Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono studied at Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia and University of Padua. Training under Gian Francesco Malipiero is recorded. Helmut Lachenmann, Mauricio Sotelo and Martinho Lutero Galati are recorded as having studied under Luigi Nono. The recorded working language is Italian. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are opera. Places of work recorded in the authority are Venice. Works named in the authority record are No hay caminos, hay que caminar. Distinctions recorded are Berliner Kunstpreis.

• Name — Luigi Nono • Born — 29 January 1924 • Birthplace — Venice, Italy • Died — 8 May 1990 • Place of death — Venice • Education — * Venice Conservatory • University of Padua • Occupation — * Composer • Organizations — Darmstadt School • Works — List of compositions

• Illustration — House in Venice where Nono was born, at Ponte Longo, Fondamenta delle Zattere, Dorsoduro

Nono, born in Venice, was a member of a wealthy artistic family; his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono began music lessons with Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Venice Conservatory in 1941, where he acquired knowledge of the Renaissance madrigal tradition, amongst other styles. After graduating with a degree in law from the University of Padua, he was given encouragement in composition by Bruno Maderna. Through Maderna, he became acquainted with Hermann Scherchen—then Maderna's conducting teacher—who gave Nono further tutelage and was an early mentor and advocate of his music. Scherchen presented Nono's first acknowledged work, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di A. Schönberg in 1950, at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. The Variazioni canoniche, based on the twelve-tone series of Arnold Schoenberg's Op. 41, including the "Ode-to-Napoleon" hexachord, marked Nono as a committed composer of anti-fascist political orientation. (Variazioni canoniche also used a six-element row of rhythmic values.) Nono had been a member of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War. His political commitment, while allying him with some of his contemporaries at Darmstadt such as Henri Pousseur and in the earlier days Hans Werner Henze, distinguished him from others, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Nevertheless, it was with Boulez and Stockhausen that Nono became one of the leaders of the New Music during the 1950s.

Intolleranza 1960 may be viewed as the culmination of the composer's early style and aesthetics. The plot concerns the plight of an emigrant captured in a variety of scenarios relevant to modern capitalist society: working class exploitation, street demonstrations, political arrest and torture, concentration camp internment, refuge, and abandonment. Described as a "stage-action"—Nono explicitly forbade the title of "opera"—it utilizes an array of resources from large orchestra, chorus, tape, and loudspeakers to the "magic lantern" technique drawn from Meyerhold and Mayakovsky theatre practices of the 1920s to form a rich expressionist drama. Angelo Ripellino libretto consisting of political slogans, poems, and quotations from Brecht and Sartre (including moments of Brechtian alienation), together with Nono's strident, anguished music, fully accords with the anti-capitalist fulmination the composer intended to communicate. The riot at the première in Venice was significantly due to the presence of both left- and right-wing political factions in the audience. Neo-nazis had attempted to disrupt proceedings with stink-bombs, nonetheless failing to prevent the performance ending triumphantly for Nono. Intolleranza is dedicated to Schoenberg. In 1960, Nono started his lifelong exploration of electroacoustic music with the first composition for tape called Omaggio a Emilio Vedova. Dissatisfied with the post-war music establishment, electroacoustic music enabled the composer to explore new means of expression, which could be presented in unconventional musical settings. For instance, La fabbrica illuminata for soprano and tape (1964) did not only make use of factory noises and spoken words from factory workers, but was also performed in factories. The work can be considered a comment on the exploitation of industrial workers. During the 1960s, Nono's musical activities became increasingly explicit and polemical in their subject, whether that be the warning against nuclear catastrophe (Canti di vita e d'amore: sul ponte di Hiroshima of 1962), the denunciation of capitalism (La Fabbrica Illuminata, 1964), the condemnation of Nazi war criminals in the wake of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (Ricorda cosi ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz, 1965), or of American imperialism in the Vietnam War (A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida, 1966). Nono began to incorporate documentary material (political speeches, slogans, extraneous sounds) on tape, and a new use of electronics, that he felt necessary to produce the "concrete situations" relevant to contemporary political issues. The instrumental writing tended to conglomerate the 'punctual' serial style of the early 1950s into groups, clusters of sounds—broadstrokes that complimented the use of tape collage. In keeping with his Marxist convictions as 'reinterpreted' through the writings of Antonio Gramsci, he brought this music into universities, trade-unions and factories where he gave lectures and performances. (The title of A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida contains a spelling error, the word "full" is "cheia" in Portuguese, not "cheja". • Illustration — Nono in Hilversum, 1970 Nono's second period, commonly thought to have begun after Intolleranza, reaches its apogee in his second "azione scenica", Al gran sole carico d'amore (1972–74)—a collaboration with Yuri Lyubimov, who was then director of the Taganka Theatre in Moscow. In this large-scale stage work, Nono completely dispenses with a dramatic narrative, and presents pivotal moments in the history of Communism and class-struggle "side-by-side" to produce his "theatre of consciousness". The subject matter (as evident from the quotations from manifestos and poems, Marxist classics to the anonymous utterances of workers) deals with failed revolutions; the Paris Commune of 1871, the 1905 Russian Revolution, and the insurgency of militants in 1960s Chile under the leadership of Che Guevara and Tania Bunke. Then extremely topical, Al gran sole offers a multi-lateral spectacle and a moving meditation on the history of twentieth-century communism, as viewed through the prism of Nono's music. It was premiered at the Teatro Lirico, Milan, in 1975. During this time, Nono visited the Soviet Union where he awakened the interest of Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt, among others, in the contemporary practices of avant-garde composers of the West. Indeed, the 1960s and 70s were marked by frequent travels abroad, lecturing in Latin America, and making the acquaintance of leading left-wing intellectuals and activists. It was to mourn the death of Luciano Cruz, a leader of the Chilean Revolutionary Front, that Nono composed Como una ola de fuerza y luz (1972). Very much in the expressionist style of Al gran sole, with the use of large orchestra, tape and electronics, it became a kind of piano concerto with added vocal commentary. Nono returned to the piano (with tape) for his next piece,... sofferte onde serene... (1976), written for his friend Maurizio Pollini after the common bereavement of two of their relatives (See Nono's Programme note|Col Legno,1994). With this work began a radically new, intimate phase of the composer's development—by way of Con Luigi Dallapiccola for percussion and electronics (1978) to Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima for string quartet (1980). One of Nono's most demanding works (both for performers and listeners), Fragmente-Stille is music on the threshold of silence. The score is interspersed with 53 quotations from the poetry of Hölderlin addressed to his "lover" Diotima, which are to be "sung" silently by the players during performance, striving for that "delicate harmony of inner life" (Hölderlin). A sparse, highly concentrated work commissioned by the Beethovenfest in Bonn, Fragmente-Stille reawakened great interest in Nono's music throughout Germany.

• Illustration — The Church of San Lorenzo, where Prometeo was premiered in 1984 Nono had been introduced to the Venice-based philosopher, Massimo Cacciari (Mayor of Venice from 1993 to 2000), who began to have an increasing influence on the composer's thought during the 1980s. Through Cacciari, Nono became immersed in the work of many German philosophers, including the writings of Walter Benjamin whose ideas on history (strikingly similar to the composer's own) formed the background to the monumental Prometeo—tragedia dell' ascolto (1984/85). The world premiere of the opera was staged in the Church of San Lorenzo, in Venice, on 25 September 1984, conducted by Claudio Abbado, with texts by Massimo Cacciari, lighting by Emilio Vedova, and wooden structures by Renzo Piano. Nono's late music is haunted by Benjamin's philosophy, especially the concept of history (Über den Begriff der Geschichte) which is given a central role in Prometeo. Musically, Nono began to experiment with the new sound possibilities and production at the Experimentalstudio der Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung des SWR in Freiburg. There, he devised a new approach to composition and technique, frequently involving the contributions of specialist musicians and technicians to realise his aims. The first fruits of these collaborations were Das atmende Klarsein (1981–82), Diario polacco II (1982)—an indictment against Soviet Cold War tyranny—and Guai ai gelidi mostri (1983). The new technologies allowed the sound to circulate in space, giving this dimension a role no less important than its emission. Such innovations became central to a new conception of time and space. These works were partly preparation for what many regard as his greatest achievement. Prometeo has been described as "one of the best works of the 20th century". After the theatrical excesses of Al gran sole, which Nono later remarked were a "monster of resources", the composer began to think along the lines of an opera or rather a musica per dramma without any visual, stage dimension. In short, a drama in music—"the tragedy of listening"—the subtitle a comment on consumerism today. Hence, in the vocal parts the most simple intervalic procedures (mainly fourths and fifths) resonate amidst a tapestry of harsh, dissonant, microtonal writing for the ensembles. Prometeo is perhaps the ultimate realisation of Nono's "theatre of consciousness"—here, an invisible theatre in which the production of sound and its projection in space become fundamental to the overall dramaturgy. The architect Renzo Piano designed an enormous 'wooden boat' structure for the première at San Lorenzo church in Venice, whose acoustics must to some extent be reconstructed for each performance. (For the Japanese première at the Akiyoshidai Festival (Shuho), the new concert hall was named 'Prometeo Hall' in Nono's honour, and designed by leading architect Arata Isozaki). The libretto incorporates disparate texts by Hesiod, Hölderlin, and Benjamin (mostly logistically inaudible during performance due to Nono's characteristic deconstruction), which explore the origin and evolution of humanity, as compiled and expanded by Cacciari. In Nono's timeless and visionary context, music and sound predominate over the image and the written word to form new dimensions of meaning and "new possibilities" for listening. Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar In 1985, Nono came across this aphorism ("Travellers, there are no trails – all there is, is travelling") on a wall of the Franciscan monastery near Toledo, Spain, and it played an important role in the rest of his compositions. As Andrew Clements writes about this aphorism in The Guardian, "It seemed to the composer the perfect expression of his own creative development, and in the last three years of his life he composed a trilogy of works whose titles all derive from that inscription." • Illustration — Grave of Nono in the San Michele Cemetery, Venice Nono's last pieces, such as Caminantes... Ayacucho (1986–87), inspired by a region in southern Peru that experiences extreme poverty and social unrest, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988–89), and "Hay que caminar" soñando (1989), offer comment on the composer's lifelong quest for political renewal and social justice. Nono died in Venice in 1990. After his funeral, the German composer Dieter Schnebel remarked that he "was a very great man"—a sentiment widely shared by those who knew him, and those who have come to admire his music. Nono is buried in the San Michele cemetery on the Isola di San Michele, alongside other artists like Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Zoran Mušič and Ezra Pound. Perhaps the three most important collections of Nono's writings on music, art, and politics (Texte: Studien zu seiner Musik (1975), Ecrits (1993), and Scritti e colloqui (2001)), as well as the texts collected in Restagno, have yet to be translated into English. Other admirers include architect Daniel Libeskind and novelist Umberto Eco (Das Nonoprojekt), for Nono totally reconstructed music and engaged in the most fundamental issues with regards to its expressivity. The Luigi Nono Archives were established in 1993, through the efforts of Nuria Schoenberg Nono, for the purpose of housing and conserving the Luigi Nono legacy.

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