Swatches & Splashes

Luigi Nono is a gentle man -- until provoked. Then, he says, he writes music. Provoked by "neo-Nazism," the "Algerian struggle for liberty" and racial discrimination, among other things, he composed Intolleranza 1960, an opera of social protest that has done some wholesale provoking of its own. Its premiere in Venice four years ago was interrupted by a hail of stink bombs from the gallery and cries of "This opera makes me sick!" Nono's followers shouted back "Cretins!" "Dirty Fascists!" in a riotous uproar that even for Italy was, as one critic shuddered, "as ugly as I ever want to encounter."

Last week the adventurous Boston Opera produced Intolleranza for the first time in the U.S.--and right from the beginning there was provocation aplenty. First, Nono's application for a visitor's visa to the U.S. was denied because he is a member of the Italian Communist Party. Two Boston newspapers and a committee of 65 U.S. musicians and composers protested and got the State Department to change its mind. Nono arrived two weeks late, demanded so many last-minute changes that the opening was postponed for two days. Once the curtain went up, however, Intolleranza proved a production worth the provoking.

Pingpong. It is not so much an opera as a series of dreamlike tableaux strung across a barren landscape of the ear. The score is jaggedly dissonant, an extension of the twelve-tone music espoused by Nono's idol and father-in-law, the late Composer Arnold Schoenberg. Italian Composer Bruno Maderna conducted the performance like a man refereeing a pingpong match, swinging from side to side to summon a swatch of mewing strings here, a splash of braying trumpets there. For the singers it was "up and down, up and down, from high C to low F," said Tenor Lawrence White. "It's enough to drive you crazy."

The loosely stitched scenario follows the wanderings of a refugee in search of the Meaning of Life. But what gave the performance its power was its unique stage effects. The faces of the singers were picked up by four TV cameras positioned in the balcony, boxes and backstage and projected on a large screen onstage.

Console in the Pit. For one scene there was a nightmarish montage of "scenes of injustice"--a Negro lynching, street riots, the desolation of Hiroshima, decaying bodies stacked in graves --flashed on dozens of various-sized screens, some dropped from the flies, others held aloft by the chorus in a jigsaw pattern. While the words "And you? Are you blind like a herd of cattle?" appeared on one screen, the TV cameras raked the audience and projected their faces onstage in self-conscious closeups.

The singing of the chorus was prerecorded on tape and played by Nono from a console in the orchestra pit. To open the second act he played a mixture of electronic music and voices shouting "the absurdities of life," alternately ricocheting the sounds through eight speakers ringing the auditorium. In the final minutes, Nono's tape machine broke down, and he had to pull the tape through by hand. At performance's end he stood knee-deep in tangled tape like a partially unraveled mummy.

Intolleranza is a politically inspired work, but its brotherhood-of-man theme is basic Sunday school rather than party dogma. More important, it represents a significant step in developing a new language for modern opera. And for one at least, the language of Intolleranza carried a very special meaning. Jan Skalicky, the costume designer for the Boston production and son of a former Czech consul to the U.S., announced at week's end that he was defecting to the U.S.

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