There has been a growing attention towards the topicality of Luigi Nono’s music, as if suggesting that the times are ripe for a deeper reception of his musical thought, a new encounter between the work of an authentically visionary author, an anticipator of the future, and contemporary sensibility.
The same sensibility seems to renew the value of Nono’s theatrical conception, and in this context the case of La fabbrica illuminata seems exemplary.
The work stems from Nono’s meeting in 1961 with the then very young poet Giuliano Scabia. It is an invigorating encounter, full of strength and confidence, a period of extraordinary energy arising from common desires and utopias and from a common taking on of the problems of the historical present.
These are widespread sentiments. In the text-manifesto A molti il teatro si è rivelato all’improvviso (*) Scabia describes those years as follows: “Almost everyone was in search of the present. (…) There was a new world to be filled with hope. The future was the present, and it transfigured the past.”
A dense dialogue was established between the two artists on the form of theatre in music and on political commitment. A dialogue that retraced the teachings and suggestions of the avant-garde, whilst cultivating a tension towards a total use of space and narrative time. These comparisons led to a large-scale project in 1962, Da un diario italiano (From an Italian Diary), which found interest from the Teatro alla Scala.
Nono had just completed Intolleranza 1960. From that experience he felt the urgency of a new commitment towards the theatre. From Scabia’s testimony we can see how, during their work together, new motivations began to emerge within Nono. In particular, from a letter of January ‘64: “while some time ago the possibility of more theatre for me seemed very distant, now it is here. Because it is moving as I have long hoped.”
Underlying the convergence between the two authors is a total rejection of theatre understood as spectacle, a need for dramaturgical elaborations capable of bypassing the mimetic processes normally taken for granted or seen as inevitable.
Nono and Scabia begin to work on the construction of a large dramaturgical structure articulated in six scenes or ‘situations’ whose subject is a reading of recent Italian history. This large framework centers five female figures and various choirs, including a prominent children’s choir (fourth scene).
The intention is to compose “large scenes of interwoven linguistic materials”.
The selection of material ranges from various factory work situations, trade union struggles, accounts of a strike in Palermo, references to the events in Hungary, the theme of fratricidal violence, and hints at Majakovsky’s suicide.
One entire lengthy scene, the fifth, is centered on the Vajont tragedy, with “the collapse of all the scenes, the catastrophe of the theatre: very long, intoxicating; collapsing scenes bombarded with photos of Longarone and the dam, deformed”.
The work converges and culminates to a final scene in which a ‘great assembly of humanity’ of Majakovskian flavor takes shape.
“Idea for the resurrection of the dead: from below, the overwhelmed rise up, carrying flags, objects, books, newspapers, tattered; they begin a march; first THE FIVE WOMEN, black, undone, enormous, then the men; then everyone; they continuously march across the scene; idea of an endless procession:
…”
So does Nono write about the project.
In this phase of elaboration and experimentation, Scabia describes Nono as “always very uncertain, and always very decisive.”
Nono and Scabia’s work is characterized by research that requires a commonality of thought and tools. This is particularly evident in a letter from Nono in March 64:
“instinctive idea: to use these structures
phonetic structures as you have
fixed them –
this technique corresponds
to today’s composition technique –
THAT IS: the relationships between phonemes (or sounds)
are created from time to time, not
in a single perspective succession
in time —–>, but continuously
in polyvalence in all directions –
not a single center, but various
centers that chase each other, determining
and inventing themselves.”
There is thus a tension towards a new spatiality already starting from the composition of the texts and in their elaboration.
In 1964 Diario Italiano seemed ready to be realized. The director Virginio Puecher was involved, assisted by Josef Svoboda for the scenography. However, the production process was interrupted almost immediately: La Scala rejected the work, blaming the harshness of the text.
At the same time, however, Nono and Scabia were already working on a new development: from a rib of Diario italiano came the idea of a fragment, which in a few months became La fabbrica illuminata.
Nono and Scabia first wrote about it in letters in May ’64. La Scala’s rejection came in June of the same year.
There was an interest from RAI, which proposed Nono to elaborate a Cantata from Diario Italiano to inaugurate the sixteenth edition of the Premio Italia which, in that year, would be held in Genoa. The RAI commission was shared by Italsider – appearing for the first time in this troubled story (**) – who would host the first performance.
However, after RAI viewed the text of the Cantata, they censured the piece and immediately cancelled the commission, followed by Italsider, who also cancelled the performance.
These conflicts are indicative of the increasing censorship of the time, which made it impossible to publicly address political issues such as deaths at work.
The expulsion of Dario Fo and Franca Rame from RAI in 1962 is an example of this. Addressing such topics in public, when more than ten workers were dying every day in Italy, was considered an offense to the government.
But Nono and Scabia’s work continued. La fabbrica illuminata begins to take shape.
Scabia: “from a fragment of the second scene (Sentire il mattino che vibra tutto vergine) we extracted the materials that became La fabbrica”.
And in fact in the same month of May ‘64, following the first two drafts of the project, Nono, Scabia and Marino Zuccheri enter the Italsider site of Cornigliano. This opportunity was favored by the presence of Lisetta Carmi, an extraordinary figure who had first worked as a musician and later as a photographer, and who had established a very deep professional and human relationship with the reality of the factory.
In Cornigliano, Nono, Zuccheri and Scabia recorded the sounds of steel processing, as well as the voices of the workers with whom they had several encounters and “all the writing we encountered along the way” (Scabia).
After the experience at Italsider, the work began to shift in purpose. The central idea now drew from the everyday life encountered in the factory.
Such encounter is what promoted a research finalized towards an act of knowledge – for Scabia, this is a moment of mutual understanding between the artists’ work and the workers’ lives in the factory (***) .
The work proceeded rapidly and was completed between June and July ‘64. The voices recorded at Italsider are joined, in the RAI Phonology studio in Milan, by those of the RAI Choir, as well as the voice of the singer, both in the studio and then on stage, and electronically processed sounds.
The development of research in the study of phonology suggests a very synthetic writing style and points towards the construction of a relatively short piece for soprano and four-track magnetic tape.
All the composition and processing of texts and sounds occurred within the dimension of music.
The music becomes composed “with” the space. In many senses: from the space in which the sounds of the steelworks originate, which the sounds carry with them, to the space of performance and listening, reproduced in four sound sources that surround the audience.
A new musical dimension opens up.
The articulation of La fabbrica illuminata began to take shape. The piece, in its final version, consists of four parts: Part I consists of four chorales and culminates in the steel casting episode, entrusted only to the magnetic tape and the articulation of sound in space; Part II (IL GIRO DEL LETTO) is a nightmare of the nights after work, a theme on which the authors had already worked extensively for Diario Italiano (image of the “house without windows”); Part III (TUTTA LA CITTA’) reprises the protest after yet another death; it concludes with a Finale entrusted to the soprano’s voice alone, the tape silences.
The most soundly characterized part is that of the steel casting. In the steelworks, the process leading from the melting of the steel in the blast furnace to its transformation into rolled steel occurred along a one-and-a-half-kilometer path. The authors entered that space with respect and care. As Scabia describes it: “I remember it as a journey to the underworld, disturbing and sacred.” In the tape made by Nono and Zuccheri, the casting of steel is rendered with a dramatic acoustic crescendo, involving all four sound sources around the audience, reaching an excruciating climax.
In the final section, Nono feels the need to close La fabbrica with Cesare Pavese’s verses from Due poesie a T. “perhaps also out of a need for serenity after the nightmare of the hot rolling mill” (Scabia)
The mornings will pass
the anguish will pass
it will not always be so
you will find something again
“Anguish will pass” means here: all that we have lived and are living is History, it does not happen in vain. Man is conscious, he acts, he transforms. “You will find something again”: all this ending is singing, and singing in Nono is an expression of a truth, an existential truth.
Following the Cornigliano experience, we reach the third draft. The final one will be the sixth. It consists of the transcription of the final musical result.
The text is composed/formed by the needs of musical organization.
It is not a ‘text for music’.
In Nono’s theatrical conception, word and music must coincide. This means that the material recorded in the factory is taken up is taken up in its musical reality, not in a naturalistic sense, but through language solutions sought outside the sphere of artistic contemplation—outside the sphere of the rhetorical mechanisms of composition.
In the Introduction to the score of La fabbrica Illuminata, Nono writes: “The composition of the Cornigliano material with the original electronic one was derived from me in order to overcome the naturalistic imprint of the former and the coldly mechanical one of the latter with various elaborations, also together with the choir, possible with electronic devices.”
Once La fabbrica illuminata was canceled at the RAI’s Premio Italia, and after Italsider’s refusal to present the piece in Genoa (****), it was the Venice Music Biennale that hosted its first performance, on 15 September 1964.
Scabia recalls: “La fabbrica was a kind of musical political manifesto and provoked a great debate.” “Nono was very happy because he had set a significant discussion in motion.” “We had placed ourselves in a zone on the edge of music—one step further and we would have been out.”
What is most striking about La fabbrica illuminata is the radicality of Nono’s approach, the culmination of his research during those years, which pushed him toward a decisive expansion of linguistic, sonic, and spatial dimensions. All this, within the realm of music. Music composed ‘with’ space. And for space.
We encounter a work in which foregrounds and depths alternate and intersect. Nono’s compositional work reflects both the objectivity of the piece and its reflection in the interiority of the worker; this dynamic is never abandoned. On the contrary, it is the foundation upon which the piece is built.
There is nothing descriptive; a kind of ruthless objectivity dominates everything: the acquired sounds and the composed sounds are fused into the score while retaining their unmistakable expressive power.
The alienation of the working man and his labor is exposed in an epic, objective manner that profoundly elaborates the models of tragedy and the historical examples Nono confronted.
The product of the long process that began with the composition of Diario italiano, La fabbrica illuminata represents a significant condensation of the ideas and reflections developed along the way.
The point, it seems to me, is this: La fabbrica illuminata is explicitly not a piece designed for the theatre. This was no longer possible. In reality, it is much more—it is theatre in a higher and more synthetic form. New, essential, and necessary, as it is the result of engaging with and compromising with reality on multiple levels.
Sound in La fabbrica illuminata is concrete, real sound, and this fact alone introduces us into a dimension far removed from and different from the dramaturgical dimension of ‘verisimilitude’ (*****).
The theatre of La fabbrica illuminata lies in the presence of sound and textual narratives that carry with them the experiences from which they spring, in the immediate succession of materials. Theatre is in the happening of this very special experiment in musical theatre in which everything is vigorously objective and narrative in itself.
La fabbrica illuminata presents itself today as a “form concluded in itself”: La fabbrica is the accomplished expression of an idea – of music about man today, situated at the crossroads of its servitude / liberation.
If one can think that Nono’s intention to create a grand fresco of musical theatre would, years later, result in the composition of Al gran sole carico d’amore, La fabbrica illuminata stands out in our history as an experiment loaded with testimonial values: it is both a story and a document. And it is musical tale, musical theatre in the fullest sense.
In conclusion, I believe that with La fabbrica, Nono achieved a re-invention of theatre, through the celebration of its ‘futility’- the futility of its apparatuses, both scenic and rhetorical.
These are themes that mirror Nono’s thinking, already clearly articulated in his 1959 lecture in Darmstadt:
“Music will always remain a historical presence, a testimony of men who consciously face the historical process, and who, at every moment of this process, decide with full clarity of their intuition and logical consciousness, and act to open up new possibilities for the vital need for new structures. Art lives and will continue to fulfill its task.
And there is still much wonderful work to be done.”
Perhaps, then, in composing La fabbrica illuminata, Nono materialized a need that could no longer be postponed, having identified a necessary point of contact between reality and artistic expression.
Finally, I believe it is important to highlight yet another aspect. Nono had already clearly identified this in Possibility of a New Musical Theatre in 1962.
“Musical theatre is still on the way.
The decisive need is: to communicate.
New human situations urgently press for expression.”
How does this translate? And why are Nono’s music and thought so topical, so important today, as evidenced by the audience’s response to La fabbrica and on so many other occasions?
An author, any author, working from a strong need, develops his composition by imagining an audience—an imagination full of desire (a ‘nostalgia’). It is a projection into time. This, it seems to me, is a fundamental component of the need to communicate.
And this, if there is one, can lead to resonances that, in time, spread, go beyond the present moment, and encounter new, different, and more mature feedback.
In this sense, the work goes ‘beyond’ the author and generously offers itself to other people, to other times.
The work becomes a free subject that moves and communicates through time.
These seem to me to be some of the meanings that approaching Nono’s musical and theatrical thought offers us today: a gift, and an example for our times.
It should be clear by now that it is impossible—or rather a mistake—to separate Nono the artist and musician from his broader political and cultural thought. Nono works simultaneously on all these levels and ideas without any split. Quite the contrary, because in Nono, there is always an active tension toward freedom. A generous freedom, in which music and art play a decisive role.
Daniele Abbado