Il canto sospeso

Il canto sospeso (The Suspended Song) is a cantata for vocal soloists, choir, and orchestra by the Italian composer Luigi Nono, written in 1955–56. It is one of the most admired examples of serial composition from the 1950s, but has also excited controversy over the relationship between its political content and its compositional means.

The title Il canto sospeso may be literally translated as "The Suspended Song", though the word sospeso may also be rendered as "floating" or "interrupted". The title is actually taken from the Italian edition of a poem, "If We Die", by Ethel Rosenberg who, together with her husband Julius, was tried and convicted in America of espionage and of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their execution on 19 June 1953 caused outrage in Europe. The phrase in the English original is "the song unsung" (Nielinger 2006, 87).

Nono chose his texts from an anthology published in 1954 by Giulio Einaudi as Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza europea, a collection of farewell letters written to loved ones by captured European resistance fighters shortly before their executions by the Nazis. The score is dedicated "a tutti loro" (to all of them) (Nielinger 2006, 85). The premiere was given under the direction of Hermann Scherchen in Cologne on 24 October 1956. Four years later it was performed at the twenty-third Festival of Contemporary Music of the Venice Biennale under the direction of Bruno Maderna (Mila 1975, 382; Nielinger 2006, 83). This Venice performance was recorded for the radio on 17 September 1960 and in 1988, nearly three decades later, became the first commercially released recording of Il canto sospeso.

Four years after completing the work, Nono incorporated its entire fourth movement into his opera Intolleranza 1960 (Nielinger 2006, 83).

Il canto sospeso is set for solo soprano, alto, and tenor voices, mixed choir, and an orchestra consisting of:

The work is divided into nine movements with changing forces:

The movements are grouped into three large segments of four, three, and two movements, marked by a short pause between groups (Mila 1975, 283).

In its alternation of instrumental, choral, and solo movements, as well as in some internal details, Il canto sospeso resembles a Baroque cantata or mass setting. Although it is in no way a neoclassical composition, the Darmstadt ideology to which Nono subscribed at the time shared with neoclassical aesthetics a commitment to the notions of purity, order, and objectivity (Fox 1999, 122–23). Nono himself referred to the work as a "cantata" (Nielinger 2006, 86).

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