„Il Canto Sospeso“,
the composition
It was Nono's will to set the legacy of the ten selected letters in 12-tone atmospheres in order to learn from them now and in the future.
Luigi Nono
The message in those letters from people condemned to death has carved itself into my heart, just as it was carved into the hearts of all those who understand these letters as testimonies of love, as conscious decisions and responsibility towards life, and as a model of sacrifice and resistance to Nazism, that monstrosity of irrationalism that tried to destroy reason.
The video collage
The film footage of a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abbado in the early 1990s became the basis for the video. The performance and reading of letters by Susanne Lothar and Bruno Ganz was assembled with artworks such as Picasso's Guernica and archival footage of the war years with a foreword by Umberto Eco to create an artistically designed video collage.
