Luigi Nono studied law at the University of Padua and composition (as an auditor) with Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Benedetto-Marcello Conservatory in Venice. In 1946, he met Bruno Maderna, marking the beginning of a long friendship and a period of intense study (including treatises of medieval music, enigmatic Franco-Flemish canons, Hindemith, Dallapiccola, etc.), notably at the Biblioteca Marciana. In 1948, Nono and Maderna attended conducting classes in Venice with Hermann Scherchen; Nono accompanied the conductor on tour, allowing him to familiarise himself with works by Schoenberg, Webern, and Bartók.

In 1950, Nono attended Darmstadt, where he studied with Varèse and developed a friendship with Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Following the premiere of his Canto Sospeso, Nono would himself teach classes at Darmstadt on Schoenbergian serialism, as well as presenting two influential conferences co-written with his student Helmut Lachenmann: “History and the Present in the Music of Today” (1959) and “Text—Musik—Gesang“ (1960), the latter of which strongly rebuked Stockhausen’s critique of Canto Sospeso.

Nono joined the Italian communist party in 1952. On 12 March 1954, he attended the premiere of Stravinsky’s Moses and Aron in Hamburg. On this occasion, he met Nuria Schoenberg, daughter of Arnold Schoenberg, whom he married the following year. During a trip to Prague in 1958, where he discovered the Laterna magika (considered to be the world’s first multimedia theatre) and the scenographic work of Josef Svoboda, Nono’s music was harshly criticised by the socialist realists. This did little to deter him from returning to the Eastern Bloc; he again spent time there in 1960 and 1963. On the latter trip, he visited Moscow, where he met with Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke (of whom he was severely critical), and pianist Marina Youdina, and Tallinn, where he presented his works, along with those of Berio and Donatoni, to Arvo Pärt. Nono also regularly travelled to East Berlin to visit his friend and colleague, Paul Dessau.

In 1961, in a matter of just a few months, Nono completed Intolleranza 1960, the first of his azione scenica [“staged actions”]; the work’s premiere at La Fenice caused a scandal. While teaching occasionally at the Dartington Summer School of Music and the University of Helsinki, starting in 1962, Nono devoted considerable effort to organising (along with critic and musicologist Luigi Pestalozza) regular concerts and debates in Italian factories. In 1965, he travelled to Boston for the stormy United States premiere of Intolleranza 1960 (conducted by Maderna), and to Los Angeles, where he visited the home of Schoenberg. Following discussions with Erwin Piscator about life in Weimar in the 1920s and 30s, Nono collaborated with writer Peter Weiss to create incidental music for fixed media for the play Die Ermittlung [“The Investigation”], and with the Living Theater on A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida, a scenic work for three speakers, soprano, clarinet, and tape (produced at the RAI Phonology Studio in Milan, where Nono worked regularly throughout the 1960s).

During a three-month trip to South America in 1967, Nono taught classes in Argentina and Peru, where he was arrested and expelled for openly expressing support for the release of political prisoners. In Cuba, he met Fidel Castro and discussed the work of Varèse with novelist/musicologist Alejo Carpentier. He returned to South America in 1968 and in 1971, when he met with Luciano Cruz, a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement in Chile (who was killed soon afterwards), and in 1983 to attend a congress of the “Artistas Trabajadores de la Cultura”. In February 1968, Nono, along with political activist Rudi Dutschke, took part in the Internationale Vietnamkongress in West Berlin. In the Autumn of the same year, he refused to participate in the Venice Biennale out of solidarity with the student movement. Nono’s second azione scenica, Al gran sole carico d’amore, was the result of a collaboration with Youri Lioubimov, who was Director of the Taganka Theatre in Moscow at the time.

Shortly thereafter, Nono suffered a major crisis, which was resolved in part by his contact with philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Hölderlin’s analytical writings, experimentation with live electronics, and the study of Jewish and Greek cultures informed the composition of both Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima (1979-80) for string quartet and the opera Prometeo (1981-84); the latter work, and indeed the majority of Nono’s music from the 1980s, was premiered in collaboration with the Heinrich-Strobel Foundation Experimental Studio. Nono was largely based in Berlin from 1986 to 1988 following an invitation from the DAAD. In July 1989, at Centre Acanthes (then in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon), he taught his final classes. Requiring hospitalisation in Paris due to cancer, Nono died on 8 May 1990 in Venice.