Luigi Nono – A Portrait

Text: Tom R. Schulz, 16 January 2024

Shortly after the »Elbphilharmonie Magazin« is published, its editor-in-chief is in the habit of giving me a text assignment for the next issue. He always finds a topic that he thinks will suit me because he suspects that I know a bit about it. Last June, however, he asked me about something I hardly had a clue about. Could I write something about this composer for the three concerts in the Elbphilharmonie in March 2024 in honour of Luigi Nono, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday in January 2024? I had nothing by Nono and nothing about Nono, no recordings, no secondary literature.

While I was a music student, the class analysed a passage of his »Il canto sospeso« as an example of serial music. I knew Nono as Helmut Lachenmann’s composition teacher and also as a great source of inspiration for Hamburg’s former General Music Director Ingo Metzmacher. Pieces by Luigi Nono in a Hamburg concert hall are about as rare as the Blue Mauritius. Even in the Elbphilharmonie, which performs a lot of contemporary music.

In 2024, Luigi Nono would have celebrated his 100th birthday – reason enough to pay tribute to him with a highlight. The NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and the NDR Vokalensemble, the SWR Experimentalstudio and the innovative Quatuor Diotima are part of the programme.

However, I experienced an unannounced Nono performance myself in the Elbphilharmonie shortly before the corona virus hit: at the end of a concert with Teodor Currentzis conducting the SWR Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Ninth, two violinists played the duo »Hay que caminar’ soñando« from different positions in the Great Hall. Thus was Nono’s very last piece, which he developed from an earlier composition,.

The succinct words come from a poem by Antonio Machado. They were could hav e been Luigi Nono’s own mantra: »No hay caminos. Hay que caminar«. (There is no path, paths are made by walking). A consolation to all those who are forever lost to convention. I remember the music as a stark and somewhat lonely experience. But to be honest, what I remember most is that at a playing time of almost half an hour,  the piece is absurdly long for an encore. And aesthetically, too, it’s the opposite of a brisk final encore (which would also have been absurd after Mahler’s Ninth). Now I’m someone whose education is reminiscent of Emmental cheese: to borrow Alfred Polgar’s phrase, it consists largely of holes. But even as I get older, I’m still trying to transform one of the holes into something of Emmental substance. So I said yes to the editor-in-chief. After all, you grow with the tasks you’re set.

Over the course of the summer, I bought all kinds of secondhand CDs of Nono’s music and watched documentaries online; I read endless stuff about him, likewise online, bought a few second-hand books about him and his work, and borrowed the Lachenmann/Nono letters from the State Library (where I had to extend the loan period twice).

The whole thing is a bit silly really. But Nono simply grabbed meout of the blue, and in no uncertain way. Time seemed to stand still when I was listening to some of his enigmatic pieces. Every now and then, what was coming out of the loudspeakers seemed to be the valid answer to all the world’s unresolved questions. Nono expresses himself in a musical language of extraordinary intensity that is nonetheless flexibly organised. It really is a language, in fact, with its own grammar, syntax, characters and words. And with its very own concept of time.

Nono’s music comes from far away, and in its choice of resources – at first only acoustic instruments, then tape, later electronics or mixtures of all these, plus in most cases a wide variety of vocals – it has remained incredibly modern. Especially in the late Nono’s tendency for the music to disappear, ekeing out a precarious existence on the edge of what is audible, it gains an overwhelming presence and power for me. However, it won’t put up with even a second of background listening. If I don’t give it my complete concentration,  I lose the thread and have to go back to the beginning, until the next distraction, until the next time my thoughts wander off the subject. Nono’s music is meditation.

Most of the perceptive people who have analysed Nono thoroughly would defend him tooth and nail against precisely this verdict. Meditation? For God’s sake! Nono sought silence and to a certain extent sanctified it in a secular way, but there cannot be anything esoteric about the man and his music. And that’s true. Nono was a hard-core materialist. But one with (secret) contradictions, in my opinion, with a longing for the dissolution of all matter, for emptiness. He joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1952 and remained loyal to it till as long as he lived. The communist parties of Italy, France and Portugal were also quite popular in Germany in the 1970s.

The Euro-Communists, as they were known, were much less doctrinaire and Moscow-orientated than the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei DKP. They aspired to give Communism a human face, and somehow there was even a hint of hedonism to them . I remember to this day the  lavish parties organised by L’Unitá, the official PCI newspaper, in many a never-ending Ligurian summer of my youth.

Nono, however, was no armchair revolutionary, no pleasure-seeking leftie. In his music, he worked with great seriousness for the utopia of a man who no longer treats other men like a wolf. He put his finger in the wound of fascism (»Il canto sospeso«, 1956; »Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz«, 1965), and attacked the horrors, atrocities and injustices of the present (“Intolleranza 1960”). Nono, himself born into an upper-middle-class family, had to study law at the behest of his authoritarian father before he was allowed to devote himself to music. He persistently attacked bourgeois musical conventions and the bourgeoisie in general, and garnered corresponding reactions, including temporary performance bans.

His »Fabbrica illuminata« (1965) is a gripping, tormenting piece of »musique concrète« attacking the appalling working conditions in a Genoa steelworks, consisting solely of carefully edited tape recordings of sounds on location and a soprano voice that makes your blood run cold. The text is partly taken from working instructions posted in the factory, and Nono involved the workers in the production process. The second of his three »Canti di vita e d’amore« (1962) features a soprano solo depicting the suffering of a young Algerian resistance fighter tortured by the French military, and truly gets under your skin (»Djamila Boupachà«). His only string quartet »Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima« (1979) and the late work »Prometeo« (1984) are among the higher shrines of music at the end of the 20th century. One is fragile, the other lavish in its use of space and magical in its effect.

Anyone who exposes himself to Nono’s musical world for any length of time may notice a persistent sense of strangeness, which he may even come to appreciate. His music is unobliging, but over time it becomes delightfully so as we sense that this is true, uncompromising art without any illustrative fibre or gesture. Aesthetically speaking, there is really no going back. But the mainstream of music is much stronger of course. Viewed from there, the bright, not clinical but deeply humane light of Nono’s world illuminates a remote cloud-cuckoo -land. A lot of the very latest music, especially the casually tonal and blue-eyed orchestral music with wide-screen instrumentation coming out of America, sounds as if Nono had never existed, nor indeed John Cage. Musically, we live in an age of restoration.

As can be read in all the articles and books about him that I’ve read, Nono was a thinker in music. A meticulous intellectual, a craftsman of composition. A well-travelled intellectual. And above all: a Venetian. He studied the rich musical history of his home city from the bottom up, going all the way back to the »Odhecaton«, the first printed collection of music dating from 1501, an antique copy of which was passed around among fellow students during composition lessons with Nono’s teacher Gian Franco Malipiero, in order to re-orchestrate some of the ancient songs in it. Nono endlessly analysed the music of the Franco-Flemish school and Giovanni Gabrieli’s polychoral music, which was first tried out in the Basilica San Marco in Venice; he persistently studied counterpoint, excerpting entire works from Monteverdi to Hindemith and exploring twelve-tone music by Schoenberg and Webern, until he felt able to compose something based on all his predecessors.

So there was no trace of »dolce far niente« during his studies. And his very first work to be performed, the »Variazoni canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schoenberg«, caused an uproar in the ivory tower of the German musical avant-garde at the 1950 Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. The inspiration for this came from Hermann Scherchen, the legendary socialist conductor from Berlin and a contemporary of Schoenberg and Berg, with whom Nono took a conducting course in Venice in 1948, and who became his mentor during this time.