Luigi Nono

"All my works share a certain, very human, point of departure: it is often an event, or maybe an experience that acts as a window on our life and which spurs on my instinct and conscience, forcing me as both a musician and a person to document and bear witness." This claim by Luigi Nono was fulfilled in 1960. His friend Karl Amadeus Hartmann confirmed with the words: "Nono is on the offensive, and his language is that of fire", adding that this is the very reason that Nono the man and Nono the artist created this oeuvre.

from the CD booklet

"Music-life (or life-music, which is the same thing)": thus wrote the young Nono to Karl Amadeus Hartmann in 1953. That same year he wrote to Hermann Scherchen about "the very beautiful reality of our strong unity in life and in music." This desire for unity of art and life, which was still possible - indeed, perhaps necessary - after the war, found an ideal correspondence in Federico Garcia Lorca and his "barraca." It was this simple stage on a truck with which Lorca traveled across the country for a time; he wrote and staged plays for it on behalf of the young Spanish republic.
…in Der rote Mantel the obvious, "audible" political intentions are very much in the background; there are no choral, rhythmic slogans or anything similar. Nono's ballet on the "erotic hallelujah" is rather a bizarre kind of chamber play that seeks intensifications of Garcia Lorca's intangible, poetic images. And yet at the same time, of course, it is an homage to Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by the Falangists.

Peter Hirsch from the attached booket