Considered unanimously as one of the peaks of post-war opera, Prometeo was the acme of Nono’s research, begun towards the end of the 1960s, about the sense of making music and the very aim of art, in conjunction with the reflective withdrawal of its expressive instruments and musical contents after his combative years of “commitment”. After a four-year elaboration work, in close cooperation with Massimo Cacciari, the opera debuted on 25th September 1984, under the baton of Claudio Abbado, in San Lorenzo’s deconsecrated church in Venice, where Renzo Piano had created an enormous wooden structure similar to a ship, or the soundbox of a huge lute, to accommodate the audience. Around it, at different distances from the floor and on the structure itself, the musicians moved, with very few visual effects created on purpose by Emilio Vedova. After a deep revision, the opera was staged in a definitive version exactly a year later in Milan. Prometeo is a work that refuses to relate, to represent, to compromise the lis