Sweet Thunder is a welcome addition to the literature on recent opera, valuable to both the musicologist and the literary scholar. Written by a Reader in Italian at the University of London, it is a study of the literary influences behind five vocal works produced by avant-garde composers: Luigi Dallapiccola's Ulisse (1960–8), Luciano Berio's Laborintus II (1963–65), Armando Gentilucci's Strofe di Ungaretti (1967), Giacomo Manzoni's Parole da Beckett (1970) and Bruno Maderna's Ausstrahlung (1971).Footnote ¹ The author examines the text of each composition, as well as its relation to the music, in five essays that constitute the core of the book; these are framed by an introduction cum survey of Italian twentieth-century music and a short conclusion. The book also includes the complete texts of the works under investigation, to which the reader may easily turn as the analysis proceeds.

What binds these five works together? Or, to put it in other terms, what makes Sweet Thunder an organic and coherent book? Suvini-Hand addresses these questions in the introduction, providing a broad cultural-political framework to her analyses. As the author observes, all five compositions are based on texts that deploy collage technique. That is to say, the texts are assemblages, and very intricate ones, of literary fragments drawn from the works of one or more authors. (With the exception of Laborintus II, each text was assembled by the composer himself.) As the titles of Gentilucci's Strofe di Ungaretti and Manzoni's Parole da Beckett imply, these texts are collages of fragments drawn from the work of a single poet. Each of the other three works draws on multiple sources: Ulisse borrows from literature ranging from Homer to Thomas Mann; Laborintus II (assembled by Edoardo Sanguineti) is based on Isidore of Seville, Dante, Pound, Eliot and Sanguineti; Ausstrahlung uses ancient Persian and Indian poems. To complicate things further, two works (Berio–Sanguineti's Laborintus II and Maderna's Ausstrahlung) are also multilingual.

Because the use of texts based on collage technique was widespread among Italian avant-garde composers during the 1960s, Suvini-Hand argues that these five works are part of a trend, one strongly influenced by the ideas of the Neo-Avant-garde. This literary movement, which emerged at the end of the 1950s and was known from 1963 onwards as Gruppo '63, preached the subversion of the conventions of literary language, to which it opposed ‘organized disorder’, as Umberto Eco put it. This could be achieved in a number of ways, ranging from the juxtaposition of fragments (collage) to the simultaneous use of several languages, from rapid shifts between different styles to the dismantling of syntax: all techniques found to a greater or lesser extent in the works presented here.

The relation between Gruppo '63 and the Italian musical avant-garde involves politics as well as literature and aesthetics. Poets and composers alike conceived of their activity as an explicit critique of the capitalist values of Italian society of the 1960s; they were all of Marxist orientation, with the exception of Dallapiccola. As Suvini-Hand shows, these works all betray a preoccupation with the drift of society towards materialism in the years of the ‘economic miracle’. Indeed, this anti-capitalist stance informs not only the insistence on spirituality and transcendence in the libretti – Maderna's use of oriental religious poems, Dallapiccola's Christian interpretation of the myth of Ulysses and Gentilucci's reference to Ungaretti's ‘metaphysical’ poetry – but also the experimental techniques used in the music. The complexity of dodecaphony, total serialism, electronic and aleatory techniques countered the lightness produced by popular culture in the years of the ‘economic boom’.

Although intriguing and in many respects convincing, Suvini-Hand's explanation as to what the five compositions have in common and how they relate to cultural and political trends of the time is not unproblematic. Problems begin with her use of the term ‘libretto’. Glancing at the subtitle of the book (Music and Libretti in 1960s Italy), readers might expect a study of Italian opera of that decade. Yet even taking into consideration twentieth-century dismantling of operatic and dramatic conventions, the only work that can be defined as an opera, and whose text is actually a libretto, is Luigi Dallapiccola's Ulisse. One might justify the use of the term ‘libretto’ for Berio's Laborintus II, Maderna's Ausstrahlung and Manzoni's Parole da Beckett, all of which have some dramatic/operatic component; this is true especially of Laborintus II, a theatrical piece for solo male speaker, two vocal groups, instrumental ensemble and tape.Footnote ² But Gentilucci's Strofe di Ungaretti, which is simply a vocal sextet based on poems of Ungaretti, really cannot be said to have a ‘libretto’. This does not mean, however, that what Suvini-Hand has to say about these texts is not useful for opera scholars; on the contrary, her analyses provide several insightful suggestions as to how to approach Italian opera of this period.

Suvini-Hand's claim that all five texts ‘employ a Neo-Avant-garde collage technique’ (4) is also open to question. She never offers a developed definition of this technique and its aesthetic premises: there is an extensive literature on these complex issues, and a few more paragraphs might have aided the reader's understanding. More important, Dallapiccola's libretto for Ulisse does not match the author's description of a collage composition as a work in which ‘phrases and sentences from other texts [are] literally pasted together’ (4). The text of Ulisse is indeed full of quotations and allusions to literary sources, but these are not ‘literally pasted together’: they are instead inserted by the composer into the continuum of his own text, so that the reader/listener can hardly recognise them as something ‘extraneous’. Dallapiccola's use of quotations and literary references in Ulisse is thus only partly related to the collage technique of the Neo-Avant-garde, a movement with which this composer does not seem to have ever been directly affiliated.

Neo-Avant-garde collage technique is more relevant to the other pieces, and in particular to Berio's Laborintus II, whose libretto is an adaptation of Sanguineti's Laborintus, a work commonly referred to as the ‘manifesto’ of the Neo-Avant-garde. Suvini-Hand acknowledges that the employment of collage libretti/texts was quite common among avant-garde composers around the 1960s, as demonstrated by works such as Luigi Nono's Intolleranza (1960) and A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida (1965–6), Berio-Sanguineti's Passaggio (1962), Bruno Maderna's Satyricon (1972) and Giacomo Manzoni's Hölderlin (1972). One might wonder about the omission of a composer as important as Nono; but Suvini-Hand explicitly restricts her focus to collage libretti based exclusively on literary texts, a requirement met by neither of Nono's vocal collages. The distinction between literary and non-literary sources is a legitimate one, but it seems motivated more by practical than theoretical concerns and necessitates the exclusion of two works that would have bolstered Suvini-Hand's political analysis.

The anti-capitalist agenda that Suvini-Hand attributes to the five works she has selected is evident in Sanguineti-Berio's Laborintus II, an explicit critique of the values of consumer society. It also emerges, through the insistence on spirituality, in the works of Gentilucci, Manzoni and Maderna – although these are not the compositions in which the political beliefs of those composers are best represented. Anti-capitalism seems less pertinent to Dallapiccola's Ulisse. True, the opera conveys a spiritual/Christian message, which Suvini-Hand does a wonderful job of decoding; but preoccupation with spiritual/religious values actually runs through Dallapiccola's entire output, not only those works that can be tied to the economic boom of the 1960s. Moreover, the theme of Ulisse – especially the search for the meaning of life – had been on the composer's mind for very long time, as Dallapiccola's writings indicate.Footnote ³

Suvini-Hand also resorts to anti-capitalism to explain the composers' use of experimental musical techniques. She tends to link experimentalism with complexity, therefore ranking twelve-tone technique (employed in Ulisse) among post-war methods of composition such as total serialism. While reading the post-war experimental techniques through politics is compelling, the same cannot be said of dodecaphony: by the 1960s it was already out-of-date, not incidentally practised by an ‘older’ composer like Dallapiccola (1904–75). Historical niggling aside, Suvini-Hand's claim that experimental techniques were a way for the composers to detach themselves from consumer culture of the 1960s (3) has a somewhat Adornian flavour. Much has already been said about the dichotomy ‘modernist composer vs. the public/masses’, and it is not my intention to tackle such a controversial issue here. In making this argument, however, Suvini-Hand seems to establish a direct link between compositional choices and a very specific historical/political moment: how then should we interpret the use of these same techniques in the years before and after the ‘economic miracle’?

Moving on to the analyses of the works, the author states that one of her purposes is to enquire into music–text relationships (1), yet she never undertakes a systematic examination of the scores. References to the music tend to be used to substantiate the thesis that these works are difficult and radical, or to support the literary interpretation of the text. On textual matters, though, Suvini-Hand has much to offer, especially regarding the ending of Armando Gentilucci's Strofe di Ungaretti. The literary fragments employed by Gentilucci are drawn from three poems by Ungaretti: ‘L'angelo del povero’, ‘Non gridate più’ and ‘Silenzio stellato’. All three deal with grief and loss, originating from private tragedies in the poet's life and from the experience of World War II. Suvini-Hand argues splendidly that Ungaretti's insistence on metaphysics and religion as a way out of grief is transformed by Gentilucci into a humanistic – but equally anti-materialist – message through a sophisticated assemblage of fragments and allusions to other authors. This is particularly evident at the very end of the Strofe, where Gentilucci isolates the word ‘uomo’ and sets it to a very open and luminous rising major third sung by the vocal sextet. Unfortunately, the fascinating connection Suvini-Hand traces between a musical detail and a much broader philosophical/literary matter is weakened by the assertion that ‘[the major third is] at the basis of all chords in the tonal (not atonal) system’ (128). What, then, to make of a diminished-seventh chord?

To her credit, it must be said that this as well other musical inaccuracies in the book originate from the author's attempt to simplify concepts for the non-specialist, and especially to render it accessible to literary scholars. In the same vein, Suvini-Hand's limited engagement with the music is largely redressed by the refined and compelling literary analyses, by far the most rewarding part of the book. As announced in the introduction, the main goal is to ‘examine the fine network of subtle relationships between the different literary extracts, and (in the cases of Dallapiccola, Berio and Maderna) the many writers that have been juxtaposed in the libretti’ (1), and the author does invaluable work decoding the literary references and reconstructing the composers' poetics that lie behind them.

The literary readings are so detailed and sophisticated that it is impossible to do justice to them here. As already mentioned, Suvini-Hand sheds light on Gentilucci's humanism by interpreting the composer's arrangement of Ungaretti's ‘metaphysical’ verses; this is all the more valuable because very little has been written on the Strofe or even on Gentilucci. Similarly, the author points out a divergence of meaning between the composer's arrangement and his literary source in Manzoni's Parole da Beckett: whereas Beckett's dismantling of syntactic structures betrays a pessimistic vision of the possibilities of language, Manzoni's exaltation of the expressive power of single words or sounds in the absence of syntactical/logical coherence seems to declare his faith in communication among human beings. Further, Suvini-Hand explicates successfully how the wide range of literary references in Ulisse relates to Dallapiccola's Christian/Dantesque interpretation of the myth, and provides a lucid examination of the intricacies of Berio–Sanguineti's Laborintus II and of their anti-capitalist meaning, a valuable expansion of Peter Stacey's 1989 dissertation.Footnote ⁴ Finally, Sweet Thunder not only explains how Maderna's idea of divinity emerges through the assemblage of Persian and Indian religious poems, but also elucidates the sense in which this work is a ‘radiation’ (Ausstrahlung). Suvini-Hand shows that Maderna's piece is a study of the origin of language, intended in a biblical sense as the origin of the world, and the connection between divine creation and language comes clearly out of the analysis of the literary fragments selected by the composer. Suvini-Hand's is moreover the first scholarly analysis of the text of Ausstrahlung, and its attention to this fascinating work alone would make the book worth reading.

Despite some inconsistencies and an occasionally problematic framework, Sweet Thunder casts light on relevant works of the Italian avant-garde, and opens up avenues for further research on the relation between music and literature in 1960s Italy. It is definitely recommended reading for those with an interest in post-war Italian culture.