“Intolleranza 1960”, OperaBalletVlaanderen, Ghent
Dana Rufolo in Belgium
16 May 2025
The theatrical opera Intolleranza 1960 as interpreted by OperaBalletVlaanderen (OBV) is the canary in the coal mine. The Italian citizen Luigi Nono wrote the libretto and composed the opera 65 years ago as an ode to humankind’s yearning for self-determination which compels we the people to resist social injustice and tyranny. It is uncannily relevant today, especially with its additional reference to forces of nature that supersede human will.
Most remarkably, the central character, the Emigrant, survives years of servitude as a miner (in Belgium) and the dangers of unjust torture and incarceration in a concentration camp (in Algeria) and a journey homeward to his place of birth (Italy) only to die in a natural catastrophe, a flood which is undoubtedly a reference to the Po River flood of 1951. Sixty-five years is a long time to still be plagued by worry about social injustice and the collapse of the natural world. Our little canary is in danger of its life.
Photo credit: Annemie Augustijns.
What better than a Happening-style operatic performance to rub in the urgency of the moment? While always retaining a respect for aesthetics that characterizes the OBV, this theatrical opera with its atonal music (Nono is Arnold Schönberg’s son-in-law) was staged by Benedikt von Peter as a Happening where audience mingles with actors (a mix of the OBV’s ballet corps and extras) and singers to create the patchwork of events that seems to spring into life spontaneously on stage. And the “stage” is in fact backstage. The audience was escorted to the rows of seats in the auditorium only at the very conclusion of Intolleranza 1960; stern ushers identified by their orange scarves separated us from the few surviving flood victims who declare like figures from Dante’s Purgatory, “Qui bisogna restare e qui mutare” (“We are those who must stay and change”).
The Happening is a mostly abandoned performance style which surfaced in the late 1950s, the same era in which Nono conceived Intolleranza 1960. Its compelling quality is immediateness. By abandoning the proscenium stage – or for that matter any stage, even thrust – the Happening obliges the audience member to be implicated in the action. The theatrical event emphasizes the enactment of a collective reality rather than the dramatization of a narrative. Appropriately, Nono referred to the piece as “azione scenica” (stage actions) and not opera. This Intolleranza 1960 includes elements of unpredictability and even a sense of risk.
Photo credit: Annemie Augustijns.
Peter Tantsits as the Emigrant.
There was, for one, the press of the crowd. Although the audience is restricted to 300 and the backstage area of the Opera House in Ghent measures a generous 19 metres long and 13 metres broad, with the addition of 44 OBV opera singers, 25 extras, six soloists and ten ushers, it was crowded. Those from the opera side of OBV were a chorus (of miners, emigrants, demonstrators, prisoners, peasants, flood victims) but they and the others were also always shuffling around the space, looking at audience members, talking briefly to us in set phrases, touching us (once, the face of a Ghent resident perhaps known to the actor was caressed), beaming their flashlights here and there, sometimes at us.
I observed one woman looking somewhat panicked when she was caught among milling actors who had moved forward to catch regulation grey blankets thrown to them and who then trampled around the space looking for a spot to spread out their blankets and lie down. There was always the sense that something could spontaneously go off-script, not least that a spectator might accidentally tread on a “sleeping” emigrant. Spectators become participants to some extent, and the danger is real. It always is in Happenings. Actors are as unprotected as are the audience. This increases the sense of immediacy.
Another characteristic of Happenings is that the means of production are simple, and such was the case in Katrin Wittig’s scene design. It was Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre revisited. A versatility of heights is achieved using ladders, so there were some people on the floor, some on chairs scattered here and there, some on bleacher units. Actors and singers often stood on chairs when they sang. The swarm of homeless emigrants who accompany the Emigrant climbed up the rungs of rickety wooden ladders which were themselves of different heights.
Lighting, designed by Susanne Reinhardt, was chiefly those powerful flashlights held by the restless emigrants and on occasion beamed directly into the eyes of people nearby. Background lighting was diffuse and soft. The symphony orchestra led by Stefan Klingele which played Nono’s atonal and serial composition with inspiration was mostly located under the backstage space, so the music reached our ears from all directions and through gratings.
Nono’s Emigrant is guided on his return home by the idea of the eternal female, a woman who is a helper rather than a seducer, and so black and white images of a female face that appear to float behind bars are visible along one stage wall. Meanwhile, the Emigrant’s female companion whom he has met along the way, soprano Lisa Mostin, fulfills the role of spirit and guide, as she is hidden and it is only her rich warm voice that we hear. Possibly, it is her face that we see on the wall.
At right angles, along the rear backstage wall, there are a row of shadowy portraits in black and white of fellow travelers, men and women. At times, there are projections of images, including one of the Emigrant’s face as if it were a relic, onto articles of clothing or parts of human bodies. Beside the blankets, there are no additional props, unless one includes the flood of water that surges over a backstage wall into a recipient while an increasingly growing number of men and women sink to the ground motionless, presumably dead by drowning. A touching sensorial reality that emphasizes the Happening-like immediateness of our collective experience is the overpowering smell of chlorine that engulfed us – no doubt the result of a city ordinance requiring that the water be disinfected.
Angelo Maria Ripellino intended to write the libretto, but in the end Nono wrote the bulk. Ripellino’s Hymn to Life initiates a series of statements from twentieth-century humanist intellectuals (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bertolt Brecht, Julius Fučík, Jean-Paul Sartre) that are sung. Always, Nono’s music and the powerful voices of the operatic singers as well as the chorus (of miners, of protestors, of prisoners, of flood victims) are synchronized so that there is never one singular and transcendent focus of interest. There are even long stretches of silence – no orchestra playing, no vocals; this was most pronounced at the conclusion when everyone seemed to be lost in a reverie while awaiting the catastrophic flood.
It is true that the purity of Jasmin Jorias’s sweet mezzo-soprano voice as the woman of temptation overtook our attention for a moment when she sang out her hatred and her love for the Emigrant who was leaving her behind, but even the powerful tenor of the Emigrant himself, Peter Tantsits, never predominated over whatever other sounds co-existed or surrounded their arias. This was so even when the Emigrant is entrapped by police during a protest he was passing through on his way home to Italy; he is tortured, and it is the sound of the whip or whatever instrument of torture it was that was being used (I couldn’t see the scene from where I was seated) which was the single most specifically loud sound of all. Similarly, the musical interludes from the orchestra are like islands of musical sound rather than the raison d’être of the performance, as is usually the case with classical opera.
Reinforcing the intention of total immersion, ahead of the performance a semi-nude actor lay on a blanket in the Ghent Opera House foyer. He was a prescient echo of the theme of homelessness. This is a performance with amazing contemporary relevance. The words of Nono’s chosen thinkers are applicable today. They have been battered into strands of thought that mingle with the distractions and sounds and even ethereal singing of agitated humans, representing – as Sartre is quoted as saying – an era where the will to be free is stronger than ever before and the counter-force of oppression is at its most violent. In this OBV Intolleranza 1960, a poignant balance between anti-humanist forces and communal resistance is demonstrated with compassion and fervor; the performance closes on a note of optimism. Maybe the canary will live, after all.
