Principal characteristics of the edition:
This work, composed in 1964 for the opening concert of the Prix Italia and dedicated to the workers of Italsider in Genova-
Cornigliano, was performed for the first time on 15th September of that year in the course of the 27th Internationa
Festival of Contemporary Music at the Venice Biennale. The interpreters were the mezzo-soprano Carla Henius and the
composer himself as sound director. Commissioned by RAI while Nono was working with Scabia on Un diario italiano,
La fabbrica illuminata was originally conceived as an episode of what was the second of the composer’s “scenic actions”,
following upon Intolleranza ’60, written in 1961.
For the music on tape Nono used a selection of recordings of the Coro della RAI in Milan, a recording of a number
of improvisations on a canovaccio by the mezzo-soprano Carla Henius, voices and noises recorded at Italsider and
synthesised sounds. These sonoric materials were re-elaborated at the RAI Sound Laboratory in Milan, blended and
transformed electronically, even up to the point of making them unrecognisable.
The editor of the edition faced two problems in particular: on the one hand, the peculiar nature of magnetic tape, an
unconventional “text” and certainly still quite unusual in the context of critical editions; and on the other, the coexistence
of two heterogeneous, if not antithetical, musical dimensions: the part for voice, with access to the flexibility of “live”
performance, and the part for magnetic tape, fixed once and for all.
The edition confronts the specific textual problems inhering to each dimension with a rigorous and in a number of
respects innovative critical methodology, dealing exhaustively with all their peculiarities but at the same time not losing
sight of the conceptual unity and expressive force of the work as a whole.