The poetic significance of Risonanze erranti (1985-87) should be interpreted in the light of the reflections developed since the summer of 1975 with the Venetian...

The poetic significance of Risonanze erranti (1985-87) should be interpreted in the light of the reflections developed since the summer of 1975 with the Venetian friend and philosopher Massimo Cacciari, to whom the work is dedicated. After 'Al gran sole carico d'amore' (In the Bright Sunshine Heavy with Love) (1972-74) Nono, obsessed by a sense of anguish owed to his solitude and his activism frustrated by the stagnation of Italian music institutions, felt the need to re-examine his work as a composer, in the Gramscian sense of an "organic intellectual in the society." His meeting with the philosopher revived his interest in the critical and artistic activity in the Vienna of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, and more broadly in the Mitteleuropean culture between the 19th and 20th centuries, which he perceived as a 'higher' commitment to the quest for truth, as opposed to the falsehood of political, scientific, religious, logical-mathematical thought and the misleading implications of language.