When the month-long, extremely complex rehearsals for Luigi Nono's music theater "Al gran sole carico d'amore" in the Staatstheater Mainz came to an end in March 2020, the disappointment could not have been greater.

Only on the day of the premiere did the house postpone the planned performances indefinitely due to the beginning of the corona pandemic.

After all, Deutschlandfunk broadcast a recording of the dress rehearsal, which was able to give a first impression of the musical feat of a medium-sized opera house.

It was to take two years before Claudio Abbado's scenic action, the subtitle of which premiered in Milan in 1975, could be experienced on the Mainz stage - exclusively in the top view from the first and second tier of the Great House, because the parquet floor also serves as an extended one Venue of the orchestra as the back stage.

In any case, there is no linear plot in Nono's setting of writings, quotes and poems from the context of revolutions of the past century and a half.

The title (“Loaded under the great sun of love”) is based on a line by Arthur Rimbaud, the first part superimposes the suppressed uprising of the Paris Commune in May 1871 with excerpts from letters by the German-Argentinian socialist Tamara Bunke, who joined Che Guevara would have.

The second part, which is even denser, interweaves the Petersburg Bloody Sunday of 1905 as reflected in Maxim Gorki's novel "The Mother" with motifs from the Turin workers' uprisings, the revolution in Cuba and the Vietnam War.

Elisabeth Stöppler's direction conveys this in repeatedly bloody, menacing images, moving enough not to become oratorical and at the same time sufficiently abstract not to get lost in the ramifications of the multilingual libretto.

Not even the bizarre brief appearance of a spiked helmet Bismarck (costumes: Nicole von Graevenitz) changes anything about that.

Guns aimed, fists clenched and arms stretched

The unitary stage (by Hermann Moistur) is divided into four raised, adjacent rooms, whose perforated wooden walls only initially, as in a studio situation, shield the art of the four sopranos, who in turn play a central role.

This quartet of Marie-Christine Haase, Alexandra Samouilidou, Maren Schwier and Linda Sommerhage rises again and again far and clear into the seraphic and thus confirms the sympathy of the communist Nono for the Guevara quote that beauty does not stand in the way of revolution.

The choruses of the disabled, wounded and armed, which soon occupy the space for themselves, unfold a similar cutting presence in the scenic as they do in the music as choruses.

In general, the choirs: Nono, in this respect definitely influenced by the Venetian polychoral system of the late Renaissance, calls for a coro piccolo alongside the large choir (of the Staatstheater Mainz), sung by Les Métaboles, the Parisian ensemble specialists for contemporary vocal music.

The Mainz general music director Hermann Bäumer keeps them and the orchestra under constant tension, also in coordination with the live electronics realized by the SWR experimental studio, which Stöppler's director can no longer quite maintain in the second part.

At some point too many guns are simply aimed, fists clenched, arms stretched, the appearance of the cigar-smoking factory director (Alexander Spemann) looks a bit too much like a formula,

the baritone revolutionary Pavel (Brett Carter) comes a tad too close to Guevara's T-shirt icon, which is also quoted here.

Strong is the rebellious mother figure of Sania Anastasia, strong, in the spirit of Nono, are the women in general.

Even if the hour of the revolution isn't right now: in taking sides with the brave and the victims, in rebelling against violence and against an orchestral "repressive machinery" that breaks out in the second part with all the force of the chords, as described in the libretto, Nonos seems half a century old Action painfully topical.

Al gran sole carico d´amore, Staatstheater Mainz, on March 22, April 1 and 8 at 7.30 p.m., April 10 at 2 p.m.