A REMEMBRANCE OF FRANCO DONATONI

by Giampaolo Coral

My first contact with Franco Donatoni was in 1969 when, as president of the jury of a composition competition, he presented me with the award for one of my orchestra scores. I barely knew the music of Donatoni. At that time, in Trieste, not only was it impossible to find a musician who “taught” the New Music, the latter was also obstructed and considered to be a sideshow phenomenon. I therefore had to forge ahead with the curiosity of a neophyte.
But the music, and therefore the thinking of Donatoni, was too difficult for a self-taught person. The negation of subjectivity and the lack of confidence in the possibilities of the language present in the first period of Donatonian composition, due to Webernian assimilation, reveal, through the complex mechanisms and secrets of his music, the dramatic dimension of Man faced with the problems of Art, away from the comfortable and narcissistic representations of the Ego.
It was the extreme resonance of a historical moment of humanity, the most tragically vast that man can remember. The emptiness in the world, after the second world war, was repeated in art. There was nothing more to “sing” so as not to delude man that maybe there still was “something” to sing about. The abandonment to fetishism of material through writing, reduced to combinatorial automatism or pure indeterminism, makes Donatoni detach himself from any finalities, dumb-struck, as in the discomfort in the “pianissimi” of Etwas ruhiger in Ausdruck, born from a simple Schönberghian cell, or in the alienation of a total dissociation with one’s own creating, as in Per Orchestra, where the act of composition marked in the score by a Golem character, does not correspond to the act of execution. In the impossibility of “telling”, the illusion of communication is reduced to a pure gesture. Music which, in the disruption of its elements, lives the disruption of man. It’s not man, anymore, who forms the object, but the object which takes on human contours. From here comes the neurosis and loneliness. Because Donatoni was a unique artist and his works are full of loneliness. Donatoni knew that only after a relentless distruction was it possible to build. Before renewal, it was necessary to eliminate every negativity, to reduce everything to ashes, to a relic; to demonstrate, up to the most extreme limits, how the formulas of subjectivity had not way out. One could say that, like for Arnold Schönberg, Donatoni was, for his rational, pervasive paranoia as the only path and the only means of salvation, the personification of Adrian Leverkühn. From the end of the seventies Donatoni abandons negative thinking and finds the pleasure of sound again. The “automatism”, as an emblem of impotence, is transformed in “invention”, symbol of life. Donatonian writing, since then, has been a symbol of art of purification; it’s a penmanship which builds pure forms. The “after”, as Donatoni writes, is a question of gifts. I began to comprehend his music when I read Questo, his first book. A secret world opened up to me then. I understood that a music similar to “the cardiac pulsations of a lonely sparrow” could exist, and to execute it you had to think of the fluttering of the wings of the butterfly Acherontia atropos - everything very distant from amateur composition, from Habsburg myths or from blaring bands in the squares, which are so popular today. I personally met the Veronese maestro in 1974, during a concert in which one of my works was being executed. His physical aspect, almost Luciferous, frightened me; but his words, always full of wise irony, comforted me. From that moment, a friendship was formed which his death interrupted. As Paola Isotta writes, humorism and anguish kept Donatoni from becoming a musician with power, as were Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and, at a certain time, Sylvano Bussotti and Salvatore Sciarrino.
I invited the Maestro to be part of the jury for the Music Award City of Trieste.
The first thing he did upon his arrival in Trieste, was to buy a big, eccentric summer hat, in colonial style. He read the scores with an expert eye, quickly, like someone who knows exactly what he’s looking for. His manner was without false flattery and without diplomacy and, contrary to the strength of his music, also transgressive. During the examination of the scores, scandalizing his colleagues, he literally lay down on the floor of the large hall of the Schmidl museum. I asked him “Franco, do you feel sick?”. “No, I’m sleeping,” he replied. That year (1987) the composer turned 60. The Tommaseo Gallery, the Officina Association, the Chromas Association and the Music Award City of Trieste organized an exhibition of the Maestro’s scores. He, in turn, and with great generosity, donated his autographed manuscript of his Solo for 10 string instruments to the Schmidl Museum.
He returned to Trieste 10 years later, invited by Trieste Contemporanea and the Chromas Association, for the concert in his honor in the occasion of his seventieth birthday. When he was asked to talk about art, he would change the subject to the function of a sardine can; if he was questioned on his feelings, he would reply that his greatest emotion was to find himself in front of a risotto of fish. The last time I saw him was in 1998 at the festival Musica of Strasburg, where the comic opera Alfred, Alfred was playing, in which the composer tells with irony of his experiences in a room with two beds in the hospital Alfred of Melbourne which was specialized in diabetes, the disease which would eventually cause his death. During the last few years he worked on the transcription and instrumentation of that work with which Johann Sebastian Bach also took his leave of the world: The art of the fugue.