Luigi Nono was born and died in Venice, and though he was one of the leading figures of the 1950s European avant garde, he was always first and foremost a Venetian composer, and much of his music is as inseparable from the city of his birth as that of his great baroque predecessors, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. The centenary of Nono’s birth fell on 29 January, and the Venice Biennale has marked the occasion with his greatest and most ambitious work, Prometeo, performed in the same space, the deconsecrated church of San Lorenzo, where it was premiered in 1984 (conducted then by Claudio Abbado).
In the UK, Nono’s music is still much less often performed than that of his close contemporaries, perhaps because of its unswerving political dimension – he was a lifelong Marxist, who firmly believed that every composer should take political and social responsibility for their music – and his works have often been dismissed superficially as agit prop. But by the time he began to work on Prometeo, his whole approach to composition had undergone a radical change, and the bold gestures and poster-paint slogans of his earlier works had been replaced by music that seemed to teeter on the edge of silences that threatened constantly to overwhelm it, and which now carried more philosophical, contemplative resonances.
