Luigi Nono

2007 release - Luigi Nono No hay caminos, hay que caminar … Andrej Tarkowskij (1987) “Wayfarer, there is no path. Yet you must walk”, in Spanish: “Caminante, no hay caminos. Hay que caminar.” These words are the contents of an inscription, which Luigi Nono read on the wall of a monastery in Toledo in the middle of the 1980s. They must have affected him most deeply, since in the last three years of his life he made them the basis of the titles of a trio of works. In “Hay que caminar” he surely recognized his own lifelong principle of continual creative restlessness, of perpetually being en route, which guided him from the outset. For a long time this was perhaps unconscious, but during the several years’ incubation of Prometeo it took conscious shape in the presentation of a route-less wayfaring that directs everything. An observation from 1981 is characteristic of this consciousness. For him it was primarily to do with the attempt “to find something, but not something certain.” The central piece of the trilogy mentioned above is No hay caminos, hay que caminar … Andrej Tarkowskij.
Nono dedicated the piece to the Russian film director Andrej Tarkowskij, outlawed from his own country, perhaps in view of the film Nostalghia, which has as its theme the search “for something, which perhaps doesn’t exist”... (Josef Häusler)