ABSTRACT
Luigi Nono subsequently dated the beginning of work on Il canto sospeso to October 1955. The young couple were taking a delayed honeymoon at La Mortella, the villa of William and Susana Walton on the island of Ischia, where Henze was also a guest. Two letters to Steinecke from Ischia in the last months of 1955 document the progress of his postponed Darmstadt commission. Nono had started on the new work with the idea that it should be a setting of poems by Pavese – presumably the love poems anticipated by Steinecke. The orchestral movements therefore seem to have been intended for quite another work. In Il canto sospeso, song is suspended in a dynamic network of multiple mirrors: structures run forwards and backwards in time, sounds are balanced by their non-presence as rests, components of words are reflected through time and pitch space.
