Canciones a Guiomar

Born in Venice, Luigi Nono was a member of a wealthy artistic family, and his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono began music lessons with Gian Francesco Malipiero in 1941 at the Venice Conservatory 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 tuition and was an early mentor and advocate of his music. It was Scherchen who presented Nono's first acknowledged work, the Variazione canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di A. Schönberg in 1950, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt—a centre for the rediscovery of modern music after the devastation of dictatorship and war. The Variazioni canoniche, based on the twelve-tone series of Arnold Schoenberg's Op 41, marked Nono as a committed composer of anti-fascist political orientation (Annibaldi 1980). (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 (Schoenberg-Nono, 2008). In fact Nono's striking 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. A number of Nono's early works were first performed at Darmstadt, including Tre epitaffi per Federico García Lorca (195153), La Victoire de Guernica (1954)—modeled after Picasso's painting as an indictment of the war-time atrocity—and Incontri (1955). The Liebeslied (1954) was written for Nono's wife-to-be, Nuria Schoenberg (daughter of Arnold Schoenberg), whom he met at the 1953 world première of Moses und Aron in Hamburg. They married in 1955. Nono had enrolled as a member of the Italian Communist Party in 1952 (Flamm 1995). The world première of Il canto sospeso (195556) for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra brought Nono international recognition and acknowledgment as the legitimate successor to Webern. "Reviewers noted with amazement that Nono's canto sospeso achieved a synthesis—to a degree hardly thought possible—between an uncompromisingly avant-garde style of composition and emotional, moral expression" ( If any evidence exists that Webern's work does not mark the esoteric expiry of Western music in a pianissimo of aphoristic shreds, then it is provided by Luigi Nono's Il Canto Sospeso The 32-year-old composer has proved himself to be the most powerful of Webern's successors. (Kölner Stadt Anzeiger, 26 October 1956, quoted in Flamm 1995) The full impact of Nono's art, especially the late music, has only just begun to take effect in the Engl