Luigi Nono - Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima (1979-80) per quartetto d'archi

Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima (1979-80) per quartetto d'archi
Composer: Luigi Nono (1924 - 1990)
Performers: Arditti String Quartet: Irvine Arditti & David Alberman, violin; Levine Andrade, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello.
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"Before the composition of his String Quartet, there had been no chamber music in Luigi Nono’s oeuvre. Even with all his attention to creating intricate microstructures, it was still expressive sound, the human voice and, above all, large-scale dramatic contrasts that formed the essence of his music. In his Quartet, however, Nono faced head-on the most extreme demands of the genre’s traditions: [it] is a quartet of the utmost concentration, of radical subjectivity, of extreme rigour - and of enormous technical difficulty for the performers. But at the same time, these Fragments - Stillness are intimate and inwardly directed to the point of being esoteric; they are an unshielded act of self-questioning that recalls the “existential” quartets of Smetana and Wolf, Janacek and particularly Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite.

Although Nono’s work thus clearly belongs to the string quartet genre, some of its features nevertheless contradict that tradition. This is intimated by the title itself [...]. By “fragments” is meant here an extremely fragile web, which appears open on all sides and repeatedly assumes a state of motionlessness, even within the islands of sound, rather than a strict linear progression from the first note to the final chord. [...]

Weightlessness, light, air - these are suggested by sounds which are characteristic of this work but previously quite unusual for Nono: notes produced by very high hand positions, harmonics, flautato, notes played on the fingerboard and near the bridge, notes produced with the wood of the bow by tapping it or drawing it across the instrument - and all within a dynamic range kept largely between p and a barely audible ppppp. These are sounds as “from the ether”, tones from a “more secret world” [...]. “To awaken the ear, the eye, human thought, intelligence, externalizing as fully as possible that which has been internalized - this is what matters today”, stated Nono in a talk given in Geneva in 1983.

The “more secret world” of this quartet has something eminently mysterious about it; it questions and it raises questions. This is hinted at by the title: For Diotima.”… from the ether…” and “… a more secret world…” are two of 47 short quotations from the poetry of Hoelderlin that the composer has written into the score in 52 places. Twelve of these quotations, significantly, stem from a single poem, Diotima; another [...] recurs five times, always together with Beethoven’s indication “mit innigster Empfindung”. Here too, in the verbal mode, a fading in and out: not complete lines, but a web of memories and allusions to Diotima and Hoelderlin, to the lovers.

The music does not illustrate or comment on the texts. Nono said that “they must not under any circumstances be recited during a performance”, nor should they be misunderstood “as naturalistic programme indications”. - He called them “silent “songs” from other spaces and other skies, intimations that one need not say farewell to hope”. The four players “may “sing” them silently as they experience them - as sounds striving for that “delicate harmony of the inner life” (Hoelderlin)”.

Hoelderlin’s Diotima, as woman and lover, appears in yet another form in Nono’s Quartet. In 1889 Giuseppe Verdi composed a setting of the Ave Maria as a harmonization of an unusual, “enigmatic scale”. This work [...] combines modern expressiveness with vocal writing in the style of Palestrina to create a prayer, a musical representation of the Virgin. The same “scala enigmatica” serves as material for Nono’s Quartet, a submerged layer not directly audible, another of the work’s “more secret worlds”.

Verdi fused the old (Palestrina) with the contemporary, and Nono does the same: the principal voice of the chanson “Malheur me bat” (“I am struck by misfortune”) is hidden in the viola part a few minutes before the end of the Quartet. [...]

Old music, memories, things from the distant past are thus present here like pain [...] and hope [...]. The composer poses the fundamental question: “Where am I, who am I?” He asks himself - and his listener. To question relentlessly, with the repeated ‘… das weisst aber du nicht…” (“but you cannot know that”) also implies a readiness to break out of the habitual, the petrified, and to emerge “into the open air” - “mit innigster Empfindung”.

~Juerg Stenzl (Translation: C. Stenzl and L. Pan)
Source: https://quatuorbozzini.ca/en/oeuvres/...
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