War and memory: Nono, Penderecki, Britten

This essay aims to approach how classical music has responded to the impact of World War II. We will study three pieces of work produced shortly after the event itself, but whose authors space and aesthetics are far removed: Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso (1955-56), Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1959), and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1961-62), which we will approach from the perspective of memory, the relationship between text and music, and its musical parameters.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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