Composer
Biography:
Luigi Nono was born the son of the engineer Mario Nono (* 1890 - † 1975) and his wife Maria (* 1891 - † 1976; née Manetti). He came from a long-established Venetian family, his parents gave him the first name of a grandfather who was an important painter from the Venetian school of the 19th century. As a high school student, he received piano lessons and in 1941 became an external student in composition with Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Accademia musicale Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice. At his father's request, after graduating from high school in 1942, he studied law in Padua. In 1946 he finished his studies with a diploma, in the same year he met Bruno Maderna, with whom he took private composition lessons. Both attended a conducting course with Hermann Scherchen as part of the Venice Biennale in 1948, which Nono then accompanied on a concert tour to Zurich and Rapallo. Through Scherchen, Nono gained access to the musical tradition of the German-speaking world, in particular to the music and musical thinking of the Second Viennese School.
In 1955 he married Nuria Schönberg (b. 1932), whom he had met the year before in Hamburg at the premiere of her father Arnold Schönberg's opera Moses und Aron. The couple had two daughters, Silvia (b. 1959) and Serena Bastiana (b. 1964).
In 1950 he took part in the Kranichsteiner/Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik for the first time, where his Canonical Variations on a series of Schönberg's op. 41 were premiered under Scherchen's direction. He regularly took part in these courses until 1960, during which a total of seven of his compositions were performed, and from 1957 to 1960 he also worked there as a lecturer. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen, with whom he met for the first time in Darmstadt in 1952, and Pierre Boulez, whom he met a year later during a stay in Paris with Scherchen, he was considered one of the leading representatives of the new serial music of the so-called Darmstadt school.
In 1952, Nono joined the Italian Communist Party, where he was active throughout his life at local and national level. From 1969 he corresponded with his fellow party member and later President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano, who had written theater and music reviews while he was studying law, and discussed political issues with him in particular. While Nono was committed to Cuba and the revolution and campaigned for the Third World, Napolitano focused more on East-West relaxation.
In the beginning, his pieces were often characterized by high density and volume, which sometimes reached the pain threshold. Nono spread humane and political or class-struggle ideas through the means of new music. From the 1960s onwards, examples of social and political commitment increasingly included plays about intolerance and violence towards refugees (Intolleranza, 1960/61), the consequences of a nuclear war (Sul ponte di Hiroshima, 1962), the alienation and stress caused by the capitalist world of work ( La fabbrica illuminata, 1964), the Holocaust (Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz, 1965), the Spanish Civil War (Epitaffio a Federico Garcia Lorca), anti-fascist resistance (Il canto sospeso), or the student revolts of the late 1960s (Musica -Manifesta n.1). His musical processing of these thematic complexes consistently used the means of New Music and not the musical ideas of socialist realism. Later, Nono tended more towards subtly lyrical seclusion such as B. in the string quartet Fragmente – Stille, To Diotima. From 1960 onwards, starting with his first tape composition Omaggio a Emilio Vedova, he continued to study and study the possibilities of electronics in music until his death. Nono began working in the Freiburg Experimental Studio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation. Some of the works created there move on the edge of the audible.
In the 1970s, Nono had met the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, with whom he worked closely in the years that followed. Cacciari also provided the text material for Prometeo. Tragedy of Hearing (1984), Nono's last major musical theater project together.
According to his family, Luigi Nono died on May 8, 1990 after being hospitalized shortly before because of a liver disease. He is buried in the San Michele Cemetery in Venice.
Risonanze erranti – Post-prae-ludium per Danube:
Guai ai gelidi mostri - Quando stanno morendo. Diario Polacco n. 2:
