate Faust-Leverkühn's solitary research with problematic ambiguity and intense suggestiveness, drawing from it a tormented and emblematic image of the solitude of the modern artist and his harsh, difficult state of isolation.
The success of Doktor Faustus, which marks a climax in contemporary musical theater, is only apparently bound, therefore, to more "traditional" dramaturgic choices than Per Massimiliano Robespierre. Manzoni has said that he carried within himself for a long time the need to work on Mann's novel: we get the impression that this opera, fruit of long meditation, found its own "inner necessity" when Manzoni had matured the musical language necessary to the undertaking. Both the autonomy and the originality with which he appropriated the novel, re-examining its significance from a radically different perspective from that of Mann, belong entirely to Manzoni. This is a theatrically "impossible" novel, yet it is neither reduced for the stage nor recounted. The composer recounts almost nothing, he hints rapidly at several incidents and then takes over two long sections of the text: he presumes that the novel has already been read, since in its rapidity the libretto proves eliptic. At the same time, as we have point ed out, this very rapidity and conciseness enable Manzoni to free himself from those of Mann's thematics that are furthest from himself.
Actually, although it presents characters and the drift of a story, the libretto leaves a great deal of free space for the dramaturgic invention of the director: in fact, Robert Wilson's visionary concept of the opera at La Scala was perfectly congenial to the music.

The musical language offers a mature synthesis of Manzoni's research of that period, open toward new transparencies, toward new and complex formal weaves. Between densification and refined chamber-like rarefaction, the instrumental invention is always full of a suggestive power that is rough, sober and severe, yet extremely intense. We find the urgency of febrile pulsations, taut and nervous colorings, gelid irony (such as the sarcastic portrait of Fitelberg, the impresario, defined by a particular orchestral coloration and a particularly effective tenor vocality). The vocal part has moments of terse, deep-felt, interiorized lyricism in the beatiful poem of Keats inserted in the first act, as well as in the admirable final farewell - an epicedium without words. An extraordinarily suggestive parenthesis apart is the "concerto" at the beginning of the second act, on a text taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Manzoni applies materials taken from Purcell and subjected to radical re-elaboration and reinvention. After this scene, the sickness and death of Echo counterpointed by Fitelberg's fatuity make the second act a masterpiece of immmediate dramatic grip; yet the first and third acts are by no means inferior. The dialogue with the devil scene reveals a virtuoso miracle of variety in the vocal invention because the words of "He" are sung by three voices (bass, tenor, soprano), each characterized in a totally different way. In the third act, the arduous monologue of Leverkühn on the verge of madness relating his own destiny is resolved in a vocal line of harsh tension, a tour de force desperately pushed to the limits of the absurd.

Among the moments of Doktor Faustus that foreshadow new aspects of Manzoni's research found in his most recent works, there is the fourth scene of Act I, in which a soprano voice intones verses by Keats to the accompaniment of a string quartet, Ondes Martinot and percussion: the sharp tension, the expressive evidence (and extension) of the vocal line and the writing for the strings foreshadow several aspects of Dieci versi di Emily Dickinson (1988), for soprano, 4 solo strings, 2 ( or 1) harps and 10 strings. Here, however, the idea of the scene in Doktor Faustus is developed: in addition to the voice and string quartet another sonoral plane is defined by ten strings which create a background with glissati , tremolos and free movement of sonoral cells, "to give the sense of a spatial cosmic background... something like dust, that we can't figure out what it is " (Manzoni, in an interview with Sonus magazine, I, Nov. 1989).

In this and other recent works by Manzoni, one has the impression of freer and more fortuitous processes, defined "grafts on the research into the formal and structural processes that have characterized many years of my past, a more unpredictable way of drafting music" (interview with F. Degrada, 1992). During the past ten years in Italy there has been no lack of other examples of Literaturoper, of encounters between a composer and a pre-extant text of high literary worth. In a category by itself is the solitary and refined work of Camillo Togni on texts by Georg Trakl: of a projected (and partially already completed - with Barrabas ) theatrical cycle, Blaubart has arrived on the scene, realized in 1975, premiered in Venice on December 14, 1977, and based on a "Puppenspiel" that Trakl wrote in 1910. This particular case does not contradict the obeservations that we have been making on the difficulty, for a radical composer, in using a pre-extant libretto: his encounter with Trakl represents for Togni a sort of predestined necessity. It is based on an elective affinity and leads to results that are totally consistent with the composer's poetics and his way of re-elaborating the lessons of the Viennese School and Schönberg and Webern in particular.

This opera represents a point of arrival and synthesis for Togni, who has set to music other non-theatrical texts by Trakl. The short "Puppenspiel", Blaubart, is a drama for marionettes because for Trakl desperation, in order to express itself, must make believe it is make-believe. Full of symbolistic stylistic devices and characters, this short work is centered on Bluebeard's anguish, on the young wife destined to be his sacrifical victim and on two male personages who are almost doubles of Bluebeard: an adolescent who foresees the tragedy and commits suicide in the first act, and an old man placed, so to speak, beyond reach of the tragedy. The elective affinity that Togni feels for Trakl might give the impression of actual coherence between a neo-expressionist choice of texts and the deep ties binding his music to the lessons of the three great Viennese composers. Yet, reference to the Viennese and the use of dodecaphony do not lead to repetitive situations or imitations. Dodecaphonic technique used with extreme austerity, absolute concentration and timbral sensitivity of extreme refinement enable Togni to achieve a musical gesture all his own, in wich expressionist memories seem frozen, assuming the gleam and icy consistency of precious metals or stones. Apropos of Togni's precious sonoral material, Bortolotto quoted Trakl: Sein Odem eisiges Gold trinkt (His breath drinks icy gold).

Bussotti's presence in today's Italian musical theater has altogether particular characteristics: in him interest in theather is total, so much so that all of his works could be conceivably destined for the theater or in any case collocated under the sign of an interior theatricality, like an imaginary theater. The very totalizing nature of Bussotti's interest in the theater deserves an ample treatment in itself because the very distinction of genres seems problematical to a certain extent.
All Bussotti is theater, marked by a yearning for totality as an accumulation of fragments. All of the works in his production can be seen as fragments of a more extended design, in which different elements may be resumed or reappear. In this total theater, personal and artistic, public and private experiences converge, as is proper for poetics in which declared and flaunted narcissism plays a fundamental role. Bussotti's best writing seems to stir up unchained fantasy, incessantly evoking images and landscapes with magically thrilling intensity: it embraces moments of suspended rarefaction and great density in which, from the magmatic glow of orchestral writing, emerge more or less perceptibly, restless allusions, twisted or fond gestures and lines which seemingly reveal themselves by arising from incandescent magma only be reabsorbed later on. Dimension of memory is fundamental in Bussotti's music, first and foremost a re-examination of the heredity left by Berg and Mahler. Fedele D'Amico spoke of "the greedy venting of uncontrolled voluptuousness that is led to exhaust itself in a sort of liquefaction, at the bottom of which moan insatiable yearnings ".

In accumulating ornamentation (which has structural value in Bussotti), in combining abandon, arabesques, melodic outbursts and incandescent tensions or enervating rarefactions, Bussotti's poetic world manifests an implicit theatricality that is just as evident in his symphonic or chamber works as it is in his works written specifically for the theater: actually, there are continuous exchanges between the various genres. In his declarations, Bussotti denies any talk of "difficulty" or problematics of opera today; but based on the works he has composed for the theater up till now, he certainly cannot be taken literally. From Lorenzaccio (Venice 1972) to Nottetempo (Milan 1976), to Le rarita, Potente (Treviso 1979), Le Racine (1980), Fedra (1980-88) and L'ispirazione (Florence 1988), Bussotti's theater has reconducted Musset, Vasari, the Resistence and Racine under the sign of total autobiographicalism and of an intimately personal dramaturgy defined as a heap of multiple styles and perspectives, a complex sum of fragments, far from traditional canons.
Let's consider - after Passion selon Sade (1965-66) - Lorenzaccio (1969-72). The definition that its author gave it, "romantic danced melodrama in 5 acts, 23 scenes and 2 encores in homage to the play of the same name by Alfred de Musset", is a declaration of poetics and just as other similar declarations by Bussotti cannot be taken literally. Just as Bergkristall is quite different from a Tchaikovsky-like ballet blanc, and although it feeds on declared nostalgia, so is Lorenzaccio a romantic melodrama only in Bussotti's own, highly personal, sense.

Bussotti uses all the means of the history of opera and dance, creating a hybrid that develops on different planes. Going back over history (from the vocality of madrigals to recitar cantando to Tosti's songs) revives the suggestion of a kaleidoscopic variety of memories and echoes distilled through a highly original filter. Bussotti's theatrical experience has always been pervaded with autobiographicalism and an inexhaustible vitality which shows its other side in an icy sense of death. Lorenzaccio refers to the play by Alfred de Musset, written between 1833 and 1834 - a vast fresco centered on the figure of Lorenzo de Medici (1513-1548), leader of a plot againist his cousin Alessandro de Medici in 1537. De Musset's protagonist is intimately torn; he no longer believes in the utility of tyrannicide but he feels obligated to carry it out just the same. The play was useful to Bussotti as an excuse to immerse himself in memories of sixteenth-century Florence, interweaving them with others of diverse extraction. He sees Lorenzaccio in the key of anarchic and neo-romantic aestheticism, as a "revolutionary against everyone and against himself, ineffective for history, irreplaceable for art" (Bussotti). It is significant that our romantic melodrama is not drawn from the play but is created in homage to the play. Only a detailed description, impossible here, could give an idea of the multiplicity of elments which actually come into play in the acted, sung, danced and mimed components. Bussotti has once said that each of his works is a fragment of a unique, more vast, work, thus explaining the frequent and open passage of parts - re-elaborated or not - from one score to another. In Lorenzaccio, after the consummation of the tyrannicide at the end of Act III, the fourth and fifth acts resume the Rara requiem, masterpiece dating from the end of the 60's: here it is staged as a great, slow, funeral rite. In this masterpiece - a sort of enthralling self-portrait - Bussotti's impatience with dogmatic rigorism and his restless vendication of the independence of a highly personal poetics centered on autobiographical representation of experience seem to be filtered through a vigilant participation in the most open and vital experiences of the 50's and 60's four solo voices, a vocal sextet, an orchestra of winds and percussion, a chorus, a violoncello and a guitar celebrate a slow rite that is both loving and mortal, based on a collage of fragmentary quotations from many authors in many languages, associated according to the interior resonance they awake in the composer. Among suspended rarefaction and magmatic densification, in the accumulation of precious datails and incandescent fragments and in a severely controlled lyricism in which icy enchantment makes everything seem like a magic event, the omnivorous inventive frenesy of the Florentine composer achieves a result that is highly calibrated and of utter internal coherence, far beyond its suggestive fragmentary dispersion.

Bussotti's Florentine background is manifested also in his next operatic experience, Nottetempo. A lyric drama in a fragment, inspired by an episode in the life of Michelangelo as recounted by Vasari, it was composed from 1975 to 1976 on a commission by La Scala. The premise is that Michelangelo hurts himself falling from a scaffold while painting the Sistine Chapel as he is working alone at night, and that he has a sort of vision in which he identifies himself with Philoctetes (and Pope Julius II with Ulysses). Freely oniric character plays an important role in this text, as it also does in Le rarita, Potente, one act lyric representations (1976-78) on a libretto by Romano Amidei. This work is made up of three arguments: a murder in an "oriental fable", a solidier's dreams and fantasies in "Blu di Prussia", and an episode indirectly linked to the partisan Aligi Barducci, who took the name of Potente (Powerful), heroic figure of the Florentine liberation shot down by a sniper the day after. The score of Le rarita, Potente constitutes a synthesis of several works, prevalently chamber pieces, from the years 1976 to 1978.

Auto-quotations, frequent in Bussotti but usually concealed, are out in the open here. Some pieces like Tramonto, Three Lover's Ballet, Dai, dimmi, su and Rondò di scena, ended up in the ballet Phaidra- Heliogabalus as well. It's not surprising. As has already been said, a sort of implicit theatricality exists in works of symphonic origin; this characteristic is certainly highly evident in the incandescent tension of Dai, dimmi, su, or in the lyric sweetness of Tramonto.

I have attempted to demonstrate how, for the leading figures in new Italian music born between 1920 and 1932, research in the ambit of musical theater has led to dramatic solutions far removed from convention and narrative linearity of traditional stamp. Analogous considerations are possible for the experience of younger generations as well. This is true for authors like Sciarrino, Guarnieri, Battistelli, and D'Amico, unless we are talking about experiences defined "post-modern" (using the term in an unspecified sense), musical choices which polemically inted to leave out of consideration the experience of the last forty years, or positions which thus consider traditional dramaturgic-narrative criteria perfectely redeemable, as has occured in the latest works of Ferrero and Tutino. In this article we shall limit ourselves to some examples, touching on operas by Sciarrino and Guarnieri.

The theatrical experiences of Salvatore Sciarrino (born in 1947) avoid traditional librettistic formulations by giving shape to a dramaturgy of void and absence, "stories" of unresolved and suspended character. From his precocious beginnings with the 1967 Sonata for two pianos, Sciarrino's music has impressed by means of the originality of the conception of sound and radical timbral invention which has become the carrying structure of his lexicon This lexicon cancels the possibility of perceiving a melodic-chordal framework and the sound seemingly arising "from afar", is alchemically transformed and made transparent like an incorporeal phantom fraught with visionary and disquieting suggestiveness.

Elusive figures - fluid, undulating and mercurial - flit rapidly in and out in quick flickers, denying the listener time to analyze their inner richness and disquieting fugacity. The prevalent use of harmonic sounds (suitable for creating syntheses, unitary effects and endowed with particular transparence), tremolos and glissandi are only a few of the instrumental techniques that vouchsafe the transformation of the sound and lend themselves to incredible fusions and arcane transparencies, subtle echoes and auras. Sciarrino's virginal sound and silence, where he creates, as if from nothing, the ethereal character of his sonoral phantoms. "With me music inhabits a liminal region. As in dreams, where something is but yet is not, and is something else as well... ", wrote Sciarrino in his text on Hermes, for flute (1984). Moreover, in an interview which appeared in Entretempes n.10 (December 1990), Sciarrino observes, on the subject of the newness of the relationship between sound and silence: " The transformations of the timbres in my early works were based on this nearness to silence: the smaller the degree of audibility, the more complex timbral mutations can be applied, because the higher the dynamic level, the more the individual characteristics of the timbres will stand out. " Sciarrino's fresh conception of sound characterizes the fire, the visionary refraction and the phantasmagoria of Amore e Psiche, a 1972 one-act work based on a libretto by Aurelio Pes. The esoteric character of its arduous text has been controversial but the incandescent (white-heat) beauty of the music places it among the high points of the (at that time) twenty-five-year-old composer's early maturity. Sciarrino's language continues a relationship with themes of splitting and of the mirror present in the text, which doesn't tell us the more famous aspects of the story of Cupid and Psyche but spotlights the death phase and the descent into Hades. Psyche is flanked by two sisters who are her mythical protectors while the fourth vocal role is that of Amore (in the voice of a countertenor). At the end Amore leaves the stage, heading toward the land of light. In the music the mirror theme is expanded: "symmetry at all levels prevails: everything has its double, from the musical units down to the simplest sonoral event, and prevalently canonic is the structure inside the orchestra as for the voices " (Sciarrino).

Piero Santi was right when he spoke of a "labyrinth of acoustic phantoms, which two orchestras throw back and forth in a game of echoes, reflections, canons, symmetries and asymmetries ... a dsiquieting summation of molecular aspects ". Extreme tension pervades the vocal language, set apart by a virtuosity displayed among other places, in thick ornamentation or frequent incursions into the stratospherically high register.

Several years later, Sciarrino's music delineated the tendency toward desiccated rarefaction and ever more essential transparency; this is already evident in the second of his theatrical works. Six years separate the visionary density of Amore e Psiche from Aspern, which already presents quite different features in its nature of "Singspiel in two acts" (1978) drawn in collaboration with Giorgio Marini from James's The Aspern Papers: the principal characters do not sing, they recite. The performer of the vocal pieces is off-stage and never appears in the enigmatic, intangible story. The story itself creates a sort of ironic counterpoint with the texts: not by James, they are verses by Da Ponte for some of the famous Nozze di Figaro arias and two Venetian boat-songs. From the latter Sciarrino resumes the melody, inserting it in a totally dissociated instrumental context, while on Da Ponte's words he refrains from Mozart-like references, creating a nervous, ornate vocal line - pungent, desiccated arabesques - with an effect of ironic enigmatic detachment. The instrumental writing, conceived for six soloists, appears severe, reduced to an essential clarity. In Aspern, delicate icy designs, phantoms of sounds evoked and transfigured with extraordinary fantasy reveal a magic and arcane nocturnal and mysterious power of suggestion that calls up the atmosphere of James'novella, which is reduced to a hazy background in the suspension and negation of every occurrence, just as Sciarrino's music moves in a region on the threshold of silence, evoking sonoral phantoms to which is denied consistent corporeity with the most subtle timbral research and maximum rarefaction.

Cailles en sarcophages, "acts for a museum of obsessions", (1979-1980), on a text by Giorgio Marini, confirms the inclination toward new exposed transparencies. Sciarrino returns here to the relationship with myths characterizing almost all of his theatrical works, including crime news and scandal sheets, the musical, photography and much more. In fact, a complex dovetail construction (among its ideal references points is The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus by Salvador Dalí) with games of surreal association interweaves fragmentary allusions to figures and personages of our time, deteriorated and degraded myths reproposed under a funereal, oniric and surreal light (from Marlene Dietrich to Greta Garbo, from "androgynous" Camille Barbin to Gala and Papin sisters, protagonist of a cruel and mysterious crime). This oniric, funereal and surreal climate is perfectly congenial to Sciarrino's sonoral phantoms. The surrealistic characters of his poetics seem to proclaim themselves explicity in Cailles, from the very formulation of the text. As in Aspern, large portions of the text are recited. Among other things the score evinces sounds that pretend, in an illusionistic way, to be noises of various nature without ceasing to belong to the universe of Sciarrino's sonoral phantoms; not onomatopoeic imitation but surreal evocative effects. The richness implicit in the ambiguity of these situations invariably distinguishes the multiple manifestations of Sciarrino's sonoral illusionism.

In Sciarrino's progressive rarefaction of language, one essential moment is Vanitas (1980). The title derives from "vanus": empty, and the experience of the void, of "an infinitely echoing void", is fundamental in this "one-act still-life for voice, violoncello and pianoforte" on poetic fragments from eight seventeenth-century authors, chosen and "recomposed" by Sciarrino. This score, observes its composer, "gravitates in the void, not so much for the rarefaction of its music as because the concept of the void therein is, so to speak, reflected, rendered right from the realization of the particulars". Vanitas is a sort of enormously dilated Lied, where sounds of the voice and its double, the violoncello (whose impalpable harmonics are truly "almost the lyric phantoms of a nightingale"), fluctuate in the void accompanied by the piano, which experiments with particular sonorities and uses classic accompaniment figures in a higly particular manner: for example, the frequent "emptied" arpeggios, where one sound after another disappears. Speaking of "emptying", the growing rarefaction that pervades (with some exceptions) his musical itinerary, Sciarrino observes: "I am continually writing and naturally I have the impression of becoming more profound, even if my music is, in a certain way, more light, made up of fewer things. Yet it seems to me that now it has more effect, more weight. My first works were like windows opening on a rich and often disquieting world; the latest ones seem barer to me, even crueler, disenchanted or ironic, more direct". In most of the works composed after Vanitas, Sciarrino seems to be following a road that diverges from the astonishingrichness of his early maturity, almost as if he wanted to re-invent his language on the basis of minimal elements. He restricts his field of action into smaller and smaller areas, in capillary inquiries where the concrete excavation of sound is inseparable from formal construction and evocative suggestion bound the result attained.

Sciarrino's next theatrical experience after Vanitas was Lohengrin, composed in 1982 and premiered in Milan at the Piccola Scala in January of 1983. It was later revised and presented anew (with another vocal performer) for the Prix Italia as a work for the radio. The libretto of Lohengrin was directly drawn by Sciarrino himself from the Italian translation of one of Laforgue's Moralites légendaires : there is only one character and certainly no plot nor narrative continuity. In Lohengrin, Laforgue has furnished Sciarrino's libretto with verbal material and the underlying premise: the central idea of the impossibility of a relationship between Elsa and Lohengrin. In Sciarrino, however, the entire text is shaped as a projection of the protagonist's madness - the dream, memory or hallucination of Elsa from whom a frightened Lohengrin flees, hanging on to a swan-pillow, without consummating the marriage. Thus, this " invisible action for voice, instruments and chorus - delineates - a monstrous landscape of the soul" (Sciarrino) and delves into the "infinite night" of Elsa's mind. The voice of an actress defines the dramatic itinerary through the fragmented phrases of Elsa and Lohengrin (who is like a projection of Elsa - his words are spoken by the same actress) and through sounds that orient the words and almost give birth to them, assuming essential evocative weight. They are water sounds, barks, terrifying bird-screeches, yawns, whimpers and still others, in a sonoral illusionism that always gives rise to a second - surreal - dimension, moving beyond descriptive evocation to penetrate the sphere of the surreal, suspended in constant ambiguity in the impossibility of distinguishing between external allusion and the inwardness of consciousness. The instrumental interventions contribute in large measure to this; they are rare and delicate because their very rarefaction is used as a means of creating tension, suggesting the uneasiness of the void and concentrating attention on the voice's revelation of anguished interior truths. Only towards the end does Elsa' delirium approach true song, in a demented ditty of disturbing effect.

The solitude of a female character is once again at the center of Perseo e Andromeda; but its nature is completely different as to sounds and landscape evoked; there is a return to singing and there are no instruments except live electronic music. Perseo e Andromeda is a brief, one-act work drawn from Moralités légendaires by Laforgue, with so many omissions that it is profoundly transformed (among other things the ironic happy end is missing). Andromeda is a prisoner on a desert island with a Dragon who loves her and coddles her like a spoiled baby. Perseus (whom Sciarrino compares to a sort of Rambo) brutally kills the Dragon, but Andromeda, seeing the fatuousness of the false hero, refuses to follow him and the opera ends with belated regret, in a suspended situations, a vain questioning. For the first time Sciarrino uses sounds generated by the computer and produced live, evoking the wind and the sea, and the sonoral horizon of the heroine 's solitude. Blowing and whispering are heard - calibrated and variegated mixtures of sound and noise, changing sonoral bands that ripple in undulatory movement or are sparked by unexpected starts and outbursts. By means of subtle stylization these sounds become wind and sea, landscape and horizon, but they transcend naturalistic evocation in a surreal light to become the voice of Andromeda's solitude and the monotony of waiting. His extremely personal use of electronic means is molded, in this opera, into an exceedingly delicate dimension, into the reduction of language to the few essential elements that distinguish almost all of Sciarrino's recent works.

He applies the same principle to his treatment of the voice of Andromeda, the absolute ptotagonist. At the beginning and the end only two notes are sung; they form the smallest of intervals, the semitone, and even when the song opens up into nervous ornamental figures, in rapid jerks, the hallucination-like stylization utilizes only a few elements subjected to continual variations with great subtlety and a valiant attention to detail or to the slightest variation.

With Trionfo della notte by Adriano Guarnieri, composed from 1985 to 1986 and premiered in Bologna in February of 1987 with the direction of Giorgio Marini, we are once again faced with a kind of musical theater in which a theatrical gesture "internal" to the music is projected on the stage without any story being narrated.

The text is taken from Pasolini, but this is not the Pasolini of stage, cinema or novels; Guarnieri has chosen brief fragments from Religion in My Time. From these fragments, or rather from the aura surrounding them, the composer has found stimuli for a musical itinerary steeped in suspended oniric atmospheres and oriented toward the research into singing and the evocation of melodic gesture. In Trionfo della Notte, there is only one thing that is "theatrical": the nostalgia for singing, which carves out its own drama inside the music, where vocal gesture is more and more exposed and explicit in the last two scenes.

Adriano Guarnieri has spoken on many occasion of the "matteric singability" (materico *) that characterizes the most mature phase of his research: a singability that excludes traditional melodic or thematic revivals because it is always born "inside the galaxy of sound", from inside the sonoral material. The sound - not the interval - is determinant for its delineation, which originates in the contrapositioning of lines and thicknesses on fixed harmonic agglomerates, in auras, fade-outs, echoes, reverberations and refractions. Especially from 1980 on (but with particularly significant results as far back as 1978-79), Guarnieri's writing, extremely personal, has arrived at the definition of sonoral sotuations that are visionary, iridescent, disquietingly changeable and full of intense evocative power. The delicate immediacy of this relationship with sonoral material becomes an instrument of research turned toward images of elusive outlines, flexuous and suspended situations that are shattered and evoked like phantoms from memory; as if "figures", melodies and songs remained auras, shadows, trails - elusive yet full of the suggestiveness of the restless instability of Guarnieri's sonoral material.

In Trionfo della notte, the leaning toward song constantly present in Guarnieri's music is turned into voice and drama. In constructing the necessary text, Guarnieri drew from the short poems of Religion in My Time the smallest of fragments, often put together again in sentences sensibly different from the originals, but always chosen in a way to suggest Pasolini's poetic aura. The concreteness of many images disappears, the metric is destroyed and many elements of poetic autobiography have been cancelled; Guarnieri has concentrated on the most tender and poignant lyricism, he lingers on accents of sad sweetness. The images, the words and the shreds that remain of Pasolini's poetry are useful to the composer for their power of suggestion, their evocative force, for their aura and the poetic nimbus surrounding them. Theatrical destination depends essentially on a dramaturgy internal to the musical fact. It is the evidence of certain melodic gestures which brings theater into court, as if the very yearning for song could project itself onto the stage by means of its own evocative intensity, in an imaginary poetic theater nourished by the nostalgia for song
present in Pasolini's verse.

In the instruemental portions of Trionfo della notte (19 performers), the four percussionists take the role of "concertante" (in a different way from the first flute and firts violin) and offer a determinant contribution to the game of expansion and coagulation, of echoes, auras and fade-outs of the sonoral material; similary to what takes place in Pierrot Suite II, it is as if the sonority of the other instruments were caught up in a vortex, with the timbral epicenter represented by the percussion. Even more than polyphony, we might speak of densification and dissolution of sonoral blocks, of coagulation and attenuation of fluctuating and instable situations and of a procedure by impulse which implies determinant parabolas of intervals. The voices (2 sopranos, a tenor and a "madrigalistic chorus" made up of 3 sopranos and 2 contraltos) establish changeable affinities with this instrumental writing in each of the four scenes. In the midst of blocks, vortices, auras and fade-outs, this ideally "madrigalistic" writing is involved in a multiplicity of situations. Only during the fourth scene is there an abandonment to song (a song that loves to soar - suspended - launching itself into the highest possible notes ), and the voices of the two sopranos and tenor dominate like absolute starts, counterpointed by a cadence in the first flute.

NOTES

* The terms "materismo " (matterism) and "materico " (matteric) both derived from "materia " (matter), first came into common usage in critical language in Italy (and seemingly not in other countries) in reference to art. "Materica" defines the art of Albero Burri or Antonio Tápies (and of many others) to underline the importance that "materia" as such had in it. It can be considered a particular kind of "art informel". In music, the concept is used (not so precisely) in reference to situations where the composer uses "sound matter" as such, where you do not see counterpoint or harmony, etc., but just an aggregation of sounds as an aggregation of sonoral matter.