Book review : Lulu et après?

Abstract

Michel Fano, who turned 91 last December, has just published a book on Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. Fano is something of an outlier among the usual batch of ‘Darmstadt’ composers, since he is associated with the earliest, strictest, and most ‘compulsion-neurosis’ prone (to use Ligeti’s reading of Boulez) iteration of serialism, yet did not exhibit either the political conviction (cf. Nono, Maderna), religious conviction (Stockhausen, Goeyvaerts), or ironclad historicism (Leibowitz, Boulez) that normally accompany the adoption of such a seemingly ascetic way of writing music. Why, then, did Fano turn to serialism so early and so rigorously – why adopt such a labour-intensive method of putting music on paper before it was even slightly popular? [excerpt]