In 2011 the artist Matteo Rubbi won the eighth Premio Furla with an exhibition entitled ‘Viaggio in Italia’. The exhibition contained images and video installations that captured moments of performance art in the various Italian provinces (and sites beyond) through which Rubbi had recently travelled. During a stopover in Bologna, he had staged an event based on Luigi Nono's 1961 opera Intolleranza 1960. As he subtitled it, this was a ‘“happening”, urban radio tuner’. A radio set up in the city's Palazzo Pepoli transmitted the RAI Tre live broadcast of Nono's opera as it was being performed in Venice. Rubbi invited locals and those in their cars in the surrounding Piazza del Francia to tune in their radios and listen.Footnote ²

The event was the third occasion in the series ‘Untitled (Music!)’ (2009–). Centred within the rubric of performance art, but also making reference to Nono's own aesthetics, Rubbi's happening was generated by a network of human and non-human agents.Footnote ³ The premiss was – as with Nono – that creating such a situation would make people aware of their own potential to transform society. But more than that (and more in line with performance art), the means of achieving this heightened awareness resided in the direct involvement of the public. Emphasis lay on communal creativity within an everyday urban space. Rubbi said that the series aimed ‘to bring a particular or epochal event into the street, opening it for collective participation’.Footnote ⁴ The result was an unlikely extension of the Marxist aesthetics of Nono's opera into the realm of the liberal commonality of relational aesthetics.Footnote ⁵

The RAI Tre broadcast of Intolleranza was of a fiftieth anniversary performance taking place at the location of its première: Venice's Teatro La Fenice.Footnote ⁶ Students and academics in the Facoltà di Design e Arti at Venice's Università IUAV undertook the production. As is often the case with such revivals, the producers, while faithfully replicating the Italian-language version of the libretto and musical text, took greater liberties with its theatrical realization. They did, however, include a tape recording of audience disruption at the 1961 première – an intervention that added an extra layer of intermedial complexity to Rubbi's event.Footnote ⁷ The production was accompanied by a spate of research activity and publications in Venice: the Archivio Luigi Nono (ALN) produced the volume Intolleranza 1960: A cinquant’ anni dalla prima assoluta, edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis and Giorgio Mastinu (one of the subjects of this review), containing various documentary materials relating to the première; and an exhibition was held in collaboration with the Fondazione Emilio and Annabianca Vedova (Emilio had designed the original sets). Such commemorative activity has been bolstered by a growing stream of performances and scholarship on Nono's work – examples of which include the other books under review here. It would appear, as Ben Earle claimed in a 2013 review article, that ‘Luigi Nono's time has come’.Footnote ⁸

To date, however, there has been remarkably little interaction between recent performances and scholarship. On one level, they might obviously be seen potentially to inform each other: scholarship can contextualize performance, while performances can lead to ways of seeing through ideologies that have dominated discourse. But Intolleranza is also a particularly intriguing vehicle for thinking about how we talk about opera in performance, precisely because of the instability, fissures and unruliness that have characterized the opera since its première. The three books under review enjoin us to ask what these materials and discourses – together with the multiform iterations of Nono's music in performance – might suggest for how we think about and stage a work like Intolleranza today. The issue is not primarily that of what happens when we ‘unsettle’ an opera not firmly established in the canon;Footnote ⁹ rather, it is what new perspectives might be lent to issues of work, performance and ephemerality more generally if we recontextualize the opera, sketching a fresh nexus between performance art, modernist opera and Regietheater. Looking at late-modern opera not so much as a restaging of a stable text but rather as if every performance is a ‘happening’ in its own right might allow us to move away from the modernist ideologies that have governed its canon. Resituated in this way, Intolleranza might even pose important questions about the political efficacy of theatrical representation.

Scholarship – philological research, close musical analysis and so on – has often tended to take its cue from Nono's own writings rather than from performance. This may in part be because it is still early days for Nono studies: as the three books under review make clear, there is still a perceived need to collate authorial materials and make them more widely available. Most of the work carried out to date – collections of correspondence, bibliographical guides and the publishing of critical editions – has been editorial.Footnote ¹⁰ Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi's edited collection of the correspondence between Nono and Massimo Mila – Nulla di oscuro tra noi: Lettere, 1952–1988 – is a good example of what can be achieved. Mila was a musicologist, a critic and an anti-Fascist who wrote abundantly on musical culture throughout the Fascist and post-Fascist periods. The letters thus promise much, charting as they do the relationship between two central characters in this seminal period of postwar cultural life. Produced in collaboration with the ALN, the letters are divided into the four decades spanning their correspondence. There are also two appendices: one chronicling the correspondence between Nono and the publishers Einaudi (between 1960 and 1972), the other a selection of Mila's writings on Nono (he was one of the most prolific commentators on the composer).

Perhaps one of the reasons why all this correspondence and other material has been published is that, at least in the Italian context, such volumes have become a way of elevating a composer's status.Footnote ¹¹ Yet this in turn raises the spectre of who the intended reader is: in its quotidian detail (a large proportion of the letters involve pragmatic matters rather than anything resembling profound theorizing), this material seems geared to the already converted, and is unlikely to be of much interest to the non-specialist. This air of specialism is further encouraged by the editorial care lavished by De Benedictis and Rizzardi. The editors have tried to maintain as faithfully as possible the way the letters were written, with commentaries providing information such as whether a given document was typed or written by hand (sometimes they even include an image of the original; see p. 15). Notes also explain the context in which the letters were written – a useful intervention, given that they are often so brief as to be difficult to understand without supplementary knowledge, and a gesture, perhaps, to the non-specialist.

The second collection of correspondence, between the composer Helmut Lachenmann and Nono (Alla ricerca di luce e chiarezza, edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis and Ulrich Mosch), shares many of these characteristics. Lachenmann was under the tutelage of Nono for two periods of six months (in the winters of 1958–9 and 1959–60), but their exchanges continued for the rest of the latter's life.Footnote ¹² This collection is similarly divided into four sections charting the various stages of their correspondence, and also includes appendices of unpublished letters, texts by Lachenmann on Nono and related communications with other cultural figures.Footnote ¹³ Again the editors parade a great degree of philological faithfulness: for example, different fonts and colours are used to demarcate the nature of the original manuscripts, giving the volume the flavour of a tool for further research. Published under the auspices of the ALN and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the editorial apparatus is in Italian whereas the correspondence is in its original language – in this case usually German. Now that a German-only edition of the correspondence has been issued, however, one wonders whether an all-Italian, or even a fully bilingual, volume would have been more useful.Footnote ¹⁴

While seemingly different at first glance, De Benedictis and Mastinu's edited anthology of documents and essays relating to the première of Intolleranza has a similar editorial policy, and functions as something like a disposizione scenica for the opera. The book suggests this function even in its material appearance: the board cover, thick card pages and exposed glue seams imply a manual or workbook rather than an academic text. Primarily a recuperation of relevant documents, it constitutes a remarkable resource on the opera: chapters are devoted to the reproduction of staging sketches, photos of the première and transcriptions of correspondence.Footnote ¹⁵ Given the innovative modes of display deployed in the presentation of materials, it is perhaps churlish to wonder whether the documents might have been examined more deeply. Admittedly, the editors state at the outset that their guiding impetus was ‘to let the documents speak for themselves – [charting] the history of the intense, profound difficulties and compromises that led to the birth of Intolleranza’ (pp. 14–15). But it might nevertheless be interesting to think how we could use this information when writing about the opera. Indeed, hesitancy to stray beyond attempts to piece together how the opera came about, or to discern what we can of Nono's possible intentions, may in part be a defensiveness about the composer as a worthy subject of scholarly endeavour. It may even be due to the lingering uncertainty over how we talk about opera in performance. Specifically here, any notion of a more flexible approach to talking about opera as performance would be to adopt an explicitly anti-modernist stance: modernist ideology espouses multiple forms of fidelity, both to the nature of the original performance conditions and to a more abstract, composer-led notion of the work (Werktreue).Footnote ¹⁶

One tentative step away from a score- and libretto-based approach comes in a chapter by Mastinu on the original staging (pp. 113–37).Footnote ¹⁷ Beyond the author's tracing of the influences on the theatrical conception, however, other questions prompted by the material remain unasked. What kind of history of Intolleranza might be written from the perspective of its staging? How do strategies of exclusion and control operate in the realm of mise-en-scène, and how do these interact with those governing the musical and textual components? A clearer statement of intent by the editors might have helped in addressing such issues. For example, does the staging information assembled here function as historical evidence, or as a form of prescription? While the sheer quantity of visual images alone suggests the former, one must, of course, still be wary: to sanctify the material's prescriptive status is not only to reinforce the modernist ideologies mentioned above (in many ways, then, a somewhat conservative position), but also to privilege one moment over any other – to give it a prohibitive authority.

After several much-hyped early revivals – Cologne Opera in 1962 directed by Hans Lietzau (in German translation) and the Boston Opera Company in 1965 under Sarah Caldwell (in English) – Intolleranza has had a reasonably healthy performance history (all in German). It was next performed in Nuremberg in 1970 under Wolfgang Weber, then in Nancy in 1971 under Jean-Claude Riber, and a revival of the 1970 version took place in Florence in 1974. Further performances took place in Hamburg in 1985 under Günter Krämer, in Stuttgart in 1992 under Christof Nel and in Darmstadt in 1995 under Werner Schroeter; the 1992 version was revived in Stuttgart in 1996. In the first decade of the new millennium there was a production almost every year in Germany, involving a roster of renowned theatre practitioners:Footnote ¹⁸ Ludger Engels, Helgard Haug, Alfred Hrdlicka, Peter Konwitschny, Krämer, Johann Kresnik, Daniel Libeskind, Nel, Benedikt von Peter, Christian Pöppelreiter and Reinhard M. K. Thasler. Intolleranza has morphed across this performance history, its contours repeatedly reshaped in response to changing circumstances of production. At times it has even been renamed: the Nuremberg, Nancy and Florence performances were dubbed Intolleranza 1970. Some of this updating was overseen by Nono himself – he was particularly involved in the 1965 Boston staging, for example. The recently released critical edition of the opera calls it simply Intolleranza, in order to recognize its multiple reinterpretations and (in the words of its publishers) its inherent ‘timely’ quality.Footnote ¹⁹

As later production teams have interpreted the opera, they have also highlighted its instabilities, ambiguities and fragilities. A preoccupation has been the inconsistencies in the relationship between music and text. While Nono gave much attention to the compilation of the libretto, the actual text setting and musical accompaniment often obscure, at times even obliterate, verbal comprehensibility. Some directors have sought to address this in various ways: in the 2001 Deutsche Oper production, Konwitschny compiled a new, updated edition of the libretto in collaboration with dramaturge Werner Hintze, which was then displayed electronically to the audience. This was in part a rejection of Nono's (somewhat problematic) notion of ‘total commitment’ – that is, that every aspect of the work was to be avant-garde, pushing at the boundaries of expectation. According to the composer, music and text thus ultimately worked against each other, the political import of the libretto relentlessly diminished by a music that cannot remain subservient.Footnote ²⁰ But in Konwitschny's production, comprehensibility of the text was part of an attempt to renew the opera's political message.

A similar kind of conflict arose at the première: in his own writing on the opera Nono emphasized the transformations of intervallic relationships underpinning the melodic working. But the critics instead emphasized the music's noisy surface as a locus of political potency, dwelling not on Nono's commitment to his craft, but rather on the fact that the music evoked memories of war and Fascism.Footnote ²¹ Thus, regardless of Nono's attempts to control how the opera was understood, performance practice and reception have tended to gesture in other directions. This parallel course is particularly obvious in Intolleranza's recent incarnations in performance art. Rubbi has not been the only one to use the work in other types of performance: in Via Intolleranza II (2010–11), the German director and artist Christoph Schlingensief combined moments of the opera into a new hypermedial denouncement of present-day intolerance (focused particularly on Burkina Faso as a case study in colonialism). However, in its reliance on video projection and intense colour abstractions, the performance echoed recurrent tropes in productions of Nono's opera.

If we take these different performances on their own terms (distanced from any blueprint), we might see the original 1961 production as merely one option among many: a single event in a process that can come in time to exhibit patterns or tropes. As Mary Ann Smart has written: ‘Echoes or divergences between multiple realizations of the same opera can unlock dimensions of meaning that are fluid, even invisible, until rendered perceptible across a series of performances.’Footnote ²² Modernist opera is perhaps the ideal vehicle for this kind of project, given the wealth of material at our disposal. Particularly illuminating might be those productions that deliberately failed to consult historical information regarding earlier performances, or that strove to reconfigure the opera in a completely different guise, but that still ended up employing the same themes and tropes. From this perspective, new writing on Intolleranza might focus on metal scaffolding, black clothing and the intense red materials that have been a recurrent feature of productions to date.Footnote ²³ Of course, productions themselves are no nirvana: they risk becoming another kind of text, and in some ways they, too, speak to the already initiated – to the same audience as the books.

But writing a history through the flexibility of such tropes might allow us to conceive of Intolleranza not as an abstract concept but through the materiality of eventsFootnote ²⁴ – of the scaffolding and black costumes, as well as of bodily movement, extreme vocality and gesture. Such an approach necessarily encourages a degree of irreverence (perhaps even of intolerance) towards any notion of fidelity to a work concept. Each production in turn is the result of a creativity generated by a network of participants. This practice, then, requires a sociological approach to opera production – one that actively incorporates human interaction and a more material aspect;Footnote ²⁵ one, furthermore, that does not privilege and impose an abstract framework. Actor-network theory (ANT) is one possible theoretical model.Footnote ²⁶ Just as Bruno Latour argues that there is ‘no distinct domain of reality to which the label “social” or “society” could be attributed’Footnote ²⁷ (a domain that determines the actors within), could we also discuss Intolleranza in performance in a way that does not apply an abstract, composer-centred vision of the work as a determinant? Instead, could we conceive of a performance through the working together of various actors, regulating their own agency in regard to the production, and who can in turn take the work in new, previously unseen directions? Intolleranza in this sense could be seen not as an abstract concept waiting to be unearthed, but rather as something continually constructed through interaction.Footnote ²⁸

Staging, looked at in this way, can imply its own incompleteness and ever-changing nature, its mutability and presentness; as Erika Fischer-Lichte puts it: ‘The process of staging is a trial by which to find the best way for generating materiality.’Footnote ²⁹ Such an understanding alludes to Martin Seel's definition of mise-en-scène: ‘It is the staging of presence. It is the perceptible creation and emphasis of the presence of something which occurs in the here and now, and which, because it is in the present, completely eludes the totalising grasp.’Footnote ³⁰ This, then, is where – via Seel and Fischer-Lichte – opera staging and performance art collide: there is always an element of chance and unpredictability, even if the practice of mise-en-scène encourages a degree of control. Mise-en-scène, or Inszenierung (production), is a strategy that allows for the spontaneity of performance.Footnote ³¹ Fischer-Lichte defines the strategies of staging as follows: ‘On the one hand, these strategies create presence and physicality; on the other, they allow for open, experimental and ludic spaces for unplanned and un-staged behavior, actions, and events.’Footnote ³² This, in turn, is where the practices of staging and performance art start to align ironically with Nono's political aesthetics: staging is the formation of an event, an event that creates action. The audience should be excited to the extent that they become aware of their own invigoration: enchantment and transformation are the end goals.

If we emphasize these edge moments of unpredictability in performance (if the mise-en-scène cannot exert complete control, if a successful production creates an unpredictable spectator), then what possibilities might there be for further creative flexibility? Aiming for complete historical fidelity to any blueprint, or quasi-authorial control, thus comes to seem out of touch with any work's reality in performance. Viewed in this light, the material presented in the three books reviewed here can be seen as representing particular amalgamations of data that can be used or rejected for new creative ends.

Noise can be seen here as something like a symbol of the flexibilities of Intolleranza's realization. Ephemeral in performance, noise came to stand metonymically for political memory at the première. This was the aspect discussed in the press for months. Nono's attempts at reconciling a leftist avant-gardism and a politically realist message might strike us as odd today, but in Italy in 1961 this posed a central aesthetic question of the period. But the same discourse has failed to recur in the reception of the revivals. The issue, then, might be whether attempts at mere repetition would confine the work to being a museum piece.Footnote ³³ How might its noisy efficacy be rekindled, and might a possible lack of efficacy be a cause not only for visual, but also for musical change? Or need re-enlivening not concern us? The same applies to the issue of technology: how might Intolleranza, so incorporative of its own mediation, be reconfigured in response to new capabilities?Footnote ³⁴

Nono studies could thus be seen as currently enjoying a similar moment to those of Verdi from the 1950s to the 1990s – renewed and provocative stagings of the works, critical editions and a vast array of material being made available. But the situation is different in important ways. Whereas the Verdian turnaround was about canonizing a composer who had long been seen as too popular to be taken seriously, the entrance of Nono into the canon is premissed on a need for wider acceptance of his music. Although the books under review primarily work towards this end (bringing to light new materials, increasing access to information and collating resources), some of the results undo this noble aim, in preaching to the converted rather than attempting to change public perceptions. The motive is again perhaps an underlying defensiveness where it is no longer needed.

The question remains, then, as it did for Verdi scholars decades ago, of where future scholarship might head, as well as what relationship it might forge with performance. So far, and as these three books make clear, much scholarly time has been invested in source studies and chronologies – in getting to grips with archival materials. Perhaps inevitably, work to date has focused on those aspects in which Nono's control was strongest: the libretto and the musical text. The result, as we have seen, has had two divergent trajectories – one has risked endorsing the modernist ideology that notation is a lexicon of intentionality, whereas recent performances have attempted to escape the confines of such encoded meanings, relishing what Nono himself could not have foreseen. If Nono's time really has come, then perhaps now is the moment to reconsider the relationship between the two approaches. One might, in other words, start to construct a more complex and multifaceted picture of the opera in performance; to see, for example, what tropes and themes emerge when it is viewed within a broader fabric of different production practices. Instead of an autonomous idea, a more socially constructed picture of the work starts to take shape. One might even extend the net into operatic culture more generally: modern production practices such as Regietheater in many ways meet modernist theatre such as Intolleranza on its own terms. Calixto Bieito's recent production of Verdi's Aida (Basle 2010), for example, was a politically charged reworking of the opera's orientalism. Aida was recontextualized within the heightened Islamophobia in Switzerland that saw a 2009 referendum ban the construction of new minarets. Set in the city's stadium, the opera was situated within the context of consumerism and society's proliferation at the cost of migrant workers (many of whom were Muslim). Metal structures framed advertising and press insignia; intolerance, consumerism and the homo sacer of modern society were its overriding themes.Footnote ³⁵

Both Aida and Intolleranza have thus been configured as protest events, contemporaneity and timeliness being distinctive traits. Regietheater and late-modernist opera can indeed be seen as sharing many core values. The two – along with performance art – emerged from the same historical (if not entirely the same cultural) moment and had convergent genealogies, even if they have often explicitly defined themselves against one another. All three were post-Second World War responses to contemporary society; all were concerned with radicalization, protest and provocation.Footnote ³⁶ Exploring further their mutual circumstances of critique can lead to a fresh perspective on works such as Intolleranza. For a start, Regietheater and performance art meet – and extend – such modernist opera: striving for ever more intense contemporaneity; not just stimulating or enchanting the spectator but provoking a physical response. Performance art complicates long-entrenched binaries between subject and object, materiality and semioticity – something echoed more in modernist theory than in practice.

The overriding plurality, collaboration and ephemerality of such alternative positions shows in turn perhaps how conservative the late-modernist position had become. Whereas performance art collapsed what Fischer-Lichte calls the ‘two-world theory’ of an abstract ‘work’ and a practice of mise-en-scène, modernist opera has tended to reinforce this binary – with authority given primarily to the former rather than the latter. In this way the three significant and timely books under review here (it is also worth mentioning the sheer productivity of a single scholar – De Benedictis) present an exciting opportunity, should we choose to grasp it. Now that Nono's reputation is seemingly assured (thanks in no small part to the ongoing efforts of the editors of these volumes), Nono studies can perhaps enter a more critical and even creative phase. In other words, with such a harvest of materials, where might we go from here? And how might we move forward without replicating the values of the objects we study?