Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy 9781107420366, 9780521844031

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Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

Luigi Dallapiccola is widely considered a defining figure in twentieth-century Italian musical modernism, whose compositions bear passionate witness to the historical period through which he lived. In this book, Ben Earle focuses on three major works by the composer: the one-act operas Volo di notte (Night Flight) and Il prigioniero (The Prisoner), and the choral Canti di prigionia (Songs of Imprisonment), setting them in the context of contemporary politics to trace their complex path from fascism to resistance. Earle also considers the wider relationship between musical modernism and Italian fascism, exploring the origins of musical modernism and investigating its place in the institutional structures created by Mussolini’s regime. In so doing, he sheds new light on Dallapiccola’s work and on the cultural politics of the early twentieth century to provide a history of musical modernism in Italy from the fin de siècle to the early Cold War. ben earle is a Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, where he teaches the history, analysis and aesthetics of music. Before moving to Birmingham he completed a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford. His research interests lie in Italian and British music of the mid twentieth century and his articles and reviews have appeared in a number of edited volumes and also in the journals Music & Letters, Music Analysis, Radical Musicology and Il saggiatore musicale. He is a member of the editorial board of Music Analysis. This is his first book.

Music Since 1900

general editor Arnold Whittall This series – formerly Music in the Twentieth Century – offers a wide perspective on music and musical life since the end of the nineteenth century. Books included range from historical and biographical studies concentrating particularly on the context and circumstances in which composers were writing, to analytical and critical studies concerned with the nature of musical language and questions of compositional process. The importance given to context will also be reflected in studies dealing with, for example, the patronage, publishing and promotion of new music, and in accounts of the musical life of particular countries. Titles in the series Jonathan Cross The Stravinsky Legacy Michael Nyman Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond Jennifer Doctor The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936 Robert Adlington The Music of Harrison Birtwistle Keith Potter Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass Carlo Caballero Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics Peter Burt The Music of Toru Takemitsu David Clarke The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics M. J. Grant Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe Philip Rupprecht Britten’s Musical Language Mark Carroll Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe Adrian Thomas Polish Music since Szymanowski J. P. E. Harper-Scott Edward Elgar, Modernist Yayoi Uno Everett The Music of Louis Andriessen

Ethan Haimo Schoenberg’s Transformation of Musical Language Rachel Beckles Willson Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War Michael Cherlin Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination Joseph N. Straus Twelve-Tone Music in America David Metzer Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Edward Campbell Boulez, Music and Philosophy Jonathan Goldman The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez: Writings and Compositions Pieter C. van den Toorn and John McGinness Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom David Beard Harrison Birtwistle’s Operas and Music Theatre Heather Wiebe Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton Music and Protest in 1968 Graham Griffiths Stravinsky’s Piano: Genesis of a Musical Language Martin Iddon John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance Martin Iddon New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez Alastair Williams Music in Germany since 1968 Ben Earle Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy Ben Earle

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521844031 © Ben Earle 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by MPG Printgroup Ltd, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Earle, Ben, 1973– author. Luigi Dallapiccola and musical modernism in Fascist Italy / Ben Earle. pages cm. – (Music since 1900) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-84403-1 1. Dallapiccola, Luigi, 1904–1975. Prigioniero. 2. Dallapiccola, Luigi, 1904–1975. Volo di notte. 3. Dallapiccola, Luigi, 1904–1975. Canti di prigionia. 4. Opera – Italy – 20th century. 5. Choral music – Italy – 20th century. 6. Fascism and music – Italy. I. Title. ML410.D138E27 2013 782.1092–dc23 2013013106 ISBN 978-0-521-84403-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of my son Olly

Contents

Preface and acknowledgements 1

Modernism before fascism

2

The true spirit of Italian music

3

Fascist modernism

4

Protest music?

5

The politics of commitment Bibliography Index 294

page xi

1 63

132

194

277

235

Preface and acknowledgements

The five chapters of this book are designed as a single narrative that tells two interlocking stories. The principal focus is on the first twenty years (roughly 1930– 50) in the career of the leading Italian composer of the mid-twentieth century, Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–1975). Special emphasis is placed on his one-act operas Volo di notte (Night Flight) and Il prigioniero (The Prisoner), which received their stage premières in Florence in 1940 and 1950 respectively. The operas are discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 5. Between these accounts comes a reading of Dallapiccola’s major choral work of 1938–41, Canti di prigionia (Songs of Imprisonment). Together, Chapters 3–5 attempt a balanced coverage of musical, philosophical and political points of interest in these three works. While the accounts of the operas do not neglect music-analytical discussion, they gravitate towards philosophy and politics. The discussion of the Canti di prigionia, by contrast, treats Dallapiccola’s music in more depth. Yet here too, philosophical and political dimensions are never far away. These three compositions from the late 1930s and 1940s are outstanding in the history of twentieth-century music for the way in which they manage to sustain the highest aesthetic interest at the same time as they bear witness to a profound involvement in the socio-political currents of their times. They do not simply trace a movement from fascism to resistance, but engage with some of the darkest episodes of the twentieth century with an intensity that repays the closest attention. Volo di notte, the Canti di prigionia and Il prigioniero are the three major works of Dallapiccola’s that have been most frequently performed. They have also been widely discussed in print, not least by the composer. As they take into account the reception histories of these compositions, Chapters 3–5 examine the ways in which the interpretation of Dallapiccola’s work has been shaped by his own writings. Throughout the present study, it is taken for granted that neither musical works nor their ‘afterlives’ can be comprehensible in the absence of an awareness of the social and historical contexts of their creation. The discussion of Dallapiccola’s mid-career trio of major works is prefaced in Chapter 2 by an account of his compositions of the earlier 1930s – above all the three sets of choruses on texts by the seventeenth-century poet Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger – considered in relation to the institutions for the dissemination of new music fostered by the fascist regime. The book is equally concerned to place Dallapiccola’s music in its stylistic context. His celebrated interest in the work of the Second Viennese School is addressed in Chapter 3. Just as significant, however, are the composer’s debts to non-Viennese models, considered in Chapter 2. These include Ravel and Stravinsky among non-Italian composers; and

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among Italians, Dallapiccola’s teacher Vito Frazzi, as well as the more internationally prominent Gian Francesco Malipiero and Alfredo Casella. The last two names bring us to the second story this book wishes to tell. Recent years have seen a marked increase of interest in Italian music of the first half of the twentieth century, as record companies have belatedly started to issue recordings of a repertory that, not so long ago, remained largely inaccessible. While Chapter 2 discusses the work of Casella and Malipiero in the period immediately preceding and following the fascist take-over of power in October 1922 as a background to Dallapiccola’s first published compositions, Chapter 1 takes the account of musical modernism in Italy back to its origins before and during the First World War. This book’s second story, inseparable from the first, is thus the more ambitious. In the light of the sudden availability of recordings capable of illustrating the full sweep of Italian musical modernism in its first forty years – from Casella’s extended orchestral song Notte di maggio (May Night) (1913) onwards – it seems an appropriate moment to attempt the sketch of a complete history. To employ a pair of terms that will reappear in Chapter 4, this book has both a protagonist and a ‘deuteragonist’. The leading role played by Dallapiccola for his generation was taken in the earlier decades of the century by Casella. Some readers may balk at this vocabulary. A reminder of the title of the present book – it is a study of modernism and fascism – should be sufficient to indicate how the notion of cultural ‘leadership’ may be thoroughly apposite in the present context, for all that it has lately become unfashionable, particularly among those commentators set on the rooting out of supposedly outmoded ‘teleological’ visions of history. It is one thing to write teleological history, another to observe figures from the first half of the twentieth century consistently ascribing a teleological virtue to their own actions – typically that of occupying a stylistic ‘vanguard’. If modernists did not in fact know where they were going, they certainly wanted audiences to believe that they did. To attempt to cleanse accounts of modernism of the kinds of future-orientated belligerence so characteristic of its leading figures – for leading is precisely what they did: others followed – is to attempt to write against the evidence of history. Modernism, as the following account will demonstrate, is inextricably bound up with desires for historical priority, for domination of perceived inferiors, for exclusion and/or estrangement of the work of others. If recent commentators have tried to find in it consoling signs of such liberal values as pluralism, compromise, cooperation and cultural exchange, the present book will suggest that these values are, for the most part, irrelevant to the discussion of this repertory. What is required for the adequate interpretation of those kinds of non-modernist music that were treated as beyond the pale by an English-language musicology backed into a corner by the ideological exigencies of the Cold War is not a dilution of the meaning of the term ‘modernism’, but a greater effort of conceptualization with regard to the repertories against which modernism defined itself. Some suggestions are put forward in

Preface and acknowledgements

xiii

Chapters 1 and 2. Modernism itself is essentially anti-liberal. It is not a pretty topic. Appearances to the contrary, it is not finally a fascist topic either. And yet, as we shall see, the distinction can be a fine one. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as ‘The Avant-Garde Artist as Superman: Aesthetics and Politics in Dallapiccola’s Volo di notte’, in Roberto Illiano (ed.), Italian Music during the Fascist Period (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 657–716. Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Dallapiccola and the Politics of Commitment: Re-Reading Il prigioniero’, Radical Musicology, 2 (2007). A still earlier version of Chapter 3, along with some of the material presented in Chapter 2, first saw the light in my doctoral thesis, ‘Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy: Dallapiccola in the Thirties’ (University of Cambridge, 2001). I would like to thank Anna Dallapiccola for permission both to reproduce the photograph shown on the front cover and (in Chapter 4) to quote from her father’s correspondence with Alfredo Casella. In Florence, the staff of the Archivio Contemporaneo ‘Alessandro Bonsanti’ were unfailingly helpful; in Birmingham, the staff of the Barber Music Library no less so. Much of the work on the previously published sections of the book was carried out during my time as a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford. At the University of Birmingham, John Klapper arranged funding for a research trip to Florence and for a teaching buy-out that enabled progress to be made on Chapter 1. Arnold Whittall kept faith with the project over many years, and read the entire manuscript in draft, making a number of acute criticisms, to many of which I have tried to respond. Others who helped, by lending scores, tapes and books, or in more or less friendly discussion, include Kathryn Bailey, David Gallagher, Alexander Goehr, Rob Keeley, Julian Murphet, the late David Osmond-Smith, Francesco Parrino, Dean Sutcliffe and the late Janet Waterhouse. Anna Linton made it all possible, and Daniel helped too – as, in his own way, did his younger brother Henry, who raced the book to its completion, and won. The following music examples reproduce extracts from copyright works: Example 1.1 Alfredo Casella, Elegia eroica. Copyright © 1916 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 6984. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 1.2 Alfredo Casella, Notte di maggio. Copyright © 1916 Société Anonyme des Éditions Ricordi – Paris, France (R 235) by permission of MGB Hal Leonard srl – San Giuliano Mil.se, Italy. Example 1.3 Alfredo Casella, Nove pezzi per pianoforte. Copyright © 1915 Casa Ricordi srl – Milan, Italy (NR 115411) by permission of MGB Hal Leonard srl – San Giuliano Mil.se, Italy. Example 1.4 Gian Francesco Malipiero, Pause del silenzio. Copyright © 1917 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 7695. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.

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Example 1.5 Ildebrando Pizzetti, Musiche per ‘La nave’. Copyright © 1968 Casa Ricordi srl – Milan, Italy (NR 131326) by permission of MGB Hal Leonard srl – San Giuliano Mil.se, Italy. Example 1.6 Ildebrando Pizzetti, I pastori. Copyright © 1916 by Casa Editrice Musicale A. Forlivesi & C., Florence, Italy. Reproduced by permission. Examples 2.1 and 2.3 Luigi Dallapiccola, Seconda serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane. Copyright © 1936 by Carisch S.p.A., Milan, Italy. Reproduced by permission. Example 2.2 Vito Frazzi, Quintetto. Copyright © OTOS Edizioni Musicali Opera Italiana S.a.s., Lucca, Italy. Reproduced by permission. Example 2.4 Luigi Dallapiccola, Prima serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane. Copyright © 1936 by Carisch S.p.A., Milan, Italy. Reproduced by permission. Example 2.5 Alfredo Casella, Concerto per due violini, viola e violoncello. Copyright © 1924 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/PH 249. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 2.6 Alfredo Casella, Suite à Jean Huré. Copyright © 1910 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 3049. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 2.7 Alfredo Casella, Concerto romano. Copyright © 1928 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 18298. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 2.8 Alfredo Casella, Tre canzoni trecentesche. Copyright © 1924 Casa Ricordi srl – Milan, Italy (NR 119505) by permission of MGB Hal Leonard srl – San Giuliano Mil.se, Italy. Example 2.9 Gian Francecsco Malipiero, Il cantastorie. Copyright © 1926 Chester Music Limited. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission. Examples 2.10 and 2.11 Luigi Dallapiccola, Musica per tre pianoforti (Inni). Copyright © 1936 by Carisch S.p.A., Milan, Italy. Reproduced by permission. Examples 2.12 and 3.1 Luigi Dallapiccola, Terza serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane. Copyright © 1936 by Carisch S.p.A., Milan, Italy. Reproduced by permission. Examples 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 Luigi Dallapiccola, Volo di notte. Copyright © 1940 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien. German Version © Copyright 1952 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 13882. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 4.1 Goffredo Petrassi, Salmo IX. Copyright © 1934 Casa Ricordi srl – Milan, Italy (NR 123914) by permission of MGB Hal Leonard srl – San Giuliano Mil.se, Italy. Examples 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 Luigi Dallapiccola, Preghiera di Maria Stuarda. Copyright © 1939 by Carisch S.p.A., Milan, Italy. Reproduced by permission.

Preface and acknowledgements

xv

Example 4.5 Luigi Dallapiccola, Invocazione di Boezio. Copyright © 1941 by Carisch S.p.A., Milan, Italy. Reproduced by permission. Examples 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8 Luigi Dallapiccola, Congedo di Girolamo Savonarola. Copyright © 1941 by Carisch S.p.A., Milan, Italy. Reproduced by permission. Example 5.1 Luigi Dallapiccola, Il prigioniero. Copyright © 1948 by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni Sugarmusic S.p.A., Milan, Italy. Reproduced by permission.

1 Modernism before fascism

This is a book about music in Florence, the city in which Luigi Dallapiccola arrived as an eighteen-year-old in May 1922, and where he made his home until he died, close to fifty-three years later. Florence was where he composed, where he wrote and taught, and where – in the first twenty years of his career – his most important premières took place. Unlike his older contemporary Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968), Dallapiccola was not a native Florentine. He was born some 150 miles away (closer to 300 by road or rail) in Pisino (today Pazin), a small town in Istria, the peninsula that juts into the Adriatic at its north-eastern corner, south of Trieste. We shall return to Istria, but not to Castelnuovo-Tedesco. If this were a general history of music in Florence during the first half of the twentieth century, Castelnuovo-Tedesco would play a leading role. From the mid-1920s until July 1939, when – following the imposition of anti-Semitic legislation – he found himself compelled to leave Italy, he was the best-known composer in the city, recognized as ‘“the Florentine musician” par excellence’. But Castelnuovo-Tedesco was no modernist. In a letter of January 1938 to his erstwhile friend Alessandro Pavolini (1903–1945), president of the Fascist Confederation of Professionals and Artists, he protested that notions of ‘Bolshevising and subversive musical Judaism’ were inaccurate. His work, like that of other Italian Jewish composers, had always been ‘rather moderate in tendency’.1 In disgruntled mood, Dallapiccola might well have viewed the pre-war association of Florence with Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s stylistic moderation as symptomatic of the city’s attitudes. For what connection had Florence with musical modernism? As Dallapiccola scornfully recalled, late in life, when he arrived in 1922 the city was mounting its first ever production of Tristan und Isolde – fifty-seven years after the opera’s première. ‘Florence is a city deaf to music’, he complained. And further: ‘The composition teaching at the Conservatory in Florence remained without influence on my musical language.’2 English-language musicology knows Florence as a musical centre: as the late sixteenth-century location of Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Camerata, the birthplace of musical modernity, in some accounts.3 Musical modernism is something 1

2

3

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Una vita di musica, ed. James Westby, 2 vols. (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005), I, 274, 292n409. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Über Arnold Schönberg’, in Beiträge der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Musik 1974/75 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1974), 10; Ursula Stürzbecher, Werkstattgespräche mit Komponisten (Cologne: Gerig, 1971), 223. See, for example, Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29–40.

2

Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

different, as this chapter will try to show. Given the intention, already declared, to give an account not just of Dallapiccola’s early career, or of ‘musical modernism in fascist Italy’, but of Italian modernist composition generally, the decision to set the book in Florence may appear eccentric. So it needs to be pointed out that to the scholar of Italian literature or politics the idea of a Florentine modernism is entirely conventional. Part of the task of the present chapter will be to bring this background to light for musicology in English; to show that modernism in the city had its musical dimension too. It must also be acknowledged that what follows is, of course, not the only history of ‘musical modernism in fascist Italy’ that one might contemplate. A book centred on the early career of Goffredo Petrassi (1904–2003) would be concerned with a Roman environment apparently much more stimulating for a young composer in the 1920s and 1930s (though, as we shall see, Dallapiccola’s complaints were exaggerated). But it is in neither Florence nor Rome that we begin. At the start of the twentieth century, it was Milan that was the base for the iconoclastic movement that called itself futurism, which to readers less versed in music than in painting, sculpture, theatre or poetry surely counts as Italy’s preeminent contribution to modernism. Thus it was in that city, on 21 April 1914, that one of the great cultural events of the century took place, a performance less celebrated in textbooks than the Second Viennese Skandalkonzert or the Parisian première of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (31 March and 29 May 1913 respectively), but in its way just as seminal: the first public outing, at the Teatro dal Verme, of Luigi Russolo’s orchestra of intonarumori or ‘noise-makers’.

I Is it appropriate to group these events together? All three provoked noisy responses. Performances were rendered inaudible, or had to be abandoned, and were accompanied by brawling and police involvement. But the Milanese concert (or serata, to use the futurists’ term) stood apart from the events in Paris or Vienna. For all their power to disturb audiences, the compositions that caused scandals in the latter two cities rested on musical conventions that had been developing for centuries. It is in terms of the flouting of such conventions (which they take for granted) that modernist compositions make their effect. Such works demanded a considerable refinement of taste of their listeners, and a remarkable virtuosity of their composers and performers. But Russolo (1885–1947), unlike Stravinsky – or Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Mahler (the composers of the Skandalkonzert) – was not a professional musician. How could a compositional autodidact hope to find his place among such exalted company? In some respects he clearly wished to. He had written three pieces, or ‘spirals’, as he called them: Il risveglio di una città, Si pranza sulla terrazza dell’Hôtel and Convegno d’automobili e d’aeroplani (The Awakening of a City, Dining on the Hotel Terrace and

Modernism before fascism

3

The Meeting of Automobiles and Airplanes). He had developed a method of notation; his performers, whom Russolo conducted in something like the normal manner, had been thoroughly rehearsed. Had the audience not been intent on drowning out their efforts, it would (Russolo tells us) have enjoyed ‘really excellent performances’.4 Although nothing more than the opening two pages of Il risveglio di una città has come down to us, and only the shortest recorded bursts of the intonarumori in their original form, we may take it that Russolo’s spirali, like ‘normal’ compositions, were capable of more or less effective interpretation.5 Yet in obvious contrast to the instrumentalists of a traditional ensemble, Russolo’s performers had had – prior to their rehearsals – no experience of playing their instruments. For these had only recently been invented and built: a collection of ‘howlers’ (ululatori), ‘roarers’ (rombatori), ‘cracklers’ (crepitatori) and so forth, in appearance boxes fitted with amplifying horns. And what they produced was not the last word in melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and timbral sophistication (with respect to the conventions referred to above), but noises. If the riots at the Skandalkonzert and the première of The Rite of Spring were the prime events of musical modernism, the unveiling of musical futurism at the Teatro dal Verme was of a different order. In a study of musical modernism, it is as well to air such terminological anxiety as quickly as possible. Readers of English-language discussion of Italian repertory can nowadays expect to find the term ‘modernist’ used not just in relation to Russolo’s compositions for intonarumori, and to the work of such post-1945 luminaries as Bruno Maderna (1920–1973), Luigi Nono (1924–1990) and Luciano Berio (1925–2003), but also with respect to such unlikely candidates as Verdi’s Falstaff (Milan, 1893) and Puccini’s Turandot (Milan, 1926). How can a single term, applied to repertories of such stylistic variety, have much meaning? The present account will take none of these examples to be ‘modernist’. In the case of Russolo, the orchestra of intonarumori, in conjunction with the manifesto L’arte dei rumori (1913), will be read as an expression not of modernism, but of the avant-garde. The significance of the two terms is not co-extensive: it turns on the conventions noted above. For Peter Bürger, in his celebrated account, the serata in the Teatro dal Verme would be an instantiation of ‘the break avant-garde movements made with art as an institution’, an explosive revelation of art’s ideological character, located in its ‘imagined satisfaction of needs that are repressed in daily praxis’.6 Russolo was keen that the appearance of a traditional concert be preserved. Audiences were to appreciate the ‘charm’ (bellezza) of the sounds produced by his noise-makers, listening in ‘the most absolute silence’.7 Insisting on this 4 5 6

7

Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon, 1986), 33. For the opening of Il risveglio di una città, see ibid., 72–3. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), li, 13. Russolo, The Art of Noises, 81.

4

Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

conventional receptive attitude, Russolo confirmed the subversive character of his activity. At stake is aesthetic autonomy, the concept that defines ‘the status of art in bourgeois society’, as Bürger would have it, and the root of art’s inherent tendency to neutralize critique.8 Futurism’s assault was directed, above all, at the aestheticism of the previous artistic generation, with its belief – summed up in the phrase l’art pour l’art – that art should be insulated from society. As Russolo explains in his manifesto, music has always been something apart, ‘different from and independent of life’. It is ‘a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolable and sacred world’. Modern orchestral music, in its increasing dissonance and complexity, is drawing closer to ‘noise-sound’. The next step is a plunge into the noise that is part of reality. Russolo observes of his performers in Milan how, [a]fter the fourth or fifth rehearsal, having developed the ear and having grown accustomed to the pitched and variable noises produced by the noise instruments, they told me that they took great pleasure in following the noises of trams, automobiles, and so on, in the traffic outside.9

This is the avant-garde utopia, the reconfiguration of the relationship between producer and recipient of an art-work in what Bürger calls the ‘sublation of art in the praxis of life’. There are no more artists or works; the means-ends rationality that dominates everyday bourgeois existence has dissolved in an aestheticization that is all encompassing.10 The work of both Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School, for all its ‘revolutionary’ characteristics, belongs on the side of music in Russolo’s distinction. The use of the term ‘avant-garde’ to describe, say, The Rite of Spring, or Webern’s Sechs Orchesterstücke (1909–10), might thus be thought inappropriate, as also its more common employment in the context of post-1945 composers such as Maderna, Nono or Berio. So what and when (not to speak of where) was Italian musical modernism? The beginning of an answer lies in Example 1.1. Up to somewhere near the point in the score shown here (about 10 minutes into this 15-minute work), so the composer tells us, the audience at the première had been listening ‘in a pregnant silence, like that which precedes great storms’. But when the players reached the music given in Example 1.1 (or perhaps a few bars before), ‘the public broke out thunderously with a wave of indignation’ so furious that the later stages of the composition could not be heard. The work was the Elegia eroica, Op. 29 (1916), of Alfredo Casella (1883–1947), the date 21 January 1917; the French conductor Rhené-Baton (1879–1940) was directing the Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia in the Augusteo in Rome.11 It was a momentous occasion: 8 10 11

Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22. 9 Russolo, The Art of Noises, 24–5, 27–8, 48. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 51, 34. Alfredo Casella, Music in My Time, trans. Spencer Norton (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 140–1.

Modernism before fascism

Ex. 1.1 Alfredo Casella, Elegia eroica, Op. 29 (1916), bars 172–86.

5

6

Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

Ex. 1.1 (cont.)

Modernism before fascism

Ex. 1.1 (cont.)

7

8

Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

Ex. 1.1 (cont.)

Modernism before fascism

9

‘as tumultuous a gathering as the one that marked the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps in Paris’, so one critic wrote.12

II Born in Turin, Casella moved to Paris at thirteen to study at the Conservatoire. Apart from a period sitting in on Fauré’s class in the winter of 1900–1 (the normally registered students included Ravel and Koechlin), he did not study composition.13 Casella began his career as a precociously virtuosic pianist, winning the Conservatoire’s premier prix at the age of sixteen. He did make a thorough study of harmony at the Conservatoire (deuxième prix, 1901), working with Xavier Leroux (1863–1919), who also taught him counterpoint. But there is a sense in which the first decade of Casella’s published work – at the end of which he was still only thirty – constituted a self-education in public. The critical consensus has long been that in 1909–10 Casella came to a first maturity. On the insistence of no less than Gustav Mahler, on whose behalf Casella had engaged in a campaign of proselytization in an unenthusiastic Paris, two orchestral compositions of this period, the rhapsody Italia, Op. 11, and the Suite in C major (also known as Suite à Jean Huré), Op. 13, were published in Vienna by Universal Edition, a step up from the Parisian firm Mathot, which had handled the majority of Casella’s music to date. As the twenty-one-year-old Theodor W. Adorno confirmed, commenting on the Fragments symphoniques from Casella’s ballet Le couvent sur l’eau, Op. 19 (1912–13), the composer ‘possesses a selfhood that clearly penetrates every one of his works’. Adorno’s account of the Fragments ends badly. In the lack of any ‘compelling force’ demanding ‘that his music should sound one way and not another’, Casella is condemned as a ‘dilettante’. The score’s Mahlerian elements, ‘robbed of their meaning, become petrified in his work, and surround him like lifeless grimaces’.14 Yet Adorno seems to have put his finger on one of the fundamental characteristics of Casella’s work. Thus Virgilio Bernardoni, defending the music of 1908–10, simply treats as positive that which Adorno finds disturbing. There is indeed no deep connection to the material. Casella can hold together such a variety of stylistic elements (encompassing contemporary French and Russian idioms as well as Mahler and Strauss) because he assumes an ‘emotional equidistance from each of them’. Taking shape here, Bernardoni suggests, is the desire for music that would be ‘objective’.15 12 13

14

15

Georges Jean-Aubry, ‘The New Italy’, Musical Quarterly, 6/1 (1920), 42. For the Fauré class, see Casella, Music in My Time, 59–60; for the Conservatoire in general, ibid., 37–66; also Roberto Calabretto (ed.), Alfredo Casella. Gli anni di Parigi. Dai documenti (Florence: Olschki, 1997), 1–18. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–86), XIX, 285, 286–7. Virgilio Bernadoni, ‘La Sinfonia Op. 12 e la genesi dell’idea sinfonica nel primo Casella’, in Giovanni Morelli (ed.), Alfredo Casella negli anni di apprendistato a Parigi. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia, 13–15 maggio 1992 (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 123–4.

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Casella’s Notte di maggio, Op. 20 (1913), is the work generally held to mark the onset of his seconda maniera or secondo stile: his modernist period. A setting for solo voice and orchestra of a text by Italy’s national poet of the late nineteenth century, Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907), Notte di maggio unleashes – in the words of the prominent critic Massimo Mila (1910–1988) – ‘an astonishing flow of expressionistic lava’.16 The description would be more appropriate to passages in the outer movements of Casella’s heavily Mahlerian Second Symphony, Op. 12 (1908–10) than to this Carducci setting, in which, as the work’s first reviewers appreciated, the Germanic character of Casella’s earlier music has largely disappeared.17 Notte di maggio is a ‘FrancoRussian’ piece, though not exclusively, as we can see from Example 1.2, which sets stanza 4 and part of stanza 5 of the poem, given below together with the first three words of stanza 6: O voi dormenti nei materni colli, E voi d’umili tombe a presso l’onde Guardanti in cielo trapassar le stelle; Voi sotto il fiso raggio della luna Rividi io popolar la cheta notte, Lievi strisciando sul commosso verde. Deh, quanta parte dell’età mia verde Rivissi in cima ai luminosi colli, E vinta al basso rifuggìa la notte! Quando una forma verso me sull’onde, Disegnata nel lume della luna, Vidi, e per gli occhi le ridean le stelle. Ricorditi: mi disse. [O you who sleep in these maternal hills, / And you of humble graves close by the waters / Who watch the skies through which move the stars; / Beneath the unbending ray of the moon / I saw you once again people the tranquil night, / Lightly treading the softly stirring meadow. // Ah, what youthful days in such a meadow / Did I relive on the peaks of those moonlit hills, / To whose foot now was fleeing defeated night! / When I saw come towards me on the waters / A form outlined in the light of the moon / Through whose eyes were shining the stars. // Remember: it said to me.]18

16

17 18

Massimo Mila, ‘Itinerario stilistico 1901–1942’, in Fedele d’Amico and Guido M. Gatti (eds.), Alfredo Casella (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 36. See Calabretto (ed.), Alfredo Casella. Gli anni di Parigi, 172–82, esp. 173–4, 177. This translation, by Susannah Howe, is cited from the booklet accompanying the recording of Notte di maggio by Olivia Andreini, with Francesco La Vecchia conducting the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma, on Naxos 8.572416 (2010), 10–11.

Modernism before fascism

Ex. 1.2 Alfredo Casella, Notte di maggio, Op. 20 (1913), bars 91–117.

11

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Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

Ex. 1.2 (cont.)

Ex. 1.2 (cont.)

14

Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

Ex. 1.2 (cont.)

Casella binds together the setting of stanza 4 (bars 91–107) with an ostinato bass on the model of Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880). The modal C minor is replaced by the parallel major at bar 99, though the minor mode immediately returns, in Mahlerian style (see, for example, the first climax in the first ‘Nachtmusik’ from the Seventh Symphony).19 And then we come to bars 101–2, one of the most celebrated moments in all of Casella: a twelve-note chord for strings constructed entirely in fourths. At one level, the chord responds to Carducci’s text. If the walking bass of the preceding bars represents the dead ‘[l]ightly treading the softly stirring meadow’, the uncanny effect of the atonal dissonance lends a frisson to the moment when the narrator speaks of seeing these ghostly figures. But the composer was just as interested in the sonority as a technical curiosity. In letters of August 1913 to his friends Stravinsky and Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973), Casella proudly illustrated his twelve-note chord; at the première in Paris on 29 March 1914, the audience learned about this and other harmonic novelties in the programme note.20 19

20

Casella knew the Seventh Symphony particularly well, since he prepared the piano duet arrangement (Berlin: Bote & Bock, 1910). For the letters, see Francesco Parrino, ‘Between the Avant-Garde and Fascist Modernism: Alfredo Casella’s Aesthetics and Politics’ (doctoral dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2007), 52–3, which gives a passage omitted in Robert Craft (ed.), Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, 3 vols. (London and Boston: Faber, 1982–5), II, 126. The letter to Malipiero is reproduced in facsimile in Gian Francesco Malipiero, ‘Così mi scriveva Alfredo Casella (1913–1946)’, L’approdo musicale, 1/1

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It is not hard to think where Casella first came across this arrangement of the total chromatic. The twelve-note chord in fourths – in a form identical to Casella’s, except that the Italian has placed the bottom G at the top of his sonority – appears in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre, published in 1911.21 And this is not the only harmonic novelty in Example 1.2. Immediately following the twelve-note chord, we find an example of what Parisian critics of 1914 referred to as ‘harmonic counterpoint’ or ‘polyharmony’.22 At bars 103–6, there are two streams of parallel minor triads moving in contrary motion: the bass upwards by whole tones, the treble downwards chromatically. In this case the model is evidently the moment at [80] in the Introduction to Part II of The Rite of Spring, where Stravinsky similarly writes streams of minor triads moving in contrary motion. As Casella admitted, ‘Certain spots [in Notte di maggio] bear a slight resemblance to Sacre.’23 His debt to this section of Stravinsky’s score, noted by the critic Émile Vuillermoz (1878–1960) already in his review of the première,24 is demonstrated unmistakably at bars 113–14. An outright crib from the first two bars of Stravinsky’s Part II sets into motion not alternating minor triads (as in The Rite) but the complete chromatic, deployed as four fourth-chords.

III In the space of a handful of bars, Casella has evoked the most ‘revolutionary’ composition of his time and deployed the most ‘advanced’ harmonic resource from the most ‘ground-breaking’ treatise of the period. Yet as the scare quotes indicate, unreflective celebration of novelty is no longer a historiographical option for us, partaking as it does of the triumphalist teleology decried by Richard Taruskin: ‘the most stubbornly Whiggish of all historiographies . . . a Tradition-of-the-New narrative that celebrates technical innovation, viewed as progress within a narrowly circumscribed aesthetic domain’.25 And surely modernism amounts to more than keeping up with the latest technical developments. Better: technical developments amount to more than novelty. Modernism has generally been taken to involve rupture with tradition, of which fourth-chords are a good example. With respect to the third-based harmony of tonality, they are fundamentally new. But what is

21 22

23 24 25

(1958), 22–4. For a passage from the programme note, as cited by André Lamette, the critic of Le Guide musicale, see Calabretto (ed.), Alfredo Casella. Gli anni di Parigi, 175–6. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (London: Faber, 1978), 406. See Calabretto (ed.), Alfredo Casella. Gli anni di Parigi, 174, 178; also Casella’s June 1914 article, ‘Ce qu’est la musique polyharmonique’, ibid., 213–15. Craft (ed.), Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, II, 126. See Calabretto (ed.), Alfredo Casella. Gli anni di Parigi, 178. Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton University Press, 1997), 360.

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the significance of such novelty? In his 1953 comments on Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie, Op. 9 (1906), Adorno focuses on ‘the dissolution field [Auflösungsfeld] at the end of the great development section’ (around [76]), where the harmony becomes exclusively quartal. The philosopher notes the adumbration of ‘a new expressive dimension beyond the depiction of human emotions’.26 Since Monteverdi and the stile rappresentativo (the beginning of musical modernity), ‘a basic stratum of music’ had involved ‘the adjustment of musical language to the meaningful aspect of human language’. But Schoenberg introduces an ‘extreme of coolness which expresses itself through the absence of all expression’. His music is ‘allergic to . . . all identification and empathy’ on the part of the listener.27 It is no coincidence that the critic Gastone Rossi-Doria (1899–1958) should have compared the opening of ‘In modo funebre’, the first of Casella’s Nove pezzi for piano, Op. 24 (1914), to ‘a rigid figure without a face, whose fascination for us comes not from its eyes or the movement of its features, but rather from its outline and proportions’.28 Nor is it by chance that, in Notte di maggio, Casella set a text in which the poet is addressed by a member of the dead (for all that Carducci was scarcely the first poet to write a memento mori). Modernism is centrally concerned with attempts to go beyond the conventionally ‘human’. Yet do we even know to which repertory the term ‘modernism’ refers? The established notion that a pre-First World War ‘new music’ stands at the core of what is recognized as ‘modernism’ has been challenged. For Taruskin, Examples 1.1 or 1.2 would constitute no radical break with tradition. This kind of music is ‘far more appropriately viewed’ in terms of an early twentieth-century ‘maximalizing phase within the traditions established over the course of the preceding century’. Though musicology has disguised the fact, the ‘real breaks’ occurred in the 1920s.29 Where Casella is concerned, Taruskin has a point. It is not just that the composer himself insisted on the notion of historical evolution, notably in his treatise of 1919, L’evoluzione della musica a traversa della cadenza perfetta.30 As John C. G. Waterhouse demonstrated, there are significant continuities in Casella’s music preand post-1913.31 Casella’s post-1913 compositions may be characterized by ‘extreme 26

27 28 29 30

31

Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 158. Ibid. (translation modified). Gastone Rossi-Doria, ‘Le opere per pianoforte’, in D’Amico and Gatti (eds.), Alfredo Casella, 97. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 369. Alfredo Casella, The Evolution of Music Throughout the History of the Perfect Cadence (London: Chester, 1924). John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘Continuità stilistica di Casella’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento: “La Generazione dell’80”. Atti del convegno di studi, Firenze, 9–11 maggio 1980 (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 68–75; John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘Verso la “seconda maniera”: Casella e l’avanguardia internazionale del primo Novecento’, in Morelli (ed.), Alfredo Casella negli anni di apprendistato a Parigi, 177–82.

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vertical density’, as Jim Samson puts it, but the syntax of his music can be unremarkable. A case in point is the opening of ‘In modo funebre’ (Example 1.3). Samson points to the ‘polychords’ at bars 9–11, to the ‘parallel 8-note chords’ in bars 12–14, and to the ‘multi-layered’ texture at bars 17–18.32 His account could be supplemented by reference to Casella’s employment of the octatonic collection. Already at [4] in Notte di maggio, in a passage cited both by Waterhouse and Mila De Santis, Casella makes systematic use of Collection III (in Pieter C. van den Toorn’s nomenclature: F♯, G, A, B♭, C, D♭, E♭, E♮).33 To give an example from Example 1.3: at bars 12–14, the eight-note harmonies (first and third staves) can be parsed as quartal tetrachords surmounted by what Casella himself would have called ‘appoggiatura chords’ – of a kind (as he notes) particularly favoured by Ravel.34 In the case of the first eight-note harmony (on the second quaver of bar 12), the appoggiatura-chord component (g♮1, b♭1, d♭2, e♭2 and g♭2), along with the e♮ in the bass, fall within Collection III; the following repeated transposition through a cycle of minor thirds preserves this point of reference. But amid this vertical excitement, the music is articulated rhythmically in traditional patterns, grouped metrically for the most part in two-bar units that consist of one bar and its immediate repetition. Rossi-Doria makes the obvious comparison with ‘Danseuses de Delphes’, the first of the Préludes in Debussy’s Book I (1909–10). In Example 1.3, he suggests, we behold these dancers’ corpses. Taking up the argument, the composer’s one-time pupil Fedele d’Amico (1912–1990) notes how Casella’s rhythm ‘tends to stiffen, while the melodic design can be reduced to the shortest of elements: glimmers, mechanically repeated fragments . . . gone is the sfumato, the characteristic Debussian flou’.35 If ‘Danseuses de Delphes’ provides a model for Casella’s 1+1 (or sometimes 1+1+1) repetitions, Debussy’s piece (unlike Casella’s) also shows how such rigidity may be tempered.36 It is as if, having ‘advanced’ so far in one direction – B♭ is much less a tonal point of reference in ‘In modo funebre’ than it is in ‘Danseuses de Delphes’ – Casella finds it necessary to ‘hold back’ in another. And from Taruskin’s point of view, all the octatonicism in

32

33

34 35

36

Jim Samson, Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900–1920 (London: Dent, 1977), 74–8. See Pieter C. van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 50; Waterhouse, ‘Verso la “seconda maniera”’, 183; Mila De Santis, ‘Casella e il testo poetico’, in Mila De Santis (ed.), Alfredo Casella e l’Europa. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Siena, 7–9 giugno 2001 (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 314. Alfredo Casella, ‘Ravel’s Harmony’, trans. Fred Rothwell, Musical Times, 67/996 (1926), 125–6. Rossi-Doria, ‘Le opere per pianoforte’, 96–7; Fedele d’Amico, ‘Il pianoforte di Alfredo Casella’, an (unpaginated) essay accompanying Lya de Berberiis’ 1979 recording of Casella’s complete piano works, Warner Fonit 0927 47043–2 (2002). See Boyd Pomeroy, ‘Debussy’s Tonality: A Formal Perspective’, in Simon Trezise (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 169–72.

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Ex. 1.3 Alfredo Casella, ‘In modo funebre’, from Nove pezzi, Op. 24 (1914), bars 1–18.

Modernism before fascism

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Ex. 1.3 (cont.)

Example 1.3 would simply confirm his ‘maximalization’ thesis: a link to the Russian repertoire that Casella knew well. Nor is there any reason to protest against the notion of ‘real breaks’ in the 1920s. In Chapter 2, we shall see that Casella fully participated in them. Taruskin’s periodization may appear polemically overstated, yet this is not to suggest that it is ‘wrong’. As Fredric Jameson has argued, ‘the choice between continuity and rupture is something like an absolute historiographical beginning’. It ‘cannot be justified by the nature of the historical material or evidence, since it organizes all such material in the first place’. All the same, even if all ‘we have to do with here are narrative options and alternate storytelling possibilities’, we may find ‘some narratives to be less persuasive or useful than others’.37 To insist on ‘maximalization’ is to risk losing sight of what is most extraordinary in the pre-1920s repertoire. Returning to 37

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 23, 32, 33.

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Example 1.3, we might argue that it is precisely the clunkingly awkward – or indeed ‘dead’ – rhythmic/metric academicism of Casella’s piece that, together with its attenuated tonality, creates such a strange effect. It is thus the loss of musical continuity that results from these rhythmic/metric and harmonic characteristics, the sense that Casella’s piece consists of a series of arbitrarily repeated and/or juxtaposed fragments, that permits Rossi-Doria to hear ‘In modo funebre’ quasispatially, its simultaneously sounding strata involved in ‘a play of specifically proportional relationships’.38 And this same lack of continuity, we might further suggest, lends the music Rossi-Doria’s ‘faceless’ quality, directly comparable to the anti-psychological, dehumanized character that was so quickly recognized in The Rite of Spring.39 (‘In modo funebre’, it should be pointed out, is dedicated to Stravinsky.) In such cases, maximalism exceeds itself: quantity turns into quality; maximalism into modernism. The proposal here is to compromise, and to follow Jameson in suggesting that musical modernism had ‘two moments’: that it happened twice – once before and during the First World War as maximalism (though it was more than ‘just’ maximalism); again in the 1920s as neoclassicism (to be explored in Chapter 2).40 There is a sense in which Taruskin is harsh to dismiss as ‘normalizing and sanitizing’ the work of those analysts who want to portray modernism’s first ‘moment’ in terms of a radical break with tradition.41 In the case of Casella, while there is an argument for continuity, there is also one for rupture. In his 1924 paper ‘Problemi sonori odierni’ he distinguishes ‘polytonality’ from ‘atonality’. It is the former that exhibits evolution. Polytonality, which Casella exemplifies by way of ‘harmonic counterpoint’ or ‘polyharmony’, has its origin ‘in what we may term an intensification of diatonicism’. Just as in cubism, where the original object is preserved, viewed in several ways at once, so in polytonality, there remains ‘an absolute faith in the seven-tone scale and the common chord’. Where modulation was once successive, it now occurs ‘in simultaneity’.42 By contrast, atonality, which Casella illustrates by the opening of Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909), involves a ‘total repudiation’ of tradition, one that requires an entirely new mode of understanding. Citing the twelve-note chord from Notte di maggio, Casella suggests that, while [i]t is not easy to determine which natural chord assumes the function of fundamental in atonality . . . it might not be impossible – at least provisionally – to recognize the ensemble of the twelve chromatic notes [arranged as his stack of fourths] as the natural

38 39 40 42

Rossi-Doria, ‘Le opere per pianoforte’, 98. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 379, 382–3, 385–7. Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 150. 41 Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 375. Alfredo Casella, ‘Tone-Problems of To-day’, trans. Theodore Baker, Musical Quarterly, 10/2 (1924), 169, 160.

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harmony of the atonal system, and then to consider any chord from three to twelve tones as a fragment or a permutation of the basic chord.43

The notion (like the chord) derives from the Harmonielehre.44 But most striking here is the way, decades before the Cold War (which Taruskin takes as providing ideological sanction for such approaches), Casella apparently invites a thoroughly formalist analysis, along the lines of George Perle’s work on interval cycles.45 All is not quite as it seems. In the same 1924 paper, having defined atonality as ‘the negation of the diatonic scale and the common chord’, Casella proceeds to ‘a more abstract definition’ of this phenomenon as ‘“the fourth dimension in music”’.46 The reference is not to Einstein. As Linda Dalrymple Henderson has demonstrated, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popularization of theories of n-dimensional geometry led to idealist speculations on the possibility of a ‘higher reality’ beyond immediate perception, which in turn had a profound influence on some of the most celebrated artists of the period.47 Francesco Parrino suggests that Casella’s source may have been the futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916).48 Whether or not the ‘fourth dimension’ represented by atonality in Casella’s account is taken to involve the Bergsonian dynamism central to Boccioni’s theorization, it is clear that, for Casella, the organization of Schoenberg’s atonal music stands outside ordinary human comprehension. This is important. As Jameson observes, modernism has conventionally been studied in terms of an ‘inward turn’. Robert P. Morgan, for one, writes of Schoenberg attempting ‘to transform musical language from an essentially “public” vehicle, susceptible to comprehension by ordinary people (but thereby also limited to more or less ordinary statement), to an essentially “private” one capable of speaking the unspeakable’.49 By contrast, the testimonies gathered above to ‘dehumanization’ in Casella, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, together with Casella’s talk of a ‘fourth dimension’, all suggest that what is at issue in musical modernism is not privacy but, as Jameson puts it, a ‘dissatisfaction with subjectivity . . . a radical depersonalization of the bourgeois subject, a programmatic movement away from the psychological and from personal identity itself’.50

43 45

46 47

48 49

50

Ibid., 171, 170. 44 See Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 406–8. George Perle, ‘Berg’s Array of the Interval Cycles’, Musical Quarterly, 63/1 (1977), 1–30, esp. 10–11. Casella, ‘Tone-Problems of To-day’, 160. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, 1983). Parrino, ‘Between the Avant-Garde and Fascist Modernism’, 185. Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 131; Robert P. Morgan, ‘Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism’, Critical Inquiry, 10/3 (1984), 458. Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 135.

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The snobbery implicit in Morgan’s account also calls for comment. As we shall see, the question of class distinction (not to speak of other social aberrations) is inseparable from the modernist project. Yet there is another way to view the musical rejection of the public. In Adorno’s writings, as Jameson points out, the modernist work ‘homeopathically’ adopts the commodification – which is to say, the technological rationalization – of mass cultural objects in order to stage a resistance to commodification within the artwork’s very form.51 This is one way to explain the mechanical, expressively ‘dead’ character of Casella’s seconda maniera. Even if we do not follow Adorno, it is clear that in so far as this music can be viewed as atonal, the search for the principles of an entirely new language in the seconda maniera is, pace Taruskin, not an anachronistic but a historically grounded enterprise. Putting together Casella’s ‘fourth dimension’ and his ‘fundamental’ twelve-note chord, one can see that for this composer, the uncovering of such relations would speak to his music’s occult depths. To put it another way, rather than condemn the vast majority of the pitch relations demonstrated by Cold War analysts of post-tonal music for their notorious inaudibility, one might celebrate this inaudibility as a mark of historical authenticity.

IV The present account of musical modernism will take a more concrete approach, one that does indeed follow Adorno. But first we need to complete the distinction broached earlier with respect to the avant-garde. For Bürger, Adorno fails. The critique of the institution of art made by movements such as futurism is something Adorno does not ‘thematize’. Convinced that certain kinds of art are more ‘valid’ than others, he remains bound to a pre-avant-garde standpoint.52 The argument illustrates the problematic character of Bürger’s starting position, his assumption that Adorno is a theorist of the avant-garde. As Andreas Huyssen puts it, ‘if it is true, as Bürger argues, that the main goal of the historical avant-garde was the reintegration of art into life, a heroic attempt that failed, then Adorno is not a theorist of the avant-garde, but a theorist of modernism’.53 Soft-pedalled in Theorie der Avantgarde is the hostility Adorno expresses towards precisely those movements that Bürger wants to present him as having inadequately grasped. In his 1956 essay ‘Rückblickend auf den Surrealismus’, Adorno characterizes the alienating montage of obsolete images in surrealist works as bearing ‘witness to abstract freedom’s reversion to the supremacy of objects and thus to mere nature’.54 To open out this 51 53

54

Ibid., 152. 52 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 86–7. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner’, in Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (eds.), Adorno: A Critical Reader (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 39. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolson, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–2), I, 89.

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compressed pronouncement: in the situation of ‘total reification’ embodied by surrealism (which is that of late capitalism), the subject ascribes to itself the power of total freedom over the object. Nothing escapes its capacity to categorize, to subsume under concepts. But this means that the world appears to the subject as if immutable. The subject has lost its capacity for ‘experience’, for dynamic interaction with the object. The object thus stands over against the subject as if natural. ‘The dialectical images of Surrealism’, Adorno writes, ‘are images of a dialectic of subjective freedom in a situation of objective unfreedom.’55 The analysis relates to a key moment in Adorno’s ill-famed critique of Stravinsky. In Histoire du soldat (1918), Adorno writes, ‘[t]hrough the rigorous manipulation of the hollowed-out musical language, reduced to wreckage’, Stravinsky ‘brings into existence a second, phantasmagorical and regressive musical language’ that ‘can be compared to surrealist dream montages built out of the residues of daily life’. These ‘deteriorated conventions . . . reveal the irreconcilable breach between the subject and that in music which stands opposed to it as an objective element: the idiom’. As in the images of surrealism, where ‘bourgeois society abandons its hopes of survival’, so in Histoire du soldat, music ‘embodies the idea that life is no longer’.56 If Stravinsky’s music of 1918 is akin to surrealism, is it ‘avant-garde’? In a 1983 paper, Bürger refers to Stravinsky’s ‘avant-garde phase’, suggesting that the composer ‘does not settle just for the parody of . . . the forms of entertainment music’, but ‘alienates’ them, in a ‘quite avantgardistic treatment of the pre-given’ that ‘aims at a questioning of art’.57 For Adorno, Stravinsky’s ‘works are assembled out of scraps of merchandise, just as many pictures of the period are made of scraps of hair, razor blades, and tinfoil’. To the extent that Stravinsky’s distortions eliminate ‘every trace of false individuality and sentimental expression that belong indispensably to naïve jazz’, his work maintains a critical distance towards commercial music: ‘He performs a danse macabre around its fetish character.’58 In Theorie der Avantgarde, Bürger is less enthusiastic. Commenting on the montages created by Picasso and Braque in 1912–13, he notes how ‘the insertion of reality fragments into the painting, i.e. the insertion of material that has been left unchanged by the artist . . . means the destruction of the unity of the painting as a whole, all of whose parts have been fashioned by the subjectivity of the creator’. Yet ‘although there is destruction of the organic work that portrays reality, art itself is not being called into question, as it is in the historic avant-garde movements’.59 There are fine lines to be drawn here. ‘Works such as the two ragtimes’, Adorno suggests (not Piano-Rag-Music, one assumes, but the ‘Ragtime’ from Histoire du 55 56

57 58

Ibid., 88. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 135, 134; Adorno, Notes to Literature, I, 88. Peter Bürger, ‘The Decline of the Modern Age’, trans. David J. Parent, Telos, 62 (1984–5), 122, 120. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 188–9n24. 59 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 77, 74.

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soldat and the free-standing Ragtime for Eleven Instruments of 1917–18), ‘do not so much alienate the musical language . . . as reconceive individual, distinctly separable models belonging to the sphere of commercial music as absolute music.’60 As in the piano duet pieces of the period (above all the Three Easy Pieces (1914–15), with their ‘March’, ‘Waltz’ and ‘Polka’), Adorno suggests that the ‘superior imitation’ of what is in any case despised ‘provides the cultural bourgeoisie with a malicious pleasure’.61 As a characterization of Stravinsky’s miniatures, the account may not be fair. But in the case of the ‘Fox-trot’ that concludes Casella’s Cinque pezzi for string quartet, Op. 34 (1920), it seems apt enough. The piece is clearly modelled on the Ragtime for Eleven Instruments, explicitly so in its introductory gesture, yet in place of Stravinsky’s montage, wherein the various scraps of metrically irregular and harmonically distorted ragtime clichés could apparently be juxtaposed in almost any order, Casella composes a straightforward ternary form with double coda, often metrically square. More interesting from a formal perspective is Casella’s Sonatina for piano, Op. 28 (1916), especially the finale. In her account of this movement, Susanna Pasticci surely tries too hard to establish its unity. Having asserted Casella’s ‘stylistic “simultaneity” and discursive discontinuity’, she proceeds to describe the entire movement as ‘a process of gradual approach to a final goal’ involving the interaction of blacknote pentatonic and white-note diatonic elements.62 Guido Salvetti has more of the measure of Casella’s achievement. Drawing a parallel with cubism, he finds in the Sonatina a ‘desire to neutralise the very idea of discursiveness – of narrative, of the journey [percorso] – on which nineteenth-century form was based’.63 As Bürger would have it, Adorno’s ‘theory of the avant-garde’ operates by opposing such anti-organic montages to traditional rounded forms. ‘According to Adorno’, Bürger explains, ‘it is characteristic of the non-organic work using the principle of montage that it no longer creates the semblance of reconciliation.’64 Richard Wolin has pointed out how the Adorno of the posthumous Ästhetische Theorie came to find a critical value in surrealism and its techniques.65 But in Ästhetische Theorie ‘montage’ means Bürger’s ‘insertion of reality fragments’, which in musical terms means Stravinsky’s alienation of commercial forms (as in 60 62

63

64 65

Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 135. 61 Ibid., 190n34. Susanna Pasticci, ‘La maschera della chinoiserie nel 3° movimento della Sonatina per pianoforte di Alfredo Casella’, on the CD-ROM, Musiche del novecento italiano, ed. Società Italiana di Musicologia, Stradivarius STR 33671 (2004). Guido Salvetti, ‘Osservazioni su alcune tecniche compositive nella Sonatina per pianoforte di Alfredo Casella’, ibid. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 78. Richard Wolin, ‘Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism’, in Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (eds.), The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997), 116–17; Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997), 154–5.

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Piano-Rag-Music). The finale of Casella’s Sonatina may be ‘cubist’, but the movement contains no ‘reality fragments’. It would seem misguided to attempt to align this music too closely with the avant-garde. By the same token, if for Bürger’s Adorno the contrast between ‘traditional’ and ‘avant-garde’ comes down merely to a question of form, it is not hard to see why the latter ‘fails’ as a theorist. Where the presence or absence of ‘reality fragments’ becomes an issue of secondary importance, the question of the ‘sublation of art in the praxis of life’ disappears from the agenda. It is here that we may perceive the dividing line between modernism and the avant-garde. The modernist work, we can say, is one in which the parts emancipate themselves from the whole, but – this is the crucial point – within a framework which remains that of art. Unmediated juxtaposition is not its only technical means. For Adorno, both Schoenberg and Stravinsky end in formal disaster. ‘In both, every detail is predetermined by the whole, and there is no longer any authentic reciprocation of the whole and the part.’ But where Stravinsky, we are told, wilfully cultivates such a state as a presumed short-cut to authenticity, Schoenberg arrives at musical catastrophe by means of ‘the strict self-development of the essence’.66 Bürger makes a distinction between ‘classicists’ (‘who produce an organic work’) and ‘avant-gardistes’. The former treat their material as something living. They respect its significance as something that has grown from concrete life situations. For avant-gardistes, on the other hand, material is just that, material. Their activity initially consists in nothing other than in killing the ‘life’ of the material, that is, in tearing it out of its functional context that gives it meaning.67

What needs to be added here is, first, that an ‘avant-gardiste’ who operates in this manner with materials drawn solely from the sphere of art is in fact a modernist, and second, that, driven to extremes, ‘classicists’ may become modernists too.

V Let us return to the Elegia eroica. As Parrino points out, the reviewers of the calamitous première complained of formal disjointedness. Alberto Gasco (1879–1938), for example, wrote that, ‘The various episodes of Elegia eroica never appear to be closely linked with each other by ties of necessity, nor, sometimes, are they materially connected through skilful welding.’68 Of course not, we might reply: the Elegia eroica is a work of musical modernism. Yet to the extent that this music does indeed have the form of a disjointed patchwork, we might be tempted to view Gasco’s ‘classicist’ criticism as legitimate. Nor does Bernardoni’s ‘avant-gardiste’ 66 68

Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 57, 105–6. 67 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 70. Alberto Gasco, ‘Augusteo: il concerto d’oggi’, La tribuna (22 January 1917), 2, cited from Parrino, ‘Between the Avant-Garde and Fascist Modernism’, 154.

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image of Casella seem appropriate: one in which the composer disinterestedly disposes his stylistically heterogeneous materials in compositions of an ‘objective’ character. For if we are to trust the composer’s own account, the Elegia eroica, dedicated ‘to the memory of a soldier killed in the war’ (to the ‘unknown soldier’, in other words), was intended as a deeply subjective work, ‘an act of faith on the part of an Italian who felt all the tragedy of the moment and who sincerely wished to commemorate with his art the sacrifice of so many young lives and the mourning of so many mothers’.69 Recently returned from Paris to take up permanent residence in Rome, where he had been appointed to a teaching position (piano, not composition) at the Liceo Musicale di Santa Cecilia, Casella had already borne public witness to his fervent patriotism. Parrino cites a ‘vehemently nationalist article’ with the portentous title ‘Nell’ora di Roma’, published on the occasion of Italy’s 1915 intervention in the First World War.70 The Elegia eroica is montage-like – apparently anti-subjective – in one obvious respect. At the conclusion (on flutes, oboe and muted trumpet between [50] and [51]), in music otherwise reminiscent of Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque (1909), Casella introduces the first phrase of the ‘Inno Mameli’, the nineteenth-century patriotic song that since 1946 has been the Italian national anthem. As Mila put it, this is a ‘dangerous’ moment.71 While there are nineteenth-century precedents for Casella’s citation (think of Tchaikovsky’s 1812), there is a hint of avant-gardism here too. The effect is political: insertion of a ‘reality fragment’ subverts the work’s autonomy. Yet for all that Casella’s gambit misfired at the première (hence, perhaps, the ‘danger’), and the citation of the ‘Inno Mameli’ was received as ‘irreverent’,72 his intention was surely nothing if not sincere. Example 1.1 gives part of the approach to the final climax of the work, and the climax itself. As in Example 1.3, Casella’s ‘French’ syntax is immediately recognizable. Bar 172 is repeated in bar 173 (though the repeat is considerably varied). At bar 174, a two-bar unit (with a 4+3 metre) is introduced, which is repeated at 176 and again at bar 178, transposed up a minor third. In contrast to the stiffness of ‘In modo funebre’, here Casella generates a tremendous level of excitement. A Schoenbergian would doubtless have recourse to the notion of Steigerung.73 To return to Adorno’s words about the Op. 9 Kammersymphonie, the Elegia eroica here adopts music’s traditional role in ‘the depiction of human emotions’. This is indeed ‘subjective’ music. Better: it is music of a subject in extremis, expressive of mounting panic. In Bürger’s terms, it is ‘organic’ music, growing from a ‘concrete life situation’. 69 70 71 72 73

Casella, Music in My Time, 141. Parrino, ‘Between the Avant-Garde and Fascist Modernism’, 131–2. Mila, ‘Itinerario stilistico’, 46. Parrino, ‘Between the Avant-Garde and Fascist Modernism’, 153. See Christopher Wintle, All the Gods: Benjamin Britten’s ‘Night-piece’ in Context, ed. Julian Littlewood (London: Plumbago, 2006), 89–93, 102–7.

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The Schoenbergian reference seems apt. To be sure, bars 172–3, with their octatonic appoggiatura chords in the brass (Collection I: E, F, G, A♭, B♭, B♮, D♭, D♮), suggest a Franco-Russian affiliation, the scoring pointing to another reminiscence of The Rite of Spring, especially [37]–[42] from the ‘Ritual of Abduction’. But from bar 174, the harmonic organization is closer to the Second Viennese School. The horn writing at bars 174, 176 and 178 recalls bars 3–5 of the fourth of Schoenberg’s Fünf Orchesterstücke (1909); the trombones’ chord at bar 1744, in which two tritones are separated by a perfect fourth, is the same harmony (transposed down a semitone) that sounds on the first downbeat of Erwartung. As Taruskin has emphasized, quartal harmonies of this type are also crucial to The Rite of Spring.74 But it makes sense to highlight the Viennese connection. As the music approaches the Allegro molto, it starts to develop rather than repeat and vary. Already at bar 177 there are departures from literal repetition (of bar 175). In bar 179, the metre is 2/4 rather than the expected 3/4, and the violins introduce a new upbeating figure in semiquavers. In bar 180 (in 3/4 rather than the expected 4/4), the horn figure is passed – in barely recognizable form – to the violins, while the horns introduce a new, rhythmically accelerating figure. The horns’ final semiquavers are picked up by the cellos and basses at the start of bar 181; meanwhile the violins set out on an ascent that extends their semiquavers from bar 179. They are joined by triplet semiquaver and demisemiquaver runs that plunge the music into the eight-note dissonance that marks the climax (bar 1814). And then something extraordinary happens. At bars 1824–6, against the background of a complex inverted pedal, the brass instruments (with low woodwind and string support) articulate a repeating two-part figure, previously unheard, in dissonant bursts of sound. In the upper register, there is chromatic movement in contrary motion; in the lower register a kind of neighbour note (or neighbour chord) motion. The figure is heard two-and-a-half times and breaks off as unexpectedly as it appeared. Harmonic links to the preceding music can certainly be found. Yet to insist on these would be to lose touch with the shock of this passage. Casella wrote of a ‘tempest of death’,75 and there is indeed a terrifying aspect to his music at this point. It is as if the orchestra has become a single giant machine. In terms of style, one thinks not so much back to The Rite of Spring or the Fünf Orchesterstücke as forwards to the Amériques (1918–21) of Varèse. The interpretative point of reference is surely expressionism: in this context Mila’s use of the term is entirely appropriate. At the moment of Casella’s sudden reversal at bar 1814 – from a forward urging subjectivity to a machine-like objectivity – we are confronted, as Thomas Harrison puts it, with ‘forms of pure sound in its unmitigated and alien materiality’. Or as Adorno writes of 74

75

Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through ‘Mavra’, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1996) I, 939–47. Casella, Music in My Time, 140.

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the Schoenberg of the pre-First World War period, the representation of human feeling is suddenly brought face to face with the real in all its horror. Aesthetic illusion is shattered.76

VI Why still Adorno? Are there no more recent theorists of musical modernism to be called upon, whose work not only has an argumentative scope equal to that of the old negative dialectician, but which benefits from not being involved in proselytism on modernism’s behalf, thus avoiding all those disparaging remarks about Sibelius, Hindemith, Britten and the rest? Perhaps it would be comforting to imagine that such theorists exist. But it is not simply their absence that makes recourse to Philosophie der neuen Musik inevitable. If one sides with T. J. Clark (as the present book obviously does) in believing that the character of modernist art is essentially negative – that ‘the fact of Art, in modernism, is the fact of negation’ – then the choice of Adorno as musical guide ‘imposes itself’, as Clark would say.77 And aside from the content of Adorno’s work, its tone is important too. One may reckon the Adornian claim that the climax of the Elegia eroica shatters aesthetic illusion to be untrue, merely a provocative exaggeration. But such provocation is a means to keep alive the fact that the première of the Elegia eroica, like that of The Rite of Spring, was the occasion for violence. The inflammatory character of such music in its original context is something that academic familiarity with the idioms of modernism does little to sustain. As Clark has put it in another place, ‘already the modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp’.78 One of the ways in which English-language musicology proceeds apace with the burial of modernism is through the emptying out of the significance of the term itself. In the introductory chapter of his study of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, James Hepokoski labels ‘modernist’ a generation of composers born around 1860, whom he also calls ‘liberal-bourgeois’. Apart from Sibelius, they include Debussy, Strauss, Elgar and Puccini.79 Hepokoski makes a clear distinction between these ‘modernists’ and younger ‘radical’ composers of ‘New Music’, principally Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Yet this distinction is not always respected by writers operating in Hepokoski’s wake. When it can be suggested that ‘the prevalent critical diagnosis of musical modernism is . . . simply a coded statement of the belief that people who 76

77 78

79

Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), 47; Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 35. T. J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry, 9/1 (1982), 154. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 2. James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–9.

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consider Sibelius modern do so simply because they are too aurally conservative to tolerate Webern’,80 we reach a situation in which the explanatory force of the term is close to zero. Modernism’s musicological atrophying of meaning began in a 1984 article by J. Peter Burkholder; here the term is associated with mid-nineteenth-century historicism. Thus Brahms heads a succession of composers whose work ‘takes music itself as its subject matter’, equally including Mahler, Orff and Stockhausen.81 Hepokoski’s model is purportedly Carl Dahlhaus. But as Matthew Riley has pointed out, Hepokoski in reality follows J. Bradford Robinson, Dahlhaus’s translator. Where Dahlhaus has ‘die Moderne’, Robinson has ‘modernism’.82 The resulting confusion, in which Sibelius and Webern can end up being discussed under the same rubric, is foreign to Dahlhaus’s intentions.83 He does not want to extend the category of ‘die Neue Musik’ back to 1890. By ‘die Moderne’, a term drawn from the Viennese man of letters Hermann Bahr (1863–1934), Dahlhaus refers, in Hepokoski’s summary, to a type of work that seeks ‘the musically “new”, the bold, the controversial, and the idiosyncratic in structure and colour’, but does so – Hepokoski had also been reading Bürger – within the terms of the liberal-bourgeois ‘delivery system’. This music did not cause riots. Its composers were ‘encouraged to push the system to its limits, but not beyond them’.84 In choosing to translate ‘die Moderne’ as ‘modernism’, Robinson gave himself problems with ‘die Neue Musik’.85 If we are to make use of Dahlhaus’s distinction, we need to come up with something better. In line with Dahlhaus’s own practice – he chooses Bahr’s ‘die Moderne’ as a term that ‘originated in the age it names’ – we could follow Richard Strauss, who raised his glass to ‘the welfare and success of the first English Progressivist, Meister Edward Elgar’.86 But transposing Dahlhaus’s account to Italy creates further problems. In a prime example of what one reviewer characterized as the Schoenbergian-Adornian, Germanocentric, evolutionary

80

81 82

83

84 85

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J. P. E. Harper-Scott, ‘“Our True North”: Walton’s First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of Modernism in England’, Music & Letters, 89/4 (2008), 563. J. Peter Burkholder, ‘Brahms and Twentieth-Century Music’, 19th-Century Music, 8/1 (1984), 81. See Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 330–94; and compare Carl Dahlhaus, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hermann Danuser, 10 vols. (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2000–8), V, 318–82. See Matthew Riley, ‘Musikalische Moderne: Dahlhaus and After’, paper read at the conference Elgar and Musical Modernism, Gresham College, London, 14 December 2007, www.gresham.ac.uk/ lectures-and-events/elgar-and-musical-modernism. Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 3. This is rendered variously as ‘twentieth-century modern music’, ‘contemporary music’ and ‘twentieth-century contemporary music’, but also as ‘modern music’. See Dahlhaus, NineteenthCentury Music, 334, 336, 346, 373. Ibid., 334; A. J. J. [August Johannes Jaeger], ‘Lower Rhenish Musical Festival’, Musical Times, 43/712 (1902), 402.

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steamroller of Dahlhaus’s historiographical method, the author of Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts finds that the work of Puccini and Mascagni, on the one hand, and that of Strauss and Mahler, on the other, ‘seem to belong to different eras’.87 Such attempts to deny Puccini ‘acceptance into the canon of modern composers’, as Alexandra Wilson puts it, are nowadays a source of irritation. After all, Schoenberg himself listed Puccini among the harmonic innovators.88 As for Mascagni, one cannot fairly judge his work by Cavalleria rusticana (Rome, 1890) alone. Several of his later operas, in particular Iris (Rome, 1898), are abundantly ‘progressivist’ in terms of musical language and dramaturgy. Assessment of Italian ‘musikalische Moderne’ on Dahlhaus’s lines would be further hampered by his reluctance to draw parallels with literary history. For literary considerations are unavoidable in the Italian case, as Emanuele Senici’s reading of Falstaff makes clear. Carefully avoiding the term ‘modernist’, Senici follows Burkholder in locating the ‘distinctively modern’ character of Verdi’s last opera in its acknowledgement of ‘the impossibility of a direct, unmediated relationship to the past’.89 But Senici is not concerned only with historical selfconsciousness. In Fenton’s ‘Dal labbro il canto’ (Act III Scene 2), Verdi and his librettist Boito are perceived to carry out a critique of the very representational system that is the basis of opera. Senici refers to Mallarmé, in whose poetry, as the literary historian Peter Nicholls explains, ‘a syntactic opacity’ is created, with the aim of abolishing ‘any dream of one-to-one referentiality’. Language is to be protected from its everyday degradation ‘into univocal counters which seem merely transparent vehicles for meaning’.90 Similarly, ‘Dal labbro il canto’ is ‘a deeply sceptical interrogation’ of the apparently natural links ‘between body and voice, gesture and singing, words and music’, on which the operatic tradition had depended since its inception.91 To put it another way, there is a flavour of aestheticism about Falstaff, a turning aside from the all too obviously commercial imperatives of nineteenth-century Italian operatic production – to which the opera’s unenthusiastic first audiences bore witness. For all Hepokoski’s insistence on the engagement of progressivist composers with the marketplace, the aristocratic bearing of Falstaff is not untypical of the 1890s. A rather less subtle document of Italian musical aestheticism is the attack on Mascagni published by the poet, novelist and journalist Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) in the Neapolitan newspaper Il Mattino on 2–3 September 1892. Mocking the 87

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89 90 91

Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 351; Philip Gossett, ‘Up from Beethoven’, New York Review of Books, 36/16 (1989), 21–6. Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 224; Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 407. Emanuele Senici, ‘Verdi’s Falstaff at Italy’s Fin de Siècle’, Musical Quarterly, 85/2 (2001), 295. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 38. Senici, ‘Verdi’s Falstaff’, 294.

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composer of Cavalleria rusticana, L’amico Fritz (Rome, 1891) and I Rantzau (Florence, 1892) as a ‘born bandmaster’, D’Annunzio declares that Mascagni’s concern is with ‘business’ alone: ‘He has always been outside art, and there he will remain.’92 We should not be under any illusions with regard to D’Annunzio’s interest in the Italian music of the early twentieth century.93 But if D’Annunzio did not need the composers, they clearly needed him. Established as the preeminent – and most scandalous – figure in Italian letters by the mid-1890s, in 1896 he switched the focus of his creative energy from poetry and novels to the stage, producing over a dozen dramas by 1914, first in prose and then in verse. Italian composers queued up to set them. Of the results, the most lucrative was the version of Francesca da Rimini by Riccardo Zandonai (1883–1944). First performed at the Teatro Regio in Turin in 1914, it quickly received performances in London (1914) and New York (1916); it was regularly staged in Italy until the Second World War.94 Not even Dahlhaus (he fails to mention it) would have been able to deny the work’s progressivism. Although – as commentators always point out – Zandonai’s vocal idiom retains links to that of the giovane scuola (Mascagni was one of his teachers), his harmonic language and orchestral textures have a richness that brings his score closer to Wagner, at times to Debussy, and above all to Richard Strauss, than any previous opera in the Italian tradition. Francesca da Rimini, with its literary libretto and complex music, is an ‘up-market’ product, confirmation of a trend among Italian composers ‘away from the quotidian realities of bourgeois opera and toward a heightened, aestheticized operatic discourse’.95 For D’Annunzio, the commercial success of Zandonai’s opera made it unpalatable. To the composer’s chagrin, the poet never attended a single performance.96 But D’Annunzio’s behaviour was surely hypocritical. As Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol points out, while he ‘wished to define his poetic theatre as art that was autonomous with respect to the public and the market’, his work simultaneously courted a mass audience.97 D’Annunzio was a best-selling author, his novels shaping the comportment (especially the amorous comportment) of well-to-do Italians for over three 92

93

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96 97

Gabriele D’Annunzio, ‘Il capobanda’, in Rubens Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica (Scandicci: La Nuova Italia, 1988), 192–5, 193. See Guido Salvetti, ‘I rapporti con la Generazione dell’80: una “favola bella”’, in Adriana Guarnieri, Fiamma Nicolodi and Cesare Orselli (eds.), D’Annunzio musico imaginifico. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Siena, 14–16 luglio 2005 (Florence: Olschki, 2008), 125–44. Alan Mallach, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 333. Ibid., 299. For consideration of the ‘levels’ of Italian operatic culture in the period 1870–1915, see Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Musica e letteratura in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Milan: Sansoni, 2000), 95–127. Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 106–7. Guarnieri Corazzol, Musica e letteratura in Italia, 236–7.

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decades.98 The contradiction is in fact exemplary. For Adorno, as Huyssen observes, art nouveau or Jugendstil – aestheticism in general (which certainly includes D’Annunzio) – plays a pivotal role in the prehistory of modernism. While work created under the banner of art nouveau sets out to rise above commercialism (as represented by the giovane scuola), the result is nevertheless a situation (as in Francesca da Rimini) in which ‘the commodity character of art[,] which had been an integral though somewhat hidden part of all emancipated bourgeois art[,] becomes external . . ., tumbling, as it were, out of the artworks for all to see’.99 Progressivism (‘die musikalische Moderne’) and modernism (‘die Neue Musik’) need to be clearly distinguished. For modernism takes the form of a break not just with ‘liberal-bourgeois’ forms (Puccini, Mascagni) but also with the aestheticism (Zandonai) that progressivism carries as its internal opposition. Modernism takes up the failed anti-market aspirations of art nouveau and turns them into unpalatable reality. Comparison between ‘Danseuses de Delphes’ and ‘In modo funebre’ makes the contrast clear. But Casella was special: perhaps unique among his Italian generation in his avoidance of any major artistic submission to D’Annunzio. His only setting, a song for voice and piano, La sera fiesolana, Op. 37, dates from as late as 1923. The two men certainly collaborated on musical projects; they met in Paris before the First World War.100 But Casella’s immersion in French culture evidently kept him from being overwhelmed. If he had remained in Italy, things might have turned out very differently.

VII Consider Malipiero’s music of the First World War, the period referred to by Waterhouse (his foremost scholar) as the composer’s ‘crisis years’. Malipiero is often thought of, along with Casella, as Italy’s leading early musical modernist. Present with Casella at the première of The Rite of Spring, he described the experience as decisive: ‘I awoke from a long and dangerous lethargy on the evening of 28 [sic] May 1913.’101 But who today would couple Stravinsky with D’Annunzio? The distinction between aestheticism and modernism was evidently harder to grasp at the time. Thus Malipiero’s first major project after hearing The Rite of Spring was a Literaturoper based on D’Annunzio’s one-act Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno, in which, as Waterhouse puts it, ‘the newly-discovered . . . influence reveals itself . . . in sudden brief outbursts of fierce polytriadic dissonance’.102 See Gioacchino Lanza Tommasi, ‘Il gusto musicale di D’Annunzio e il dannunzianesimo musicale’, in Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento, 393. 99 Huyssen, ‘Adorno in Reverse’, 41. 100 See Casella, Music in My Time, 92. 101 See John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘G. F. Malipiero’s Crisis Years (1913–19)’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 108 (1981/2), 129. 102 Ibid. 98

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D’Annunzio’s work is often labelled as ‘decadent’: the term, as Nicholls explains, encompassing not just ‘a preoccupation with death and decay which manifests itself in a stylistic extravagance and morbid excess of the aesthetic’, but also a misogynistic glutting on ‘dreams of torture, destruction and sexual cruelty’.103 In Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno, set in the dying years of the Venetian Republic, the curtain rises on Gradeniga, the widow of one of the last doges, at dusk outside her villa by the Brenta canal. In a series of monologues, she tells how, at the behest of her younger lover, and with the aid of a sorceress brought from Slavonia, she caused the death of her husband. But now, the lover (who remains nameless) has shifted his attentions to a younger woman of siren-like sexual allure, the courtesan Pantea. Pantea is floating down the Brenta – with Gradeniga’s ex-lover – on board an enormous and lavishly decorated barge. We know this since every now and again Gradeniga’s lady’s maid Pentella reports on the offstage action from a look-out at the top of the villa’s staircase. Gradeniga’s female spies, arriving in ones and twos, tell of the various sex games played on board, including a striptease by Pantea, which is received with wild enthusiasm by all the men on the flotilla of boats that increasingly surround the barge. Gradeniga needs to possess some part of Pantea: a lock of hair or a scrap of clothing. Only with these will the Slavonian sorceress be able successfully to make a wax doll. The sorceress is brought in; she sets to work. Bloodied but bearing a lock of Pantea’s hair, two more of Gradeniga’s spies appear. Pins are stuck into the wax doll, and the sorcery works. A full-scale battle breaks out among Pantea’s admirers, and the barge is consumed by flames. It is apparently a source of embarrassment that Malipiero took this lurid nonsense so seriously. Two recent commentators both find it necessary to argue that in making cuts and alterations to Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno – which, for the most part, would seem obviously required for the play to become an opera (or invited by the specific possibilities of the operatic stage) – Malipiero succeeded in creating a dramaturgy that is ‘anti-D’Annunzian’.104 More telling is the strength of Malipiero’s commitment to the project. Having failed to gain D’Annunzio’s permission to set the text in a grovelling epistolary approach of June 1911, Malipiero travelled to Paris at the start of 1913 in the hope of tackling the dramatist directly. (D’Annunzio was in France between 1910 and 1915, in flight from his creditors.) There the composer was kept waiting for no less than five months; and even after an audience was granted, no clear permission was forthcoming. Malipiero set the text regardless, yet publication and performance proved impossible, since, as it turned out (this was the reason for D’Annunzio’s evasiveness), the rights had 103 104

Nicholls, Modernisms, 53–4. Paolo Cattelan, ‘Il sogno dannunziano ovvero come sbarazzarsene? Ariele, Bonaventura e il teatro di Malipiero’, in Paolo Cattelan (ed.), Malipiero Maderna 1973–1993 (Florence: Olschki, 2000), 38–41; Virgilio Bernardoni, ‘Il Sogno dannunziano di Malipiero’, in Guarnieri, Nicolodi and Orselli (eds.), D’Annunzio musico imaginifico, 308–13.

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already been sold for a high price to a rich amateur, who subsequently refused to surrender them. Malipiero continued to badger D’Annunzio on the topic until the early 1920s, later confessing that the author of Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno was prepared to become friendly with him only on the day that he (Malipiero) finally announced that he was prepared to drop the issue. A première, in the form of a radio broadcast, was eventually arranged for D’Annunzio’s centenary in 1963. As late as 1970, Malipiero was still trying to arrange publication of his opera. He failed, and the work remains unpublished.105 The composer was obsessed. Five years after completing his hour-length operatic score, he began a ‘Symphonic Drama’, Pantea (1918–19), a twenty-minute ballet for a single female dancer, accompanied by orchestra with an offstage solo voice and chorus. The work, Waterhouse declares, ‘brings us to the very centre of the creative fireball’ of Malipiero’s ‘crisis years’. Waterhouse too wants to play down the role played by D’Annunzio. Why ‘Pantea’ once again? Presumably Malipiero ‘simply . . . liked the sound of the name’.106 But as Bernardoni points out, much is retained from Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno, not least the demarcation of onstage and offstage elements.107 In the ballet, as in the opera, the two spaces are gendered: onstage is female, offstage male. In Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno, Malipiero evokes the scene on the Brenta with an offstage male chorus that repeats a single word, ‘Pantea’. In Pantea, the offstage chorus is mixed, but it is only the male voices that are permitted to pronounce Pantea’s name: this is during the first of the three ‘hallucinations’ that make up the central part of the work. The offstage solo voice is also male. The ballet begins where the opera left off. The opening orchestral textures of the ‘Prologo’, described by Waterhouse as ‘the most ferociously frenzied . . . that Malipiero had yet conceived’, represent the raging of ‘a hurricane of iron and fire’.108 When the solo baritone (Gradeniga’s ex-lover?) sings his ‘nostalgic’ cantilena, the orchestra responds (at [7]-3) with music whose surging, post-Wagnerian manner makes the erotic charge of Pantea’s reaction unmistakable. She struggles to open the door of her room, but cannot. As in the opera, Pantea is at the mercy of malevolent higher powers. In the ‘Terza allucinazione’, she is seen at night in a wood, ‘running as if lashed by a thousand whips’. In the ‘Epilogo’, Pantea is once again made frenzied by the sound of the lone male voice. This time she succeeds in opening the door. The music (at [34]+13) is an intensification of that at [7]-3. What is revealed, however, is not Pantea’s lover, but ‘a terrifying, unmoving figure’, whom Malipiero

105

106 107 108

For the details of this narrative, see Chiara Bianchi (ed.), Il carteggio tra Gabriele D’Annunzio e Gian Francesco Malipiero (1910–1938) (Clusone: Ferrari, 1997). Waterhouse, ‘G. F. Malipiero’s Crisis Years’, 136. See Bernardoni, ‘Il Sogno dannunziano di Malipiero’, 314. Waterhouse, ‘G. F. Malipiero’s Crisis Years’, 133.

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calls ‘L’Ombra’ (‘the Shade’). Having tried and failed to close the door, Pantea ‘begins the dance of her own death’.109 It is hard not to feel that Malipiero’s music has frequently been misread. For Luigi Pestalozza, one of the composer’s most vocal advocates, his handling of form outdoes even Schoenberg’s in novelty. While the composer of Erwartung returned to classical designs in the 1920s, Malipiero persisted with constructions that are ‘informal’ in their athematic, non-developmental character. In a work such as the orchestral Pause del silenzio (1917), which Malipiero himself regarded as bringing together ‘all the characteristics’ of his style, Pestalozza suggests that music regains contact with its historical condition before the ‘illusion’ of development. It is a return to the past without links either to neoclassicism or to Italian decadence.110 This is yet another attempt to distance Malipiero from D’Annunzio. But as Nino Pirotta pointed out, the ‘meaningless verbiage [arzigogolo]’ of the title Pause del silenzio, which Waterhouse translates as ‘Interruptions of Silence’, has a ‘D’Annunzian stamp’.111 Malipiero reads it differently. In his preface to the Philharmonia miniature score (the work was originally published by the Bolognese firm Pizzi in 1919), he relates the title to the circumstances of the music’s composition during the First World War, ‘when it was more difficult to find silence and when, if one found it, one hesitated to interrupt it, even musically’.112 Pirotta’s observation, shorn of its pejorative character, can nevertheless be taken further. In D’Annunzio’s 1900 novel Il fuoco, which Malipiero certainly knew, the musings of the ‘learned mystic’ Daniele Glàuro are particularly apropos: ‘Have you ever considered that the essence of music might not be in sounds at all?’ . . . ‘It is in the silence that precedes sound and the silence that follows. Rhythm appears and comes to life in those periods of silence. Every sound and every chord awakens a voice in the silence that can only be heard by our minds. Rhythm is the heart of music, but its beat cannot be heard except during the pauses between sounds.’113

This is a musical symbolism: the purely mental ‘voice’ of music corresponding to the unrepresentable Mallarméan ‘Ideal’. As the poet and composer Stelio Èffrena 109

110

111

112

113

Gian Francesco Malipiero, L’armonioso labirinto. Teatro da musica 1913–1970, ed. Marzio Pieri (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), 67–9. Luigi Pestalozza, L’opposizione musicale. Scritti sulla musica del Novecento, ed. Roberto Favaro (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991), 134. For Malipiero’s assessment of Pause del silenzio, see Gino Scarpa (ed.), L’opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero (Treviso: Canova, 1952), 224–5. Nino Pirotta, ‘Malipiero e il filo d’Arianna’, in Maria Teresa Murano (ed.), Malipiero. Scrittura e critica (Florence: Olschki, 1984), 9; John C. G. Waterhouse, Gian Francesco Malipiero: The Life, Times and Music of a Wayward Genius 1882–1973 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999), 119. G. F. Malipiero, Pause del silenzio (Vienna: Wiener Philharmonische Verlag, 1926), [vi] (translation modified). Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Flame, trans. Susan Bassnett (London: Quartet, 1991), 159; for Malipiero’s knowledge of this novel, see Scarpa (ed.), L’opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero, 189.

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(D’Annunzio’s fictional alter ego) replies to Glàuro, ‘The musical silence throbbing with rhythm is the living, mysterious atmosphere that is the only place where words of pure poetry can appear.’114 The Malipiero of 1926 seems to want to distance the work from this kind of speculation. Pause del silenzio, he wrote, ‘represents no tendency, no intention, other than the purely musical’.115 In the title of the work, we might even say, Glàuro’s ‘pausa dei suoni’ finds its materialist inversion. It is sound that preoccupies Malipiero, not silence. But the situation is not so straightforward, as an account of the form of Pause del silenzio will show. Pestalozza’s notion of ‘informality’ quickly unravels. As Waterhouse explains, the work, which runs continuously for between twelve and thirteen minutes, ‘is divided into seven brief, contrasted and thematically unrelated “panels”’.116 So far, so original. Yet the forms of the ‘panels’ are conventional (most have a simple ternary shape A B A), and they are far from ‘athematic’. Example 1.4 shows the final twenty bars of the work. Here, as in the concluding sections of two of the earlier panels (II and III), Malipiero combines elements from his A and B sections. At bars 254–6, repeated triads a tritone apart (from the A section of panel VII, bars 231–43) provide an accompaniment for the trumpets’ vaguely Gregorian melody (from the B section, bars 244–53). The basic principle of Example 1.4 is clear: from bar 257 onwards, fragments of the trumpets’ melody are pitted against dissonantly arranged triads in a build up to a climactic full restatement of the melody at bars 265–7. Waterhouse refers to ‘searing, war-inspired disruptiveness’.117 Yet for all Pestalozza’s (and Malipiero’s) talk of a rejection of ‘thematic development’, the employment of the nineteenth-century technique of Steigerung in this final section of Pause del silenzio – as at the final climax of Casella’s Elegia eroica – is unmistakable. Bars 258–9 are a false point of arrival (or a digression): the process of intensification begun at bar 257 continues at bar 260. At bar 257, the texture of bars 254–6 is inverted. Triads in the treble, a minor third apart (B♭ minor and C♯ minor) accompany a whole-tone variant of the trumpets’ quintuplets, given out by four horns. This is then repeated in sequence – rising a semitone at each stage – at bars 261 and 263 (the ‘extra’ bar 264 prepares the climax). At both bars 261 and 263 the material is associated with a further sequence. The triads of bar 260, rising by major thirds (each combined with its tritone transposition) are shifted up a tone at bar 262. When the ultimate climax arrives at bar 267, the tritone relation E–B♭ is expressed both as a progression (upper two staves) and a simultaneity (lower two staves). A deadlock seems to have been reached. But then something strange happens. Three trumpets sound a modal fanfare, unrelated to the preceding material. 114 115 116

See Nicholls, Modernisms, 35; D’Annunzio, The Flame, 160. Malipiero, Pause del silenzio, [vi] (translation modified). Waterhouse, Gian Francesco Malipiero, 119. 117 Ibid.

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Ex. 1.4 Gian Francesco Malipiero, Pause del silenzio (1917), bars 254–73.

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Ex. 1.4 (cont.)

The fanfare’s final d2–b1 is echoed as a♯1–f♯1 in bars 272–3 over a dissonant harmony – constructed from what Debussy analysts sometimes call the ‘acoustic scale’118 – and the piece is over. Looked at in isolation, the surprise in the closing bars of Example 1.4 suggests a parallel to the shock experienced at bars 182–6 of Casella’s Elegia eroica. At the very least, Malipiero’s music seems paradigmatic of the modernist disruption of organic form. But as every listener to Pause del silenzio knows, the fanfare at bars 269–71 does not come out of the blue. It opens the work; versions of it are heard, always unaccompanied, between each of the seven panels. First presented on e1, the fanfare begins a semitone higher each time it is played, until it reaches the concluding b1. The repeating fanfare is the single most striking element in Malipiero’s piece. What most listeners do not know is that the idea seems not to have been part of the original design. A quick look at the pencil short score reveals that Pause del silenzio was first intended as a collection of seven unconnected movements.119 The hastily written manuscript represents a late stage in the compositional process: pitches and rhythms are substantially unchanged in the published score. But the fanfares have had to be added in, often on extra hand-drawn staves. It is evident that Pause del silenzio originally ended at bar 269, without the trumpets’ entry. And this brings us back to D’Annunzio. Malipiero’s title may appear to negate the symbolist notion of a ‘pausa dei suoni’, but the original plan nevertheless corresponded to Glàuro’s ideal, in that the music would continually have been 118

119

See, for example, Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 48. See www.juilliardmanuscriptcollection.org/composers.php#/works/MALI.

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re-emerging from the silences surrounding the seven little movements. Filling in these gaps, Malipiero appears to block such a reading. The fanfare cannot be Glàuro’s voice of silence. Yet there remains an uncanny element. The fanfare is invested with authority. Not only does it open and close the work, it sometimes breaks into the musical discourse in peremptory fashion, cutting the fragments off or urging them in a new direction. It has its own laws, and while one of these (the progressive transposition) is clear, the other – why does the fanfare interrupt as it does? – is not; or not once one returns from the sketches to the finished work. So is this modernism? In The Rite of Spring, Taruskin remarks, the ‘lurching shifts’ between sections belong to the dehumanizing strategy of the work: there is an ‘absence of recall and forecast’ which is an ‘absence of memory’.120 In Pause del silenzio, there are similar lurches. On the other hand, memory – in the shape of the fanfares – is preserved. In a manner that seems more symbolist than modernist, Malipiero’s music gathers itself around an enigma.

VIII Unlike The Rite of Spring (or indeed the Elegia eroica), Pause del silenzio was reasonably well received – at least by the audience – at its première in the Augusteo under Bernardino Molinari (1880–1952) on 17 January 1918: the work went on to widespread international exposure.121 In contrast to the modernist Casella of the seconda maniera, Malipiero seems an ambiguous figure, suspended – even in his ‘crisis years’ – between modernism and aestheticism. The ‘decadent’ preoccupation with death in Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno and Pantea, it might be argued, is something Malipiero shares with Casella: witness the latter’s Notte di maggio, ‘In modo funebre’ and Elegia eroica – also his Tagore song-cycle L’adieu à la vie, Op. 26 (1915). But the distinction is a matter not so much of content as of form. In a critique of Malipiero’s achievement, Gioacchino Lanza Tommasi suggests that ‘the most durable’ musical products of the twentieth century stand together, regardless of stylistic orientation, under the sign of a ‘technological passion’. Thus the ‘polyrhythmic Stravinsky’ is just as much a ‘precision worker’ as the ‘canonic Webern’.122 It is a version of Adorno’s understanding of modernism discussed above: his ‘great “Teach the petrified forms how to dance by singing them their own song”’, as Clark puts it.123 If few would place Casella on the level of a Stravinsky or a Webern, the ‘technological passion’ of his constructions is evident. Not so in Malipiero, Lanza Tommasi suggests, and the above analysis tends to bear him out – though we need to be careful here: Pause del silenzio has its ‘technological’ side too, 120 121

122 123

Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 383. See Gian Francesco Malipiero, Il carteggio con Guido M. Gatti, 1914–1972, ed. Cecilia Palandri (Florence: Olschki, 1997), 23; Scarpa (ed.), L’opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero, 225. Lanza Tommasi, ‘Il gusto musicale di D’Annunzio’, 401–2. T. J. Clark, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 2 (2000), 91.

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notably the transposition scheme followed by the fanfare. In other Italian composers of the period, the relation to modernity is less ambiguous. For Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), the aestheticizing pursuit of an imaginary past took centre stage. And yet it was in Pizzetti – not in Casella or Malipiero – that the modernists of Florence sought the saviour of the Italian musical tradition. As they were to realize, it was a role he could not fulfil. Accounts of Florentine cultural life in the first years of the twentieth century inevitably focus on three short-lived journals: Leonardo (1903–7), La voce (1908–16) and Lacerba (1913–15), edited principally (in various combinations) by Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964), Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) and Giuseppe Prezzolini (1882–1982). As Walter L. Adamson has acknowledged (he is the foremost English-language scholar of these intellectuals), the exploits of the Milanese futurists remain more celebrated. But in the Italian context, Florentine modernism – not primarily an avant-garde in Bürger’s sense – ‘had a greater cultural and political impact’.124 The names Soffici, Papini and Prezzolini are unfamiliar to Englishlanguage musicology (the latter two were literary and political figures, while Soffici was also active as a visual artist). So it is worth noting that when – in the aftermath of the première of the Elegia eroica – Casella founded a campaigning journal Ars nova (1917–19), the mouthpiece of his simultaneously founded Società Nazionale di Musica (swiftly changed to Società Italiana di Musica Moderna), he looked to Lacerba as his model.125 Edited by Soffici and Papini, this most riotous of the Florentine journals allied itself with Milanese futurism for a year, beginning in March 1913. It was in Lacerba that Russolo first published the two pages of Il risveglio di una città; the journal also carried articles by Russolo and work by the less radical futurist musician Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880–1955). But it was Prezzolini’s La voce – Lacerba’s sober predecessor – that was more prominently concerned with music. Particularly striking is the editorial ‘Pizzetti e Mascagni’ of 20 March 1913. At issue were two further D’Annunzio operas: one a Literaturoper based on the verse drama Fedra, which Pizzetti had completed in October 1912; the other Mascagni’s Parisina, employing D’Annunzio’s only text conceived from the start as a libretto, which, by the time of La voce’s editorial, was close to completion in short score.126 Fedra had been scheduled for performance at Naples and Rome, but had suddenly been withdrawn. The rumour was that someone – the operas shared a publisher in 124

125

126

Walter L. Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4. See Casella, Music in My Time, 148; also Francesca Petrocchi, ‘Le ragioni dell’arte: musica, pittura e letteratura in “Ars nova”’, in Francesca Petrocchi (ed.), ‘Ars nova’ 1917–1919 (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1992), 17–18. See Alan Mallach, Pietro Mascagni and his Operas (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 198–204.

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Edoardo Sonzogno (1836–1920) – had decided that the Mascagni should appear first, which it did: Parisina received its premiere at La Scala in December 1913. The turn of events roused La voce to indignation. The premiere of Fedra had been anticipated as ‘a hope of something new, which would make a break once and for all with the vile mediocrity [chitarrume] and bourgeois outlook weighing on us above all since Verdi, that genius of Italian musical imbecility’. ‘We know’, the editorial continued, ‘that we shall see nothing new from Mascagni.’127 La voce was wrong. Parisina turned out to be Mascagni’s most thoroughly progressivist score. But more significant here is the open hostility towards the giovane scuola – not to speak of Verdi. This is an attitude witnessed above in D’Annunzio, ironically enough; it is most famously associated with the sometime contributor to La voce, Fausto Torrefranca (1883–1955), whose 1912 pamphlet Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale retains its notoriety. Torrefranca’s misogyny, on which Alexandra Wilson dwells at length in her study of Puccini reception, may be the most striking feature of the text to a modern reader. As Wilson points out, antifeminism was very much on the agenda at La voce, particularly as expressed in enthusiasm for Otto Weininger’s 1903 book Geschlecht und Charakter.128 But it is important to be clear about its purpose. When Wilson charges Torrefranca with depicting ‘women, homosexuals and Jews as harbingers of social disintegration’,129 she is wide of the mark. Torrefranca says nothing about either Jews or social disintegration, and barely touches on homosexuality. As for the misogyny, while this is doubtless to be understood partly in terms of a reactionary response to the first stirrings of the Italian women’s movement, it is better grasped as Torrefranca’s means to engage a politics not of gender so much as of class. The self-ascribed class image of Italian musical modernists was all too clearly articulated. Characteristic is a 1915 article by Malipiero, in which the composer declares that ‘art is of itself aristocratic, and where it flourishes, intellectual aristocracies flourish’.130 Already in 1911, as Wilson notes, Pizzetti had published (again in La voce) a lengthy critique of the ‘bourgeois’ character of Puccini’s operas. The composer of La Bohème (Turin, 1896), Pizzetti wrote, ‘was able sincerely, artistically, to live only the lives of those middling persons . . . similar to himself in terms of intellectual capacity and faculties of sensibility’.131 For Torrefranca, Puccini’s work is feminine and suited to feminine (and feminized) audiences – which is to say decadent, childish, impotent and all the rest – because it is easy. Puccini adapts to fashion, aiming calculatedly for financial gain, and thereby fails as an artist. Tosca (Rome, 1900) was not initially a great success. But the drama of Puccini’s new opera 127 128 129 130 131

‘Pizzetti e Mascagni’, La voce, 5/12 (1913), 1037. See Wilson, The Puccini Problem, 131–3; Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, 90–1, 122–3. Wilson, The Puccini Problem, 152. See Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 128. Ildebrando Pizzetti, Musicisti contemporanei. Saggi critici (Milan: Treves, 1914), 76.

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(not his music), brought running to the theatre ‘the lowest strata of the culture and that half class which is avid for violent and imbecilic emotions, whereupon the success naturally grew, little by little’.132 Instrumental music, Torrefranca claims, because it is more complex than vocal music, is appreciated only by an ‘intellectual aristocracy’. It is heroic, which is to say: male.133 Again, this is a rhetoric (a Nietzschean one) that would have been familiar to readers of the Florentine journals. Adamson sums up the Papini and Prezzolini of Leonardo as expressing a ‘cultural elitism’ that aimed to ‘overcome the temptation toward “feminine” overrefinement’ and to live ‘by a new set of moral values such as hardness, courage, and sincerity’.134 Yet we should not rush to place Torrefranca among the Florentines. To be sure, he had a strong interest in contemporary culture. But his principal concerns were in historical musicology, most famously in nonoperatic Italian Kleinmeister of the eighteenth century. Placed next to the intense scrutiny of the latest international – as well as Italian – cultural developments found in Leonardo, La voce or Lacerba, Torrefranca’s demand that young Italian composers learn to speak their national musical language via the study of Durante, Galuppi and Platti appears parochial.135 The principal critical representative of Italian musical modernism was not Torrefranca but Giannotto Bastianelli (1883–1927), the writer who came closest to acting as La voce’s regular music critic, with over two dozen articles published between 1909 and 1915, including a detailed review of Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale. As Bastianelli points out (it is something Wilson fails to mention), Torrefranca had previously published a 400-page study of musical aesthetics, La vita musicale dello spirito.136 This explains a great deal. A philosopher-critic who had persuaded himself – in explicitly Schopenhauerian style (complete with reference to the ‘veil of Maya’) – that ‘pure’, instrumental music was superior to any that found its raison d’être in a mimetic or intensificatory relationship to drama and gesture, and who further (again following Schopenhauer) had attached to instrumental music a quasireligious character as spiritual self-knowledge, was never going to find much of value in Puccini. Critic and composer were ill matched. Bastianelli objects particularly to Torrefranca’s insistence that words and music remain distinct in opera. The author of Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale privileges Palestrina over Monteverdi, regarding the former as a composer of essentially non-verbal music that ‘truly expresses the life of life’, while the latter writes music that anxiously seeks words ‘in order to give itself a face, to make itself human’. Invoking the 1902 Estetica of the Neapolitan philosopher, historian and literary critic Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), a 132 133 135 136

Fausto Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale (Turin: Bocca, 1912), 54. Ibid., 12–13. 134 Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, 93. See Fausto Torrefranca, ‘Per una coscienza musicale italiana’, La voce, 2/38 (1910), 386. See Fausto Torrefranca, La vita musicale dello spirito: la musica–le arti–il dramma (Turin: Bocca, 1910).

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work that exerted a profound influence on the writers of La voce, Bastianelli insists that if a work of art is indeed art (an ideal fusion of intuition and expression), its physical form is of no significance. The idea that one genre is ‘pure’ while another is not is an error born of ‘intellectualism’.137 A different approach to opera was possible, as Bastianelli himself had demonstrated in his study of Mascagni. Published in 1910, this surely provided the spur for Torrefranca’s book on Puccini, which was written around Christmas that same year.138 But Bastianelli’s similarly short text is no diatribe. He does criticize Mascagni’s work between L’amico Fritz and Iris for the way it falls into selfrepetition. And yet Cavalleria rusticana is a case, rare in the history of all the arts, in which the composer finds in the conception offered to him by the opera’s two librettists ‘all the stimuli necessary to set out his personality’ and ‘to fulfil . . . his entire creative capacity’. Even if Bastianelli finds less of value in the later operas, he reckons Act II of Iris a ‘semi-masterpiece’.139 The critic finds himself torn. Bastianelli may both affirm the aesthetic legitimacy of opera and criticize Torrefranca’s attempt to exalt his instrumental Kleinmeister (‘[a] false national pride in these matters . . . would make us look ridiculous’), but he takes a similar line to his critical rival with regard to Italian opera, which Torrefranca judges to have entered a period of decadence around 1750.140 Nineteenth-century Italian opera, Bastianelli explains, is like the proletariat at which it is aimed: alternately astonishing in its ingenuous ability to speak profound philosophical truths and disgusting in its ‘empty and inappropriate repetition of trite sophisms’. Unable to transcend their historical moment and achieve greatness (on the model of Beethoven or Wagner), Italian opera composers are sunk in spiritual poverty. Mascagni may be the true successor to Verdi; at his best he may be spontaneous and genuinely moving; but he also personifies ‘the new mental mediocrity of the third Italy’.141 There is a further problem. If the realism of Cavalleria rusticana is only skin deep, it nevertheless represents an attempt to participate in a Europe-wide movement of culture. Yet it does so at a moment (1890) when realism had already been overtaken by the symbolist reaction to it. Likewise, Iris tries to be symbolist, but appeared at a moment (1898) when Italians were beginning to react against that artistic movement too. Mascagni’s work exists on a level of culture that is not just low but historically irrelevant.142 Yet all is not lost. Richard Strauss and Debussy may not have Mascagni’s faults. They write ‘great’ music that is fully abreast of the latest cultural 137

138

139 140 141

See Giannotto Bastianelli, review of Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale, in La voce, 4/29 (1912), 857; Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini, 13–15. See Giannotto Bastianelli, Pietro Mascagni (Naples: Riccardi, 1910); Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini, vii. Bastianelli, Pietro Mascagni, 46–7, 30, 87. Bastianelli, review of Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini, 857; Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini, 16–19. Bastianelli, Pietro Mascagni, 8–9, 14, 23–4, 7. 142 Ibid., 53–7, 89.

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developments. But while Mascagni’s music is ‘alive’, theirs is ‘decadent’, its content ‘rotten’. And there is a particular technical interest in Mascagni’s work. If music is to overcome decadence, Bastianelli suggests, it will need a ‘new diatonicism’ to replace the ‘chaotic ocean of frenetic chromaticism’ in the post-Wagnerians. And in Act III of Iris, he finds evidence of just this.143 What Italian music needs now is to gain a historical consciousness, to learn to think. Following the example of Carducci in poetry, it needs to re-attach itself to its roots – in Monteverdi, for example – thus serving in the much needed project of national regeneration.144 The concern with regeneration is a quintessentially ‘Vocian’ theme. Torrefranca argues in much the same terms. But Bastianelli spreads his net wider. In detailed analyses of Scriabin’s Sixth and Tenth Piano Sonatas, Opp. 62 (1911–12) and 70 (1912–13), published in La voce in March 1915, he declares that, ‘apart from some things of Schoenberg’, Scriabin’s renewal of the sonata constitutes ‘the only kind of true, pure modern music’ that he knows. The Russian does for musical form what the futurists have done for painting. At the end of the Tenth Sonata (bar 260), Bastianelli is struck by the ‘sudden break’ whereby Scriabin returns to the work’s introductory material, comparing such ‘very beautiful and truly modern . . . continuous, nervous and bold breaks’ to Marinetti’s parole in libertà – the futurist leader’s celebrated bid to cancel ‘the inner life’ in a ‘destruction of syntax’.145 The most substantial statement of Bastianelli’s position had appeared three years earlier. In his impassioned study, La crisi della musica europea, the names Scriabin and Schoenberg do not feature. Bastianelli is principally concerned with contemporary French music. In the Mascagni book, Strauss and Debussy were condemned as ‘decadent’. Now the analysis is sharpened. Wielding concepts of musical poetry and prose (decades before Schoenberg’s similar terms saw the light), Bastianelli defines Strauss as a transitional figure standing between romanticism and the French moderns.146 Strauss may be ‘the first great modern musical prose writer’, but his music, unlike that of Debussy and Ravel, is not fully ‘anti-strophic’ (138). If the romantic composers wrote poetry, the decadents write prose (60). The experience of recent French music has shown Bastianelli that nineteenth-century German repertory does not speak the natural language of music (154). In Debussy, Ravel and Dukas, a ‘new musical day has dawned’. Their work bids farewell to rhythmic symmetry and replaces common practice harmony with a ‘new tonal sense’ (172). New French music is not found lacking technically. The problem is moral. Recent musical history has been a process of increasing stylistic differentiation (81–2). Romanticism brought much-needed fresh blood to music, but its cultivation of 143 145

146

Ibid., 20–4, 141–3, 132–3. 144 Ibid., 62, 102–3, 126n1, 136–7. Giannotto Bastianelli, ‘Un nuovo sonatista’, Paragone, 270 (1972), 21, 23; Nicholls, Modernisms, 92. Giannotto Bastianelli, La crisi musicale europea (Pistoia: Pagani, 1912), 128; further page references in the main text.

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originality led inexorably to the current decadence, characterized by an excess of individuality (74–5, 123–4). Composers are desperate to distinguish themselves from each other and also to cut themselves off from the past. The result is aestheticism, a music given over to hedonism, which reflects the ‘weak, egoistic scepticism’ of contemporary bourgeois society (5, 223). Plunging into Schopenhauerianism, Bastianelli insists that what is required is not an individualistic music, but compositions participating in the ‘cosmic drama’ that is life. In contrast to Croce, ‘the last of the Italian critical-romantic philosophers’, who in Hegelian style regards history and philosophy as the keys to existence, Bastianelli proposes that one can be truly in touch with the ‘cosmic will’ only in art and religion. Better: one needs an art that is ‘the supreme, immediate, religious consciousness of the cosmic will and its infinite drama’ (262, 207). Yet Bastianelli also wants to distinguish himself from Schopenhauer. In an appendix, effectively a review of Torrefranca’s La vita musicale dello spirito, Bastianelli explains how, in his rival’s version of the Schopenhauerian system, instrumental music is an object of worship in so far as it emanates from a spiritual locus prior to experience (265). But for Bastianelli, the criterion by which music is to be judged is its ‘consciousness of will’, the sense in which it participates responsibly in life (200). The renunciation of egoism in a Nietzschean ‘tragic culture’ is, at the same time, a heroic self-affirmation (212). Ironically, the result of this argumentation is to bring Bastianelli back into line with Torrefranca. Italian music needs to regain heroism, and it can do this by exploring the glories of the national culture: ‘the divine responses, the religious revelations – and not in a mystical sense, but tragically, positively human – that are contained in the works of Palestrina, of Frescobaldi and of the Italian polyphonists of the Renaissance’ (216). As Adamson emphasizes, the need ‘to develop or find a faith’ – a post-Christian faith – was one of the primary goals that launched Florentine modernism in the first place.147 And as Luigi Baldacci points out, the moralizing critique of recent literature as ‘decadent’, which both Torrefranca and Bastianelli apply to music, can be seen to originate with Croce.148 A distinction can nevertheless be made. As Bastianelli notes, Croce’s enthusiasm for the classicism of Carducci means that he is unable to regard more recent Italian poetry other than negatively (73–4). For Bastianelli, by contrast, a negative judgement of the moral character of the music of Debussy and Ravel does not entail a negative aesthetic judgement (4). A heroic, post-aestheticist music will not be able to ignore the developments brought by these composers (13–14). A new Italian idiom will have to marry the national heritage with developments in France. And it so happens that there is such a music being produced in Florence, just as Bastianelli is writing. In the work of Pizzetti, the

147 148

Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, 65. See Luigi Baldacci, Libretti d’opera e altri scritti (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974), 139.

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critic is ‘proud finally to be able to say’ (Mascagni is nowhere to be seen), Italy has a music that ‘does not remain weakly enslaved to the rotten tastes’ of the public (191).

IX Pizzetti had arrived in Florence in 1908 from Parma, on his appointment as professor of harmony, counterpoint and fugue at what was then Florence’s Istituto Musicale (it would become the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in 1923). This was the year in which he began to make a national reputation. On 11 January, the Teatro Argentino in Rome saw the lavish première of D’Annunzio’s verse drama La nave, an epic of blood, sex, religion and nascent imperialism set amid the sixth-century foundation of Venice, for which Pizzetti had composed the incidental music. La nave was a triumphant success, and Pizzetti quickly became D’Annunzio’s favourite among his Italian musical collaborators. The poet’s behaviour did not always suggest as much: he was patronising and at times obstructive. Yet Pizzetti was given the text of Fedra to set free of charge, where other composers (or their publishers) were charged exorbitant fees. And following the completion of the score of Fedra, Pizzetti provided the incidental music for La Pisanelle ou la Mort parfumée (Paris, 1913), D’Annunzio’s second French-language production (following Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, his 1911 collaboration with Debussy).149 Pizzetti owed much of the early success of his career to his association with D’Annunzio. And for Bastianelli, this is a problem. For Florentine modernism, the ‘ultradecadent’ D’Annunzio, as Bastianelli calls him (15), was the prime exemplar of Italy’s cultural crisis, a force to be overcome. The situation can be viewed positively, of course. As Paolo Valesio exclaims, ‘The truth . . . is that the genial Symbolist experimentation of d’Annunzio is essentially what makes modernism possible in Italian literature.’150 But the central point to grasp is that – in the Italian context – Adorno’s characterization of modernism as a reaction to aestheticism is no abstract theorization. Thomas Harrison describes how the eve of the First World War ‘represented a stressful post-D’Annunzian moment, obliging all poets, novelists, and essayists to measure their styles against the aestheticism . . . epitomized by the work of Europe’s most commanding bard’. And the key to their ‘anti-aestheticist turn’ – as we have seen in Bastianelli – was an ‘ethical urgency’.151 La nave is a case in point. Bastianelli lines up Basiliola, the 149

150

151

For Pizzetti’s relationship with D’Annunzio, see Bruno Pizzetti (ed.), Ildebrando Pizzetti. Cronologia e bibliografia (Parma: La pilotta, 1980), 52–149; Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 80–90; Salvetti, ‘I rapporti con la Generazione dell’80’, 125–35. Paolo Valesio, ‘Foreword: After The Conquest of the Stars’, in Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni (eds.), Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004), xvi. Thomas Harrison, ‘Overcoming Aestheticism’, in Somigli and Moroni (eds.), Italian Modernism, 173, 168.

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heroine of this drama (also known in the play as ‘La Faledra’), alongside her sisters in decadence: Salome, la Comena (recte Elena Comnèna, in D’Annunzio’s 1899 play La Gloria), Francesca, Fedra, Guilhen (in D’Indy’s Fervaal (Brussels, 1897)), Electra, Semirâma (in Respighi’s eponymous opera (Bologna, 1910)), Conchita (in Zandonai’s eponymous opera (Milan, 1911)) and Mélisande. These women are anything but heroic companions for heroes, instead sensual and malicious destroyers of solid bodily structures and, even more, of bold wills . . . worthy companions of men wasted to their bones by lust and deceived by the miserable hedonistic optimism that pleasure . . . can be the reason, the centre of life.152

Pleasures are far from simple in D’Annunzio. Near the start of the ‘Primo episodio’ of La nave (the play is divided into a prologue and three episodes), Basiliola takes revenge for the punishment meted out to most of her close male relatives (before the action of the play begins, her father and four of her brothers have been blinded; the four brothers have also had their tongues cut out). She executes a crowd of prisoners who had participated in the mutilation by firing arrow after arrow into the noisome pit in which they are being kept. The stage directions explain how Basiliola is stirred by ‘that yearning to see blood flow, which drives the hidden bestiality of womankind, as if, by the law of talion, she might recover that lost every month’.153 Later in the ‘Primo episodio’, confronted by the aged Christian monk Traba – Basiliola stands for paganism – and before her lover Marco Gràtico (tribune of the Venetians), Basiliola meets the demand that she, ‘the whore’, be thrown into the same pit as her victims, by performing a striptease: ‘Unclasped on both sides, the tunic falls like the rind of a fruit, revealing the pulp of the two breasts, small yet equally sized and broadly spaced.’154 In his choice to write the incidental music to such a text, Pizzetti has to be classed among the decadents, Bastianelli concedes (61). Yet the more ‘decadent’ aspects of the text are those that the composer handles with least confidence. In an article published prior to the first performance of La nave, Pizzetti stressed that his music contained no intermezzi or passages intended to accompany speeches. Instead there are ‘choruses, many choruses, and a long dance’.155 The dance represents Pizzetti’s only prolonged contact with D’Annunzio’s heroine. As its published title suggests (it appeared in 1908, in both piano duet and solo piano arrangements), Pizzetti’s ‘La danza dei candelabra e la danza di Basiliola’ consists of two numbers. There is also a coda, which has the effect of an interruption. At the start of the ‘Episodio secondo’ of La nave, D’Annunzio stages another confrontation between Christianity and paganism, this time in the form of a crowd scene. From within their as yet unfinished basilica, the Christians condemn the profane rite taking place 152 153 155

Bastianelli, La crisi musicale europea, 228–9. Gabriele D’Annunzio, La nave (Milan: Treves, 1925), 95. 154 Ibid., 111. Ildebrando Pizzetti, ‘La musica per “La nave” di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Lettera all’avv. Giuseppe Bocca’, Rivista musicale italiana, 14/4 (1907), 856.

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outside: a love feast presided over by Basiliola and Marco Gràtico’s brother Sergio (he was anointed bishop at the end of the ‘Prologo’, but is now corrupted). Basiliola announces that she will dance on Marco’s cloak, the symbol of his tribuneship (Marco rejected Basiliola at the end of the ‘Primo episodio’ when Traba revealed that she was sleeping with both brothers). First there appear seven ‘high-girdled’ female dancers. Pizzetti assembles an ensemble of wind, percussion and harps, intended to simulate – as best possible with modern instruments – the sound of an ancient Greek orchestra (the link to Greece is at one with Basiliola’s paganism).156 It plays a pastoral dance in 6/8, and is joined by two choirs (one pagan, the other Christian), as the music builds to a first climax. There follows (Un poco meno mosso) a passage that – pace Pizzetti – must have been designed to accompany speech, since Basiliola has more than thirty lines to deliver before she starts to move herself. Her own dance is described by D’Annunzio in characteristically leering terms: The mesh of her girdle rustles to the movements of her loins and hips; through the side split her nervous thighs appear and disappear amid the movement of the folds; the ankle rings tinkle; and when her body bends back, her breasts rise, straining against the bejewelled breast-plates, which squeeze them into the form of upside-down cups.157

Basiliola whips her audience into a frenzy of lust: they bay for her to strip completely. But Pizzetti’s response to this erotic abandon, even at its supposedly ‘orgiastic’ climax, is strikingly – and surely inappropriately – austere. More successful in his score are the sections involving voices alone. The a cappella choral writing has a legendary status. The critic, editor and administrator Guido M. Gatti (1892–1973), a long-time supporter of Pizzetti, declares that, ‘The great cathedral of Italian vocal polyphony, which had been closed for two centuries, reopens its doors and a new life animates its aisles, a new light brightens its stained glass windows.’158 It is surprising to find that before the full score of seven numbers from the incidental music was issued in 1968 (the year of Pizzetti’s death), only one choral movement from La nave was ever published, and then in France.159 It is shown in Example 1.5. The ‘Coro di catecùmini e di cucutrici’ (‘Chorus of the novices and seamstresses’), which Pizzetti composed on 27 November 1906, is heard at a portentous moment of the ‘Prologo’. To the question of the helmsman Simon D’Armanio, ‘Where shall we put our country?’, there comes an answer: not from Orio Dedo, the ‘Master of the Waters’, to whom it was addressed, but from a mysterious voice that comes from the basilica. ‘On the ship!’, it says. The astonishment that follows is the cue for music. The novices in the basilica are 156 158 159

Pizzetti, ‘La musica per “La nave”’, 861. 157 D’Annunzio, La nave, 161. Guido M. Gatti, Ildebrando Pizzetti (Turin: Paravia, 1934), 56. It appeared in a facsimile of Pizzetti’s manuscript as a supplement to the journal La Revue musicale SIM, 7/10 (1911).

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Ex. 1.5 Ildebrando Pizzetti, ‘Coro dei catecùmini e delle cucutrici’, from Musiche per ‘La nave’ (1905–7), bars 1–19.

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answered by the seamstresses working alongside all kinds of other artisans and slaves in the public square outside: il coro dei catecu` meni Veni, navigantium sidus, naufragantium portus, Maris stella! le cucutrici – Ave, Maris stella. – Gaude, stella clara Maris. – Virgo virgo virgo virginum, tibi laus et gloria.160 [the chorus of novices / Come, of sailors / the star, / of the shipwrecked / the port, / Star of the sea! // the seamstresses / – Hail, star of the Sea / – Be joyful, bright star of the Sea. / – Virgin virgin virgin of virgins, / to you praise and glory.]

The musical basis of Example 1.5 is Gregorian chant, on the one hand, Renaissance polyphony, on the other, both of which Pizzetti had studied under Giovanni Tebaldini (1864–1952) at the Parma Conservatory (from which Pizzetti had graduated in 1901). Pizzetti is clear in his 1907 article that he wished to compose neither in strict Gregorian style nor in a pastiche Palestrina idiom, but rather to maintain the original rhythmic and modal characters of Gregorian chant within a polyphonic texture based on his own melodies.161 He is coy about his sources. Doubtless in imitation of D’Annunzio’s archaeological erudition (the Latin of the novices’ chorus is drawn from authentic mediaeval hymnology), Pizzetti refers to ‘ancient nomoi’ taken from the tonary of Regino of Prüm.162 This early tenth-century source could indeed have been available to Pizzetti, since it was published in facsimile in 1867 by Coussemaker. Given that it is notated entirely in neumes, it may not have been all that much use to the composer.163 In any case, the opening melody of Example 1.5 is based on a well-known chant, the antiphon ‘Salve regina’ from the Sunday Compline service.164 Pizzetti treats the opening four pitches as a motive. It launches the piece’s two further points of imitation, at ‘Ave maris stella’ (bars 11–12) and ‘Virgo, virgo’ (bars 15–16); it also appears in purely rhythmic form at ‘Maris stella’ (bars 8–9). The 160 162

163

164

D’Annunzio, La nave, 18. 161 Pizzetti, ‘La musica per “La nave”’, 857. Ibid., 858. For the text sung by the ‘Coro dei catecùmeni’, see F. J. Mone (ed.), Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters, 3 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder’sche Verlagshandlung, 1853–5), I, 247. See E. de Coussemaker (ed.), Scriptorum de musica medii aevi, 4 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1963), II, 1–73. See the Benedictines of Solesmes (eds.), The Liber Usualis (Tournai: Desclée, 1953), 276.

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modality of Pizzetti’s chorus is an Aeolian F, with Dorian D♮s in bars 7–9 and a dissonant Phrygian G♭ at bar 17. For Bastianelli, in La crisi musicale europea, the Nave music was a ‘miracle’. Pizzetti recreates the art of choral music not in a rigid or pedantic (seventeenth- or eighteenth-century) style, but in a manner ‘full of that primal lymph that spouted up in the diatonic choral music which, in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, germinated on the immense trunk of Gregorian chant’ (190). Another of Pizzetti’s propagandists, the critic, conductor and composer Gianandrea Gavazzeni (1909–1996), delighted in the ‘[d]isdainful and haughty spiritual face’ that the composer of the Nave music turned to the bourgeoisie: ‘Like that of all those men who have something new and necessary to say to the few, to the very few who are similar to them, and for whom it is worth the effort of working and living.’165 In private, Bastianelli was less enthusiastic. A letter of 1909 asks, in Nietzschean vein: ‘Why, dear Maestro, do you love Byzantine evocations of the mysticism of the novices etc., when about you throbs fearful life with its pains, which has no need of mysticisms, but rather of a vigorous affirmation and a sane joy?’166 In La crisi musicale europea, Bastianelli wants Pizzetti to find in D’Annunzio not elements that are ‘static and concluding because too weak and exhausted’, but ‘transitional . . . elements’ leading to ‘a renewed and stronger sense of life’ (15). A few months after the première of La nave, Pizzetti made a setting of ‘I pastori’, a lyric from D’Annunzio’s most celebrated poetic collection Alcyone (1903). This was published in Paris alongside Example 1.5 in 1911; unlike the chorus, it was quite soon issued in Italy as well (in 1916), in time becoming the best known of all Pizzetti’s compositions. Example 1.6 gives his response to D’Annunzio’s first stanza: Settembre, andiamo. È tempo di migrare. Ora in terra d’Abruzzi i miei pastori lascian gli stazzi e vanno verso il mare: scendono all’Adriatico selvaggio che verde è come i pascoli dei monti. [September, it’s time we went. Time for migration. / Now the shepherds in my native land of the Abruzzi / forsake the folds and travel to the ocean / which is for them the savage Adriatic / as green as are the pastures on the mountains.]167

To Gatti, the opening piano theme suggests ‘the sound of bagpipes’;168 at bars 29–31 in the piano we glimpse the Adriatic (hardly very ‘savage’ in Pizzetti’s rendering). Aspects of the Nave style remain in place. The harmony is modal: an Aeolian A to start with; 165 166

167

168

Gianandrea Gavazzeni, La musica e il teatro (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1954), 167. See Giannotto Bastianelli, Gli scherzi di Saturno. Carteggio 1907–1927, ed. Marcello de Angelis (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1991), 27. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alcyone, ed. Federico Roncoroni (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 681–2; English version from Gabriele D’Annunzio, Halcyon, trans. J. G. Nichols (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), 207. Guido M. Gatti, Ildebrando Pizzetti, trans. David Moore (London: Dobson, 1951), 77.

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Ex. 1.6 Ildebrando Pizzetti, ‘I pastori’ (1908), bars 1–31.

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Ex. 1.6 (cont.)

later (at bar 18) a Dorian E. In their conjunct motion and alternation of duple and triple rhythms, the vocal lines have a somewhat ‘Gregorian’ character. The reharmonization of the octave A of bar 8 with a ninth chord on F (bar 10) and then a D major triad (bar 12) speaks of Pizzetti’s knowledge of Debussy, while the long prolongation of a halfdiminished seventh at bars 25–30 reminds us of the French composer’s Wagnerian heritage. But most interesting in ‘I pastori’ is the relationship of voice and piano. The first line of D’Annunzio’s poem is set in declamatory style, as if it were prose (which it almost might be: it is barely hendecasyllabic). As if to compensate for this freedom, the voice’s fragments are inserted into a steady metrical framework: a series of two-bar units in the piano, grouped into repeating sections (bars 8–13 and 14–17). Then at bar 18, everything changes. Freeing itself from the piano, the voice concentrates on a strictly syllabic delivery (melismas are only permitted at the ends of lines; note also the careful attention to elision). The piano abandons its two-bar metre, setting out on an augmented statement of the bagpipe motive over a static harmonic pedal. Between bars 18 and 24, voice and piano seem barely coordinated, the piano’s music floating like a hazy memory – appropriately enough in the poetic context. One can see why Bastianelli referred to Pizzetti as a writer of musical prose (184–6). ‘I pastori’ is the epitome of aestheticism: an ‘elevated’ literary text set to

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pastel-shaded music that is at once archaizing (in its modality) and progressive (Debussy is also the obvious source of the syllabic vocal writing). The song clearly distinguishes itself from the nineteenth-century Italian tradition of the salon romanza, on which Pizzetti himself launched a withering assault.169 ‘I pastori’ did not court its later popularity. When pressed by D’Annunzio himself to print the song, Giulio Ricordi refused: ‘It is an exquisite work, absolutely inspired in its colour’, the publisher wrote, ‘but . . . it is not the kind of work that could have a success with the so-called musical public.’170 And again, in the letter of 1909, Bastianelli was not impressed. The song expresses that particular melancholy nostalgia which is so dear to the modern soul today, that slave to vice, which consoles itself by imagining kinds of life purer than its own, but not for that any less saddened, suffused as they are by the irremediable consciousness of a vice that is unconquerable.171

The biggest test of Bastianelli’s attempt to paint Pizzetti as somehow postD’Annunzian was, of course, Fedra. As he was writing La crisi musicale europea, the opera was still unfinished; Bastianelli knew the music only through Pizzetti’s own performances at the piano. He tries his best for the work. Pizzetti’s ‘objectivity’, he says, transforms ‘the greater part of D’Annunzio’s otiose lyricism . . . into an entirely dramatic vitality’ (187). The critic draws a contrast with Debussy’s aestheticizing Pelléas et Mélisande (Paris, 1902), whose characters ‘do not suffer; rather they enjoy their false position of mutual betrayal, abandoning themselves voluptuously to it almost like naughty children playing a dark game full of precocious malice’ (189). In Fedra, the eponymous heroine ‘truly lives, because she suffers a horrendous torture, and makes us suffer it too: that is, she yearns for a tragic catharsis, for the liberation of her horrible, pitiable, sick egoism’ (188–9). Yet Bastianelli remains troubled by the character of Pizzetti’s heroine. In Sophocles, he explains, Antigone opposes ‘secret laws to the ephemeral laws of the tyrannical and egoistic judge [Creon]’: But is the heroic pose of Fedra, drunk with love for an adolescent boy [her stepson Ippolito] – a species of neurotic feminine pederasty – not a cruel egoism and a living paradox, on account of which she commits a human sacrifice out of envious jealousy [at the end of Act I], which she instead passes off as a religious act directed to Venus? Is hers a secret law worthy of heroic tragedy, like the pure law of Antigone – this Nietzschean-D’Annunzian law, defended not on pain of death but punished miserably by death, this law of Fedra, unforgettable in her fierce lust? (221–2)

As far as Pizzetti is concerned, Bastianelli’s project would seem to be doomed. There is a sense in which, in its attempt to overcome aestheticism, Florentine modernism fails in general. As Harrison points out, the Vocian turn to the ethical 169 170

See Ildebrando Pizzetti, Intermezzi critici (Florence: Vallecchi, 1921), 166. See Pizzetti (ed.), Ildebrando Pizzetti, 73. 171 Bastianelli, Gli scherzi di Saturno, 26.

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marks an aversion to ‘the values of aestheticism, not to the aestheticism of values, which are still deemed the province of art’.172 For all his bluster, Bastianelli cannot avoid D’Annunzio’s shadow. Thus when the author of La crisi musicale europea praises Pizzetti for his ‘return to the purest traditions of Monteverdian opera’ (186), he simply praises the composer for following D’Annunzian guidelines. In Il fuoco, Stelio Èffrena announces ‘the advent of a new or renewed art-form that will continue and crown the huge ideal structure of our chosen race’: an art-form that will surpass Wagnerian music-drama by means of a recourse to the Florentine Camerata, to Monteverdi and to Palestrina.173 Fedra was transparently intended by its authors as the realization of the dramma musicale latino of which Èffrena dreams. It is this very phrase that D’Annunzio uses in his failed attempt to interest Ricordi in Pizzetti’s work.174 Pizzetti’s models were neither ancient nor Italian, but modern and French. He was particularly interested in Pelléas et Mélisande and in Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbebleu (Paris, 1907), both of which he reviewed in 1908 (the Dukas at length) for the leading Italian musicological journal of the day, the Rivista musicale italiana.175 The two operas are steps towards the future perfection of ‘Latin musical drama’. But they are not without fault. Anticipating the programmes of Torrefranca and Bastianelli, Pizzetti’s goal is a break with the traditions of nineteenth-century Italian opera. He has no use for phrase symmetries or closed forms. Composers should not attempt to sum up a dramatic situation by means of musical mood, but should attend to the text, word by word. The libretto is obviously indispensable: it has to give direction to the music. But it must not intrude, nor give itself over to lyrical effusion or psychological analysis. The music, meanwhile, must never be merely accompanimental or descriptive. Its duty is continually to reveal the inner lives of the characters on stage, with a profundity of which poetry on its own is incapable. Both Debussy and Dukas are chastised for inventing orchestral material to which they only subsequently fit vocal lines. Pizzetti is looking for heightened recitative: something that falls between the singing of the old opera and the ‘speaking’ of Pelléas. The result, to put it crudely, is ‘I pastori’ writ large. The characters of Pizzetti’s Fedra declaim D’Annunzio’s poetry in recitative over motivic yet nondevelopmental washes of modal background colour. The opera’s choral passages, especially the unaccompanied ‘Trenodia per Ippolito morto’ that opens Act III, take their cue from the incidental music for La nave. To be sure, the range of harmonic 172 174 175

Harrison, ‘Overcoming Aestheticism’, 183–4. 173 See D’Annunzio, The Flame, 88–93. See Pizzetti (ed.), Ildebrando Pizzetti, 72. See Ildebrando Pizzetti, ‘“Ariane et Barbebleu” Conte en trois actes. Poème de Maurice Maeterlinck – Musique de Paul Dukas’, Rivista musicale italiana, 15/1 (1908), 73–111; Ildebrando Pizzetti, ‘“Pelléas et Mélisande” Dramma lirico in 5 atti di Maurice Maeterlinck et Claude Debussy’, Rivista musicale italiana, 15/2 (1908), 350–63.

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idioms and vocal/instrumental textures explored in the opera is vastly wider than that employed in the song and chorus studied above. The opera’s long opening melody for unaccompanied violas, leitmotivically associated with Fedra herself, is strikingly chromatic (though the tonality of D major is scarcely under threat). But Example 1.6 does not give an unfair idea of Pizzetti’s operatic idiom (especially at bar 18 onwards): one that would be subject only to the mildest of stylistic variation over the following half-century. Any sense that Fedra might offer an overcoming of aestheticism is put to rest by the opera’s final pages. As Vincenzo Borghetti and Riccardo Pecci suggest, Pizzetti appears to have misunderstood D’Annunzio’s intentions here. Fedra’s death (in the play) is non-Wagnerian, distinct from the conclusion of Tristan und Isolde. Fedra is ‘a delinquent Isolde’, who enters ‘into “metaphysical” life with all her weight, with all the physicality of her earthly life and with her hubris on her lips: she knows no oblivion’.176 Yet Pizzetti bathes his heroine in a Wagnerian halo: he transfigures her. As Bastianelli put it, in his review of the première, the music of the opera’s final bars has a quality that is ‘Lethean’.177 These are the sounds not of heroic action – whether egoistical (Nietzsche/ D’Annunzio) or responsibly self-sacrificing (Bastianelli) – but of forgetting.

X Why should a book on modernism be concerned with Pizzetti at all? In contrast to Casella or Malipiero, he had no sympathy for the new music. His 1914 dismissal of Schoenberg, alternately contemptuous and patronizing, is notorious. The music of Scriabin and Stravinsky, Pizzetti asserts, is similarly without value.178 It is small wonder that he and Bastianelli fell out. In late 1912, Pizzetti published a glowing review of La crisi musicale europea.179 A year later, the friendship of the two men had so progressed that – at the instigation of Prezzolini – they together founded a musical journal, under the same imprint as La voce. Dissonanza, or La dissonanza, as it was originally advertised, was to appear quarterly, beginning in 1914; the aim was to present unpublished music by Italian composers without interference from publishers, conductors or virtuosi.180 The first issue contained music by Pizzetti and Bastianelli themselves, as well as by Vittorio Gui (1885–1975), who would find greater fame as a conductor. But even before the appearance of the second 176

177 178 179

180

Vincenzo Borghetti and Riccardo Pecci, Il bacio della Sfinge. D’Annunzio, Pizzetti e ‘Fedra’ (Turin: EDT, 1998), 155, 161. For Bastianelli’s review, see Pizzetti (ed.), Ildebrando Pizzetti, 143–8: here 147. Pizzetti, Intermezzi critici, 179, 183, 188–9. Ildebrando Pizzetti, review of Bastianelli, La crisi musicale europea, in La voce, 4/39 (1912), 901–2. See Ildebrando Pizzetti and Giannotto Bastianelli, ‘Una nuova iniziativa della “Libreria della Voce” nel 1914: La dissonanza’, La voce, 5/50 (1913), 1213.

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issue – which included pieces by Malipiero, by Piero Coppola (1888–1971), another conductor, and by two composers who, like Pizzetti, had studied in Parma, Spartaco Copertini (1879–1952) and Vito Frazzi (1888–1975) – Pizzetti had attempted to resign his co-editorship (though his name continued to appear, alongside Bastianelli’s, on the journal’s front cover). In a letter to Bastianelli of 30 April 1914, he explained that, like a pedant, he found himself ‘horrified’ by poor voiceleading and by chords he could not define. ‘Perhaps there will be people, even in music, who will get as far as “parole in libertà”. Well I will never get that far: I can’t do without grammar and syntax.’ A few days later, he wrote of ‘lack of rigour [facilismo]’, and made it clear that the source of his dissatisfaction lay, at least partly, in Bastianelli’s own work. ‘I wish you would take more rigorous care in the writing of your compositions’, he complained, accusing the critic of self-indulgence.181 One can see Pizzetti’s point. Next to the fine craftsmanship of Pizzetti’s Due canzoni corali (1913), Bastianelli’s Terza sonata per pianoforte (begun 1907) – both appeared in Dissonanza, 1/1 – appears a rough-and-ready offering, harmonically adventurous yet (especially in the latter two movements) dilettante in precisely the way Pizzetti suggests. The third issue of Dissonanza presented compositions by Bastianelli and by Bruno Barilli (1880–1952), yet another parmigiano, and like Bastianelli better known as a critic. After that, it folded. Pizzetti is not a modernist but a progressivist: his example is useful in making the distinction clear. But in the present context, his role, above all, is that of finally ushering Dallapiccola into our narrative. Fedra was no more than a succès d’estime when it eventually reached La Scala in 1915 (it ran for only four performances); nevertheless, the appearance of this work, along with Pizzetti’s other collaborations with D’Annunzio, and his further songs and chamber music (notably the Violin Sonata of 1918–19) – together with his work as a critic, and his progress within the Italian music educational hierarchy (in 1917 he became director of Florence’s Istituto Musicale) – combined to make him the most visible younger Italian composer in the immediate post-First World War period. The year 1922, the date of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’, and that (it will be recalled) of Dallapiccola’s arrival in Florence, was also the year in which La Scala mounted the première of Pizzetti’s second opera, Débora e Jaèle. Already in 1919 a monograph had appeared, extolling the significance of his work; in 1921, at the conclusion of a series of articles on contemporary Italian music published in the Musical Times, Gatti want so far as to declare that ‘Ildebrando Pizzetti is doubtless the greatest musician in Italy today’ (with Puccini and Mascagni still very much on the scene).182 Pizzetti’s idiom was certainly ‘new’ with respect to 181 182

See Bastianelli, Gli scherzi di Saturno, 173–4, 177–8. See Renato Fondi, Ildebrando Pizzetti e il Dramma musicale italiano di oggi (Rome: Biblioteca dell’“Orfeo”, 1919); Guido M. Gatti, ‘Some Italian Composers of To-Day. Postludium’, Musical Times, 62/946 (1921), 835.

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the giovane scuola, at the same time, it was not rebarbative in the manner of Casella. For all its aristocratism, Fedra was not spurned by the institutions of bourgeois culture. Until the mid-1960s, the opera maintained a place in the repertoire of Italian opera houses, with a new production or revival every five years or so, in addition to performances on the radio. But Pizzetti’s role went well beyond the purely musical, or indeed the more generally aesthetic. As work by Lara Sonja Uras has detailed, his profile was distinctly political.183 Issues of politics have been largely avoided so far, though a good deal of antibourgeois rhetoric has been noted. And readers will not have missed the nationalistic character of many of the declarations cited above: from Torrefranca, Bastianelli and Pizzetti, and from D’Annunzio above all. Nationalistic passions could become heated among Italian musicians of the period. In September 1913 (he was still in Paris), Casella published an inflammatory article – which he later characterized as ‘completely ridiculous’ – in Clemenceau’s L’homme libre (for which he was at that time working as music critic). Doubtless inspired by La crisi musicale europea, which he too had reviewed positively, he condemned the ‘decadence’ not only of the giovane scuola but of the ‘big four’ nineteenth-century Italian opera composers. Verdi (who is savagely attacked) and Donizetti were mere ‘businessmen’. But now, he suggests, ‘the admirable French renewal [Fauré, Debussy, Ravel] is starting to bear fruit on the other side of the Alps’. In his flamboyant style, Bastianelli had apostrophized the French: Oh old, Latin nation, fraternal to mine! God preserve me from the desire to take you as a model for my nation in what you have done . . . But it is your example that must count (and which already counts) for my country, such that it should free itself and sing for itself and be itself. (159)

For Casella, less tumultuously, it is by ‘following the example of the French’ that Italian composers should ‘free themselves from all foreign influences’.184 For Pizzetti, this was an outrage. While he had nothing to say for the giovane scuola, he defended Donizetti and Verdi, who were not businessmen but ‘artists’. As for the composers of the contemporary Italian renewal – he was speaking primarily for himself – he insisted (falsely) that they owed nothing to French music. [W]e – who are the interested parties and who, though conscious of having done very little so far, almost nothing with respect to what we want to do in the future, know very well even so that we have drawn that very little entirely from ourselves – we protest, in 183

184

See Lara Sonja Uras, Nazionalismo in musica. Il caso Pizzetti dagli esordi al 1945 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2003). See Alfredo Casella, ‘L’avenir musical de l’Italie’, in Calabretto (ed.), Alfredo Casella. Gli anni di Parigi, 305–7; for his later comments, Casella, Music in My Time, 114–16; also Alfredo Casella, review of Bastianelli, La crisi musicale europa, in Calabretto (ed.), Alfredo Casella. Gli anni di Parigi, 287–8. In La crisi musicale europea, Bastianelli attacks Donizetti and Verdi at pp. 177–8.

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the name of truth and in the name of that feeling of dignity and national pride which we have so vividly in us.185

In September 1915, just weeks after Italy’s entry into the First World War, in an article that was widely circulated (it appeared in La lettura, the illustrated monthly magazine of the Milanese daily Il corriere della sera), Pizzetti made no secret of his political hopes: Today the Italian people find themselves once more – and let it be the last time, by God! – before their centuries-old enemy, the oppressor who martyred and hanged their fathers and brothers, who negated and offended and violated every freedom, the Germans! (And as never before now, the Austrians have been, for us Italians, the Germans!) The Italian provinces to be restored to liberty have other names now. While once they were called Venice and Lombardy, today they are called Trentino and Istria.186

The First World War was to be the completion of the Risorgimento: a by no means uncommon interpretation at the time, and one that would achieve official status in the texts of fascist idealism.187 And so we return to Dallapiccola, or rather, to his birthplace. We promised a return to Istria. Dallapiccola’s origins as a subject of the AustroHungarian empire – he was not born in Italy – have frequently been adduced by commentators in explanation for the composer’s later interest in the culture of Mitteleuropa; in twelve-note technique especially. The idea has even been floated that this interest, rather than expressing a ‘predilection . . . cultivated in mature years’, was ‘a destiny inscribed since childhood’.188 Such myth-making needs to be laid to rest. It has always been known, since Dallapiccola himself provides this information, that when in 1917 the composer’s father Pio (1869–1951), headmaster of the Italian Gymnasium in Pisino, was forcibly retired and interned in Graz (on a pension) along with his family, it was not on account of his philo-Austrianism. Dallapiccola’s father was judged ‘politically unreliable’ (politisch unverlässlich).189 As confirmed by documents passed to the late David Osmond-Smith by Dallapiccola’s widow Laura, Pio was a passionate irredentist, a supporter of the campaign for the ‘redemption’ of those territories outside the kingdom of Italy where there lived 185 186

187

188

189

Pizzetti, Musicisti contemporanei, 331, 335. Ildebrando Pizzetti, ‘I canti di guerra del popolo italiano’, La Lettura, 15/9 (1915), cited from Uras, Nazionalismo in musica, 15. See, for example, Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, with Selections from Other Works, trans. and ed. A. James Gregor (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2002), 1–20. Quirino Principe, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola e la Mitteleuropa. Destino o predilezione?’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola nel suo secolo. Atti del Convegno internazionale, Firenze, 10–12 dicembre 2004 (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 14. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis of the Canti di prigionia and Il prigioniero: An Autobiographical Fragment’, trans. Jonathan Schiller, Musical Quarterly, 39/3 (1953), 359.

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sizeable Italian-speaking populations: Istria and the Dalmatian coast, as well as the South Tyrol, the Trentino and Venezia Giulia (including Trieste).190 This is not the place for a detailed account of irredentism. We simply need to recognize, first, that this cause represented for Pizzetti (as for so many Italians), the very raison d’être for Italy’s entry into the First World War, and second, that D’Annunzio – as well as everything else – was the irredentist supreme. Most famously, in September 1919, at the head of an irregular column of soldiers, he led an ‘invasion’ of the port of Fiume (today Rijeka), which he held as a private fiefdom for just over a year.191 More significantly in the present context, we have already taken some account of D’Annunzio’s greatest work of literary irredentism: La nave. Pizzetti’s music serves a drama whose political message is an unequivocal call for Italy to redeem its lost territories. ‘Reclaim the Adriatic!’, the chorus cries out to Marco Gràtico towards the end of the play. ‘Liberate our sea from the thieves!’ The play is dedicated ‘To the Adriatic’; in an opening prayer, D’Annunzio speaks of his work as a beacon made from wood cut ‘between Pola and Albona [today’s Pula and Labin: both towns with important Italian-speaking populations at the time] near to the Quarnaro [the Kvarner Gulf]’: direct references to the Istrian peninsula.192 Dallapiccola’s earliest preserved compositions include settings of Istrian folk poetry and of texts by the dialect poet Biagio Marin (1891–1985), who had studied at Pio Dallapiccola’s school.193 Example 1.7 shows the first four bars of the orchestral introduction to a setting he made in 1930 – for tenor, male chorus and orchestra – of D’Annunzio’s ‘La canzone del Quarnaro’, commemorating an episode of nocturnal derring-do off the western coast of Istria during the First World War, the so-called Beffa di Buccari.194 It is curious to find Fiamma Nicolodi – in 2005 – suggesting that the irredentism of Dallapiccola’s father ‘seems to have left no trace in the biography of the son’, and that the setting of ‘La canzone del Quarnaro’ was an ‘eccentric deviation’.195 But here, of course, the issue of Dallapiccola and fascism rears its head. 190

191

192 193

194

195

David Osmond-Smith, ‘Prove di fede. Appunti sulla formazione ideologica di Luigi Dallapiccola’, in Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola nel suo secolo, 24. See John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 315–52. D’Annunzio, La nave, 225, [v], [vii]. The Marin settings are Fuiri da tapo (1924–6), Caligo (1926), and Due canzone di Grado (1927), the first two for voice and piano, the third for mezzo soprano, small female chorus and chamber orchestra. None has been published. The settings of Istrian folk poetry are made in the four movements of Dalla mia terra, for mezzo soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra (1928), of which the third, ‘Per la sera della Befana’, is Dallapiccola’s earliest published music: it appeared in a reduction for three-part children’s choir, xylophone and piano duet in the Turinese journal Agorà, 2/8 (1946). See Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio, 308–9. The example follows the extract from this score published in Gabriele D’Annunzio e il Trentino. Quaderno della revista ‘Trentino’, 3 (1938), 52–5. Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Prefazione’, in Mila De Santis (ed.), Ricercare. Parole, musica e immagini dalla vita e dall’opera di Luigi Dallapiccola (Florence: Polistampa, 2005), 12.

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Ex. 1.7 Luigi Dallapiccola, La canzone del Quarnaro (1930), bars 1–4.

As Nicolodi points out, the key words of the refrain of D’Annunzio’s poem, ‘Eia . . . Alalà!’, were adopted as a ceremonial war-cry by the regime. In 1984, she referred to Dallapiccola as ‘adhering to the myths of the ventennio [the twenty years of fascist rule]’ by way of his D’Annunzianism, an interpretation seconded by Laura Dallapiccola.196 Irredentism clearly played an important role. As Dallapiccola himself recalled, late in life, the 1920s and early 1930s in Florence was a happy time for him. In the post-war settlement, Italy was granted most of the ‘unredeemed’ territories listed above. It made for ‘an ideal situation for one who, brought up since childhood on the idée fixe of “redemption” above all – which meant the annexation to Italy of my native land – , had the illusion of having arrived at the desired result, once this ideal had been achieved’.197 Pizzetti left Florence in 1924 to be director of the conservatory in Milan; in 1936, he moved to Rome to take up the chair of the corso di perfezionamento in composition at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, left vacant by the death of Respighi. Yet he retained connections with the city in which he had composed Fedra. In 1935 and 1949, the Teatro Comunale in Florence staged the premières of his unsuccessful fifth and seventh operas, Orsèolo and Vanna Lupa. In 1947, on the occasion of a visit by Pizzetti to conduct a concert of his own music, the same theatre organized a volume of tributes, to which Dallapicola was one of the contributors. Before 1922, he says, he already knew ‘the music for La nave, the Tre liriche published in Trieste, the Due canzoni corali; works in which it was not difficult to recognise the birth of a new season for Italian music’. ‘[I]t is certain’, Dallapiccola continues, ‘that the fact that Pizzetti was at that time director of the Conservatorio “Luigi Cherubini” weighed heavily’ on his choice to study there. ‘One day or another, I thought, I would perhaps be able to be counted by the Maestro among his pupils.’198 196

197

198

See Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista, 289; Pierre Michel, Luigi Dallapiccola (Geneva: Contrechamps, 1996), 29. See Leonardo Pinzauti (ed.), ‘Un inedito di Dallapiccola’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 9/2 (1975), 254. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Benvenuto a Pizzetti’, in Firenze a Ildebrando Pizzetti (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947).

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We shall have to learn caution in dealing with Dallapiccola’s public declarations. As Nicolodi long ago warned readers, the surrender to ‘the desire to translate “that which is” into “that which one would it were”’ is a ‘typical habit’.199 In the case of Dallapiccola’s decision to study in Florence, it should be noted that he arrived in the city as a pianist, not a composer; that he studied with Ernesto Consolo (1864–1931) not at the Conservatory but privately, taking his Licenza Normale and Licenza Superiore e Magistero in 1922 and 1924 as an ‘external pupil’; and that he began the composition course at the Conservatory only in November 1923.200 Furthermore, as Osmond-Smith points out, the path to Florence from Trieste (where Dallapiccola had been studying piano and harmony) was a well-worn one.201 But the fact that figures like the irredentist writer Scipio Slataper (1888–1915) – a major contributor to La voce and the author of a memoir of a childhood and adolescence spent in the same landscape in which Dallapiccola grew up, Il mio Carso (1910) – had helped establish the Trieste–Florence connection cannot be separated from political considerations. Florence, the city of Dante, was the cradle of the Italianness that was irredentism’s religion. ‘One should not be surprised at this preference enjoyed by the city of Florence’, among students from his region, Dallapiccola explains. ‘[W]as it not the name of Dante that dominated all others, in our songs and student hymns . . . Had our teachers not perhaps identified Dante with Italy?’202 Not only that: the city of Florence, or rather a villa just outside it, had been D’Annunzio’s home between 1898 and 1910, as he composed some of his most famous texts: Il fuoco, Francesca da Rimini, Alcyone, La nave, Fedra. As the eighteen-year-old Dallapiccola travelled to the Tuscan capital in 1922, one can hardly imagine that the presence there of Pizzetti – not just Italy’s leading younger composer, but also its most obviously D’Annunzian and nationalistic – was any kind of discouragement. 199

200

201

Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Nota’, in Luigi Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1980), 14. See Mario Ruffini, L’opera di Luigi Dallapiccola. Catalogo ragionato (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 2002), 444–6. Osmond-Smith, ‘Prove di fede’, 26. 202 Pinzauti (ed.), ‘Un inedito di Dallapiccola’, 253.

2 The true spirit of Italian music

Example 2.1 shows the opening of a short piece with a long title. Dallapiccola composed the nine-minute Seconda serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, for two sopranos and two altos (or chamber choir of six sopranos and six altos) and seventeen instruments, in 1934–5. The final page – in the first edition – is dated ‘30 January 1935-XIII’: a few days short of the composer’s thirty-first birthday. A facsimile of the manuscript, the score appeared from Dallapiccola’s principal early publisher, the Milanese firm Carisch, in 1936. An engraved second edition was issued in 1967. And it is worth comparing them, though not for the purposes of any musical philology. The music is unchanged. One might wonder – especially given the beauty of the composer’s calligraphy – why the second edition was even necessary. But on the final page in the second edition, there is a significant alteration. The entire date has disappeared. It is an omission that strips the Seconda serie of the most obvious tie to the circumstances of its composition. The Roman numeral that Dallapiccola originally included reminds us that in 1935 – more precisely, from 29 October 1934 until 28 October 1935 – Italians were living in the thirteenth year of the era fascista. It would be wrong to make too much of this point. Such numerals are ubiquitous in Italian documents of the 1930s. And we can understand why, in 1967, composer or publisher (most probably both) wanted the ‘XIII’ removed. Yet the Roman numeral and its omission can be seen as emblematic: the ‘XIII’ of the extent to which Dallapiccola’s music of the 1930s is bound up with the cultural politics of fascism; its removal of the way in which commentators – starting with the composer – have attempted to wish these politics away. Between 1932 and 1936, Dallapiccola composed six choruses on poems by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (1568–1646), great-nephew of the more famous Michelangelo. They are grouped into three ‘series’ of two, the first (1932–3) for unaccompanied mixed choir; the second for the forces described above; the third (1935–6) for mixed chorus and large orchestra. The cycle constitutes the first major work of Dallapiccola’s early maturity. But for readers who have been introduced to the composer via the sets of miniature scores often used to teach basic principles of twelve-note serialism – the Quaderno musicale di Annalibera for piano (1952–3) and the Goethe-Lieder for mezzo soprano and three clarinets (1953) – the look of Example 2.1 will be surprising. Next to these miniatures’ intricacy of rhythm and texture and profusion of performance instructions, the opening of the Seconda serie looks – and sounds – simple, even crude: not least because the opening of

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Ex. 2.1 Luigi Dallapiccola, Seconda serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (1934–5), bars 1–59.

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Ex. 2.1 (cont.)

Example 2.1 makes no bones about being in C major, and a mainly pentatonic C major at that. Italian modernist composition was subject to a marked stylistic shift in the decades after 1935. Particularly after the Second World War, the adoption of twelve-note technique was experienced as mandatory not only by the younger generation (Maderna, Nono, Berio), but by established figures too: by Petrassi, for example. The result is a kind of historical mirror-image. Whether one moves backwards or forwards twenty years from 1935 – to Casella’s Elegia eroica in one direction, say, or Berio’s Nones (1954) in the other – the result is similar: atonality and rhythmic/textual complexity confront diatonicism and rhythmic/textural simplicity. Dallapiccola’s early manner takes its cue from a stylistic reorientation at least as striking as that of the 1950s. And unlike the latter, which goes under various names – most often ‘avant-garde’, though ‘neo-modernism’ or ‘late modernism’

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would be more appropriate1 – the earlier shift has a single, well established label. It is ‘neoclassicism’, the second moment of musical modernism, which will be the principal focus of this chapter. Dallapiccola’s relationship to neoclassicism was complex, and above all politically fraught. As we attend to the circumstances of the première of the Seconda serie, we can begin to see why. It took place in Rome on 6 April 1935, in the final concert of the Terza Rassegna di Musica Contemporanea, the Third Survey (or Exhibition) of Contemporary Music, organized by the Sindacato Nazionale Fascista dei Musicisti, the National Union of Fascist Musicians. Soloists and ensemble were conducted by Mario Rossi (1902–1992).

I Contrary to the testimony of many witnesses to fascism – not least Dallapiccola himself – who, after the Second World War, wished to present the regime as uncultured and especially hostile to modernism, commentary since the 1980s has emphasized the extent to which fascism was a generous patron of the arts, and well disposed to the latest trends. Ideological orthodoxies of the 1960s and 1970s were difficult to square with the facts. Consider the puzzlement of Harvey Sachs over Casella, who ‘tried to belong to the fascist artistic hierarchy while representing the musical avant-garde – rather like trying to be simultaneously an orthodox follower of two religions’. For Richard Taruskin, what Sachs sees as ‘irreconcilability’ was ‘nothing of the sort’.2 It is art historians who have been most prominent in the revisionism Taruskin espouses here, which has resulted in a blurring of the equations – modernism = freedom; conservatism = totalitarianism – that underpinned so much commentary during the Cold War. As Marla Stone has argued, ‘Modernism and its offshoots . . . , their postwar designations notwithstanding, were not genetically antifascist.’ Indeed, ‘such styles were successfully enlisted into the authoritarian project’.3 The point is not to reverse Cold War prejudices: to promote a new equation – modernism = fascism; conservatism = resistance. Stone’s thesis is that the fascist authorities took a ‘pluralist’ approach. ‘Nondoctrinaire aid to the arts produced a state culture that simultaneously commissioned the glass and steel buildings of rationalist architecture and neo-Roman equestrian monuments.’4 At the very least – so the cultural historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat more sceptically

1

2

3

4

See Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 197–200. Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 136; Richard Taruskin, ‘The Dark Side of Modern Music’, New Republic, 3842 (1988), 29. Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, 1998), 7. Ibid., 4.

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suggests – intellectuals were given ‘the illusion that they worked within a pluralist system’.5 In her study of Mario Sironi (1885–1961), the leading fascist modernist in the visual arts, Emily Braun points to the liberalism of Mussolini’s cultural attitudes. As the new prime minister announced in March 1923, ‘it is far from my idea to encourage anything like an art of the State. Art belongs to the domain of the individual.’ Mussolini’s hands-off policy had the effect of ‘dividing and conquering the intellectual community’.6 While high-ranking fascists disagreed over the proposed character of the new national culture, no definitive ruling emerged to settle the matter. Cold War accounts of music in fascist Italy tend to over-emphasize apparently state-sponsored expressions of anti-modernism. A favourite example of Dallapiccola’s (and of most commentators) was the ‘Manifesto di musicisti italiani per la tradizione dell’arte romantica dell’ottocento’ (‘Manifesto of Italian Musicians in Support of the Nineteenth-Century Tradition of Romantic Art’), published in three leading daily newspapers, Il popolo d’Italia (Rome), La stampa (Turin) and Il corriere della sera (Milan) on 17 December 1932. An attack on Casella and Malipiero (though they are nowhere named in the document), it was framed by Alceo Toni (1884–1969), the music critic of Il popolo d’Italia (which had been Mussolini’s newspaper), and signed by nine others, including Pizzetti, Zandonai and Respighi.7 It certainly caused a journalistic fracas. But no damage was done to the Manifesto’s targets, whose music continued to be widely performed. Malipiero came away from a personal audience with Mussolini on 28 December 1932 with the impression that the Duce was on his side.8 Modernists and conservatives alike asserted that theirs was the truly Italian idiom: the one best suited to a nation reborn under fascism. And they did so freely – up to a point. It is hard to imagine how an Italian composer born between 1900 and 1910 could have launched a career outside the structures of the regime. Laura Dallapiccola told the story of how, ‘in 1930 or 32, someone said to [her future husband]: “My dear chap, what are you waiting for? If you don’t take the party card, you will never get a job”.’9 But one can see why young composers (even those with political scruples) might have been keen to participate. The regime offered plentiful and high quality performances and expected no ideological tribute in return (though such tributes were in fact plentiful). As Braun puts it, intellectuals were 5

6

7

8 9

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001), 20. Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1, 2. Versions of the Manifesto can be consulted in Roberto Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, 3 vols. (Busto Arsizio: Bramante, 1985), III, 1623–4; and Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 141–3. See Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 148. Pierre Michel, Luigi Dallapiccola (Geneva: Contrechamps, 1996), 29.

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drawn to the fascist state on account of the ‘margin of creative freedom’ it offered. Indeed, the regime celebrated this ‘creative freedom’ as its peculiar characteristic, an illustration of the fascist ‘“Third Way” between the “inhumanity” of Communism and the “decadence” of liberal individualism’.10 With the approach of the Second World War, it is often suggested, the atmosphere changed. ‘After 1936’, Stone writes, when its willingness to secure the consent of artists conflicted with its intensifying propaganda demands, the dictatorship became a more coercive patron . . . [P]riorities shifted and Fascist culture demanded explicit representations of italianità, romanità, empire, war, and autarchy.11

Similar arguments have been advanced by musicologists. Fiamma Nicolodi appeals to a bipartite periodization of the ventennio. ‘[S]tarting from around 1930’, she suggests, ‘the trend most heavily boosted and promoted in the first phase, that of modernism, falls to the rear or adapts itself to the assimilation of more traditional suggestions and styles.’ In other words, after a first period marked by self-concealments and pseudo-avant-gardistic flirtations, once the dictatorship began to elaborate the statute suited to a reactionary mass regime, rather than foster technologically oriented research into what specifically was offered by the new means of communication or into changed perspectives of hearing, it limited itself to loudly articulating demagogic slogans (‘theatre for the people’, ‘melody’, ‘melodramma’, ‘chorality’), whose only result – for those who wanted to pay attention to them – was that of a turn towards the most obsolete models of the past.12

The late 1930s and early 1940s were indeed marked by some of the more foolish, repellent and catastrophic aspects of fascist rule: the campaign for cultural as well economic autarchy, the alliance with Nazi Germany and the consequent official institution of anti-Semitism, the entry into the Second World War itself. Yet the argument that musical modernism found itself in retreat in Italy during this period is difficult to justify. In her account of Casella’s later career, Nicolodi pays special attention to an anti-modernist journalistic campaign of 1937–8. In Casella’s own words, an ‘unfortunate incident’ had taken place ‘at the congress of the National Syndicate of Musicians held in Cagliari that October [1937]’. ‘A young Sardinian musician, [the composer] Ennio Porrino [1910–59], a disciple of the late Respighi, gave an address which was an open accusation of a whole group of Italian composers which included me. The incident had great repercussions’, Casella continues, and around Porrino, who had become suddenly the champion of the so-called ‘national’ music, there gathered a great number of unimportant musicians: unsuccessful

10 12

Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, 4. Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 11.

11

Stone, The Patron State, 16.

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composers, operetta writers, bandsmen, even cinema orchestra leaders, who began a vicious campaign of defamation against me in Pèrseo and in the Tevere.13

Pèrseo was a fortnightly arts journal, Il tevere a Roman daily: the latter printed grossly anti-Semitic attacks on Casella by the composer Francesco Santoliquido (1883– 1971).14 Nicolodi also notes the enthusiasm of the composer and musicologist Alberto Ghislanzoni (1892–1984), editor of Il musicista (the journal of the Sindacato Nazionale Fascista dei Musicisti), for the anti-modernist and antiSemitic aesthetic pronouncements of Adolf Hitler.15 Nicolodi does not point out how, despite his second wife’s Jewish background, Casella (who was not Jewish) occasionally played the anti-Semitic card himself.16 Nor does she relate what can be read in the first issue of Il musicista for year XVI: first, that Ghislanzoni had lost his job in a bureaucratic reshuffle; second (more importantly), that in view of the tensions between Italian musicians, the regime had seen fit to apply a steadying hand. In an editorial with the quintessentially fascist title ‘Consegna’ (‘Orders’; the term also has the sense of a handing over of responsibility), Alessandro Pavolini, president – as we saw in Chapter 1 – of the Confederation of Professionals and Artists, the body that oversaw the Musicians’ Union (as well as twenty others), emphasized that Italian musicians were to contribute to ‘the musical life of the era of Mussolini with works – rather than with polemics’. Italian music ‘will have a single tendency’, Pavolini declared: ‘Italianness’.17 To reinforce Pavolini’s point, the second issue of Il musicista for year XVI prints the minutes of a meeting, at the end of which a declaration was issued that: The National Directorate of the Fascist Union of Musicians, in its session of 26 January XVI, with regard to the discussions over certain artistic tendencies that have lately arisen among Italian musicians, expresses the opinion and the hope that these latter, above all, should and shall draw their aspirations and aesthetic laws from the sources and from the genius of their race.

The Directorate then affirmed: therefore that every artistic tendency, pursued with sincerity and in the spirit of a modern sensibility, has the right of citizenship in every practical and speculative field where it may manifest itself.18

It is the principle of ‘pluralism’ in explicit form. 13

14 16

17 18

Alfredo Casella, Music in My Time, trans. and ed. Spencer Norton (Norman, OK; University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 219. See Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 263–4. 15 Ibid., 261–2. See the reference to the ‘rather demagogic and parliamentarianistic intrigue’ – for a fascist these adjectives were not incompatible – initiated by ‘certain Jewish central-European elements’ in the ISCM, in Alfredo Casella, I segreti della giara (Florence: Sansoni, 1941), 223–4. (The translation – Casella, Music in My Time, 166 – is bowdlerized.) Alessandro Pavolini, ‘Consegna’, Il musicista, 5/1–3 (1937), 2. ‘Riunione del Direttorio Nazionale’, Il musicista, 5/4–5 (1938), 76.

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Nicolodi provides a table to demonstrate how, in the years 1935–43, the operas and ballets by living composers performed at the regime’s major subsidized houses and festivals were predominantly those of the aged representatives of the giovane scuola: Mascagni (born 1863: forthy-two stagings), Giordano (born 1867: thirtythree stagings) and Cilea (born 1866: nineteen stagings), along with works by Respighi (twenty-seven stagings) and Zandonai (twenty-one stagings). But her chart also shows that operas by Pizzetti (no crowd-pleaser) were mounted on fifteen separate occasions during this eight-year period, and that there were eleven separate outings for operas and ballets by Casella. Meanwhile if Malipiero only managed five productions, four of these were world premières of full-length operas.19 The outbreak of the war created logistical difficulties. Confined to the USA, Stravinsky could no longer travel to fascist Italy in order to conduct his own music, as he had so frequently over the previous two decades. Italian administrators responded by programming the work of the world’s most celebrated musical modernist with increased frequency. Only two works by Stravinsky were staged in major Italian venues between the 1935/36 and 1938/39 seasons, but between 1939/40 and 1942/3 the number was eight.20 It is also worth looking – again with Nicolodi – at the list of composers commissioned by the Ministry of Popular Culture (MinCulPop) to write stage works in the period 1935–43. The results range from the traditional – Zandonai’s Il bacio was left incomplete at his death – to the highly modernistic.21 Le baccanti by Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892–1965), first staged in Milan in 1948 (though finished four years earlier), shows little sign of ‘a turn toward the most obsolete models’.

II Art-historical research has highlighted the role of the Sindacato Fascista delle Belle Arti in defining a new relationship between artist and state. In the later 1920s, the Fascist Union of the Fine Arts took control of the means by which new Italian painting and sculpture were displayed. Exhibitions were arranged in a hierarchy. At the apex sat the Venice Biennale, the Milan Triennale and the Rome Quadriennale; feeding these were smaller events organized at provincial, inter-provincial and regional levels. The goal was a cultural renaissance, in which individual artists, while maintaining their freedom, would create under the auspices of fascism, putting 19

20

See Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Opera Production from Italian Unification to the Present’, in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production and its Resources, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 200–1. The Malipiero premières were Giulio Cesare (Genoa, 1936), Antonio e Cleopatra (Florence, 1938), Ecuba (Rome, 1941) and I capricci di Callot (Rome, 1942). Ibid., 204. 21 See Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 20; Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 659.

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an end to ‘the bourgeois conception of the artist as a lone genius in a garret’. Not only did the regime reorganize Italian exhibition culture, it also purchased many of the works on show. ‘As of 1930’, Stone writes, ‘the Fascist dictatorship presented itself as a benevolent patron with an open purse.’22 The extent to which the activities of the Musicians’ Union mirrored those of its sister organization remains a topic for research. Its history has yet to be written.23 Nevertheless it is clear that fascism’s reorganizational zeal and generous patronage were abundantly experienced by musicians. It is no coincidence that the premières of both Casella’s Elegia eroica and Malipiero’s Pause del silenzio took place at the Augusteo in Rome. For two decades after its foundation in 1908, the Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia (resident in the hall) remained the only permanent symphony orchestra in Italy outside the opera houses. But at the end of the 1920s the situation began to change. In 1928 Florence saw the foundation of the Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentino under Vittorio Gui. The 1930s saw the foundation of permanent radio orchestras in Turin (1931) and Rome (1936). A non-permanent radio orchestra was active in Milan between 1928 and 1931; the Orchestra Sinfonica Milanese came into being in 1930.24 In Sachs’s words, the regime made itself ‘the official defender of living Italian composers’. It was in the opera houses that they could expect the most generous support. Thus in 1938, at the very moment when Dallapiccola was at work on Volo di notte, a decree was issued that the major subsidized houses (of which fascism had established half a dozen) should ‘devote half or more of their repertoire to twentiethcentury works, at least half of which had to have had their first performances not more than twenty years earlier’.25 Both the Ministry (as we have seen) and the major houses commissioned operas; from 1937 onwards a festival in Bergamo, the Teatro delle Novità, produced previously unperformed stage works every year.26 The emphasis on novelty was felt also at fascist Italy’s most prestigious music festival. The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino – of which we shall be hearing a good deal – was apparently named by Mussolini himself.27 Launched in 1933, it initially concentrated on nineteenth-century repertory. But for the second festival in 1935, Pizzetti was prevailed upon – by Mussolini directly – to provide a new opera, Orsèolo.28 This set the pattern for the following years: there were new operas at 22 24

25 27

28

Stone, The Patron State, 26, 70. 23 A start is made in Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 29–31. See Leonardo Pinzauti, ‘La musica’, in La cultura a Firenze tra le due guerre (Florence: Bonechi, 1991), 91–5; Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 562nn52, 53. Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 69. 26 See Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 646–51. See Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Su alcuni aspetti dei festivals tra le due guerre’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento: ‘La Generazione dell’80’. Atti del convegno di studi, Firenze, 9–11 maggio 1980 (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 175n110. See Franco Sciannameo, ‘In Black and White: Pizzetti, Mussolini and Scipio Africanus’, Musical Times, 145/1887 (2004), 32–3.

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every following Maggio (which from 1938 became yearly), including, in 1940, Volo di notte. Contemporary music also featured at the Maggio’s orchestral concerts (the Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentino had become the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale). Thus on 14 May 1937 audiences could hear Mario Rossi conduct the première of Dallapiccola’s Terza serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti at the end of a programme which included works by Igor Markevitch (1912–83), Petrassi and Giuseppe Rosati (1903–62), as well as the Italian première of the Berg Violin Concerto. Far from being a city ‘deaf to music’ (as we saw Dallapiccola complain at the start of Chapter 1), Florence in the 1930s became a musical centre of international significance. The Maggio Musicale was a means for the regime to show off to the world its commitment to the highest levels of artistic achievement. The festival was accompanied in 1933, 1937, 1938 and 1939 by an International Congress on Music, at which a roster of distinguished speakers presented papers.29 Nor was this the only cosmopolitan element. Florence played host to the Vienna Philharmonic in 1935; in 1937 the Paris Opéra brought its production of Pelléas et Mélisande; in 1938 there was the Berlin Philharmonic.30 Powerful elements in the regime, not least Mussolini himself, relished the propaganda value of such displays of cultural exchange. Fascist Italy mounted the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festival three times: in Venice (1925), Siena (1928) and Florence (1934), each time with the Duce’s declared support.31 A commitment to novelty and cosmopolitanism was similarly on display in the celebrated season of contemporary opera and ballet jointly mounted in Rome and Milan in the autumn of 1942, which included the Italian premières of Berg’s Wozzeck and Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, alongside works by Italian composers, including a new production of Volo di notte.32 Again modernistic and cosmopolitan in flavour, but devoted primarily to non-theatrical music, was the Venice International Festival, which ran alongside the Biennale from 1930 onwards (with an ‘extra’ year in 1937, a gap in 1940 and further festivals in 1941 and 1942). On 11 September 1934, for example, audiences watched Stravinsky, Milhaud, Constant Lambert and Pizzetti, all conducting their own work on the same programme. Alban Berg was also present, though he declined to conduct his concert aria Der Wein, heard that same evening under Hermann Scherchen (1891– 1966). The 1937 festival, organized by Casella, featured the Italian premières of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste and Schoenberg’s Suite, Op. 29.33

29 30

31 33

See Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 643. See Leonardo Pinzauti, Storia del Maggio. Dalla nascita della ‘Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentina’ (1928) al festival del 1993 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1994), 29, 35, 43. See Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 520–31. 32 See ibid., 663. See www.labiennale.org/doc_files/80292.pdf; also Nicolodi, ‘Su alcuni aspetti dei festivals’, 161–74; Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 614–38.

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Casella pointedly excluded the work of Respighi and his more conservative pupils, thus providing the spur for Porrino’s attack later that year – it cannot have been entirely unexpected. The Florence and Venice festivals corresponded to the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale in the art world: these were international occasions. Oriented toward national production were the Roman events: the Quadriennali in the fine arts, and in music the Mostre Nazionali, held in 1930, 1933 and thereafter biennially (there was a precursor event in Bologna in 1927).34 As in the case of the Quadriennali, these Mostre (which in 1935 were renamed ‘Rassegne’) acted as national showcases for the achievements of the regional branches of the Fascist Union, which from 1928–9 onwards began themselves to give concerts.35 To give a Florentine example, Vito Frazzi, professor of composition at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini (encountered briefly in Chapter 1 as one of the contributors to Dissonanza, 1/2), first heard his orchestral Preludio magico (1936–7) at the Quarta Rassegna Interprovinciale del Sindacato Fascista dei Musicisti in Florence on 17 February 1937. The work – so Frazzi’s biographer Mara Bercella tells us – ‘was selected by the Rassegna Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea’.36 The Rassegne Nazionali also ran competitions. Thus at the IV Rassegna, on 21 April 1937, the audience in the Teatro Adriano (the Santa Cecilia orchestra’s venue after the Augusteo was torn down in 1936) heard the première of a symphonic poem by Barbara Giuranna (1898–1998). Decimo legio won the prize for ‘a Composition for large Orchestra, of a heroic character, intended to celebrate the foundation of the Empire’: the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, completed the previous year.37

III Back in 1933, Dallapiccola himself had entered one of these competitions, with Estate (Summer) (1932), a setting for men’s voices of Alcaeus in Italian translation. As he later recalled, The National Musicians’ Union had sponsored a contest with several categories. What they requested, among other things, were pieces for unaccompanied men’s chorus, ‘in contemporary style but easy of execution’, suitable for presentation by workers’ glee clubs, etc. 34 35 36

37

See Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 536–7, 593–613. See ibid., 561n46, 613–14n59. Mara Bercella, Vito Frazzi (Florence: Nardini, 2005), 113, 204. While the Preludio magico did not feature at the IV Rassegna Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea held in Rome in April 1937, it was nevertheless included by the Santa Cecilia orchestra in a concert in December of that year. The programmes of the Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia can be consulted at http:// bibliomediateca.santacecilia.it. Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 97.

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God only knows what they meant (or what anybody might possibly mean) by ‘contemporary style’; but in my opinion the National Musicians’ Union, using a phrase like this, tried to appear ‘advanced and liberal’ – and not, as they actually were, dominated by a gang of reactionaries.38

This account leaves a sour taste. Was the Union genuinely dominated by reactionaries? The organizers of the II Mostra Nazionale di Musica were Giuseppe Mulè (1885–1951) and Renzo Massarani (1898–1975). These two composers were certainly fascists. Mulè was National Secretary of the Fascist Union of Composers (on which standing he was also a Member of Parliament) and Director of the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia. Massarani was a veteran of the March on Rome, who would contribute to one of the regime’s most celebrated spectacles, the mass theatrical event 18 BL, presented in Florence in April 1934. Neither could be accused of working in an outré musical idiom. But if they were a ‘gang of reactionaries’, why did they smile upon Dallapiccola’s entry? Why, despite the poor performance (Dallapiccola recalls storming out of the rehearsals in disgust), did they recommend Estate for publication? Was it because Dallapiccola’s D major setting – the opening quartal harmonies aside – contained little that a ‘reactionary’ could object to? In fact the ‘gang of reactionaries’ was nothing of the sort. The Executive Committee of the II Mostra consisted of Casella, Bernardino Molinari, Mulè, Respighi and Vincenzo Tommasini (1878–1950): a balanced jury.39 As a look at the programme shows, the II Mostra adhered strictly to the principle of pluralism. If ‘reactionaries’ would have been satisfied by the Sinfonia seconda (1931–2) of Franco Alfano (1875–1954) or the Tre pezzi for strings and percussion (1931) by the director of the Florence Conservatory (and signatory of the 1932 Manifesto), Guido Guerrini (1890–1965), they would have been less happy with Casella’s Introduzione, aria e toccata, Op. 55 (1933) or the Partita (1932) of Petrassi, which triumphed in one of the competition’s orchestral categories. Two years later, Dallapiccola tells us, he was ‘on the point of finishing’ the Seconda serie when he ‘was invited by the National Musicians’ Union to participate in the festival that was to take place in the spring of 1935’.40 That the invitation was extended is an indication of the rapid progress of his career. In 1932 Dallapiccola had already been successful in another competition. His Tre studi, a setting for soprano and chamber orchestra of Italian translations from the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, had been selected as one of eight finalists (out of ninety-six) in a competition for ‘radiogenic’ music hosted by the Venice Festival. They were given their 38

39 40

Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, trans. Madeleine M. Smith, in Robert Stephan Hines (ed.), The Composer’s Point of View: Essays on Twentieth-Century Choral Music by Those Who Wrote It (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 153. See ‘Notizie e informazioni’, La rassegna musicale, 5/4 (1932), 265–6. Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 158.

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première in Venice by the Turin Radio Orchestra on 12 September 1932 (but have remained unpublished).41 According to the scrupulous records preserved in an uncatalogued red biscuit tin among the composer’s papers, the Tre studi were subsequently given, in a version for voice and piano, at a concert of the Istituto Fascista di Cultura in Florence (17 April 1933). It seems to have been in the version for voice and orchestra that they were performed in a concert organized by the Italian embassy in Berlin on 31 May 1934. Meanwhile, Dallapiccola’s orchestral Partita (1930–2) had been selected ‘from among the many [compositions] presented’ to the reading committee of the Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentino and given its première under Gui in the Teatro Comunale on 22 January 1933.42 The work was repeated at the Augusteo under Antonino Votto on 19 November the same year; at the beginning of the month, it was played on Berlin radio under Oreste Piccardi. The Partita was then repeated at the ISCM festival in Florence in April 1934. Also in 1934, Dallapiccola received his second première at the Venice festival. The Rapsodia (studio per ‘La morte del Conte Orlando’), for mezzo soprano and chamber orchestra (1933), setting passages from the medieval Chanson de Roland, was given on 8 September. This is another work that has remained unpublished, though it was another success: ‘mentioned’ in the 1934 Emil Hertzka Prize (judged by a panel which included Webern, Krenek, Wellesz and Franz Schmidt), and awarded a joint prize in Venice.43 Finally, still in 1934, Dallapiccola’s Divertimento in quattro esercizi (1934), settings of fourteenth-century Italian texts for soprano and five instruments, was given its première on 22 October by the chamber music society ‘Le Carillon’ of Geneva, which had commissioned it. This list of performances of Dallapiccola’s music preceding the première of the Seconda serie could be extended to include outings for student pieces: the Due canzoni di Grado and the four songs of Dalla mia terra (mentioned in Chapter 1) and the Due liriche dal Kalewala for tenor and baritone soloists, chamber choir and percussion (1930). Later in his career, the composer would complain of the difficulties he had encountered trying to make his way. In an open letter from the 1960s, he thanked Guido M. Gatti for the way in which the latter’s journal, La rassegna musicale, had given him ‘words of encouragement in the years when I had to bear the bitterness of scorn, in the years in which, practically, my compositions stopped after the first performance, if they got as far as the first performance’.44 Gatti’s journal – the leading Italian forum of the time for the discussion of new 41

42 44

See Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 616–17; Jacopo Pellegrini, ‘“Un po’ d’aria nuova”. Dallapiccola “alla” e “sulla” radio (con un assaggio “per la”)’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola nel suo secolo. Atti del Convegno internazionale, Firenze, 10–12 dicembre 2004 (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 513–20. Although the Tre studi were never issued, in 1959 Carisch prepared a score for publication, with the plate number 21398. Pinzauti, Storia del Maggio, 15. 43 See Nicolodi, ‘Su alcuni aspetti dei festivals’, 169. Luigi Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1980), 168.

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music – ran from 1928 to 1962. But if the years Dallapiccola referred to ever existed, they were not those of fascism. The Divertimento in quattro esercizi is a case in point. As the composer’s records show, the work received no fewer than twenty-nine performances between 1935 and 1940, including broadcasts. If two-thirds of these were given abroad, that is not evidence that Italian musicians were less enthusiastic about Dallapiccola’s music than their foreign colleagues. At the 1935 ISCM festival in Prague, the Divertimento was conducted by Casella. In November 1936, it was taken to Switzerland, Belgium and Holland by the Gruppo Strumentale Italiano under Nino Sanzogno (1911–1983), as part of a tour organized by the Ministry for Press and Propaganda and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.45 From the age of thirty, Dallapiccola started to receive the most prestigious attention that the musical institutions of fascist Italy had to offer. The point was made at the time. In his review of the concert that included the première of the Seconda serie, Alberto Gasco (encountered in Chapter 1 as a witness to the première of the Elegia eroica – he was another signatory to the 1932 Manifesto) declared that ‘[t]he two Cori di Michelangelo il giovane composed by Luigi Dallapiccola have reinforced our esteem for this young musician, who – smiled upon by fortune – has been adulated and flattered since his first entry into the musical lists [nell’agone musicale]’.46 One may detect jealousy here: Gasco was also a composer, and not a successful one. But for adulation one need look no further than the review of the same concert by Mario Labroca (1896–1973), another composer-critic, but more importantly, one of the most powerful musical administrators of the day: he was director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino between 1936 and 1943. For Labroca, the Seconda serie was the best thing not just in the concert but in the whole Rassegna.47

IV This 1935 première, Dallapiccola maintains, ‘was my last contact with the Musicians’ Union’.48 It is true that in neither 1937 nor 1939 (the V Rassegna Nazionale was held in Florence) did he present works at these Union-sponsored events. But he by no means broke off contact with the organization. In a letter to Malipiero he explains that that he had meant to have the première of the Tre laudi (1936–7), settings of thirteenth-century religious texts for soprano and chamber orchestra, at the IV 45 46

47

48

See Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 572n77. Alberto Gasco, ‘La chiusura della Mostra musicale. L’ultimo concerto a Santa Cecilia’, [La tribuna] (9 April 1935). The review is cited from the dossier compiled by Dallapiccola himself, preserved among the composer’s papers in the Archivo Contemporaneo ‘Alessandro Bonsanti’ in Florence. Henceforth, where page numbers are missing from such documents, they will be cited along with their call number, which in the present case is L.D. XXI.2.19. Mario Labroca, ‘Conclusioni sulla Rassegna del Sindacato Musicisti’, Il lavoro fascista (9 April 1935) (L.D. XXI.2.4). Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 158.

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Rassegna. That he decided not to was due to his fear of the Roman press.49 It is scarcely a convincing explanation, given the Seconda serie’s many excellent notices. The Tre laudi were heard for the first time on 8 September 1937 at the Venice festival: presumably Dallapiccola took up this more prestigious offer instead. And if he had no music played at the V Rassegna, this was doubtless because, as secretary of the Florence branch of the Musicians’ Union, he was heavily involved in its administration.50 Dallapiccola must have been a member of the Union already in 1932. The competition in which he entered Estate required the submission – along with his score – of a certificate of Italian nationality, a birth certificate and ‘the receipt of payment of the subscription for 1932 to the Regional Musicians Union of which the competitor is a member’.51 Dallapiccola’s election to the directorate of the Florence branch of the Union took place on 5 May 1938.52 That he held the role of (regional) secretary was revealed by the late David Osmond-Smith when he published part of Dallapiccola’s letter of 8 October 1941 to Cornelio Di Marzio (1896–1944); the latter took over the presidency of the Confederation of Professionals and Artists in 1938 when Alessandro Pavolini became Minister of Popular Culture. Dallapiccola reiterated ‘his desire “to leave the post [of Secretary] which for years I have held at the heart of the Directorate of the Fascist Union of Musicians (Florence Section)”’. ‘Keep calm and carry on with your work’, Di Marzio replied.53 The revelation of Dallapiccola’s bureaucratic role in Florentine musical life in the late 1930s and 1940s flies in the face of the established picture of the composer’s relationship with the city, which has been based on a short speech from 1974. ‘It has been said’, Dallapiccola declared, ‘and rightly, that I love isolation. Florence is the ideal city in this sense . . . since it grants isolation to those who ask for it.’ And he went on: ‘I have never been part of the official life of the city, except in a couple of sporadic and very short cases.’54 In contrast, another late declaration paints a convivial picture of the pre-war period, when the composer and his wife ate lunch 49

50

51 52 53

54

See Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola e la Scuola di Vienna. Considerazioni e note in margine a una scelta’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 17/3–4 (1983), 519n60. Nicolodi gives the date of the letter as 14 February 1936, but it must surely be 1937, since Dallapiccola refers here to the Tre laudi – which he began at the end of 1936 – as his ‘recent work’ (the score is dated 14 March 1937). Dallapiccola is listed as a member of the organizing committee in the programme-book. See Sindacato Nazionale Fascista Musicisti, V Rassegna Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea, Firenze, 4–12 aprile XVII (Rome: Sindacato Nazionale Fascista Musicisti, 1939), 10. ‘Notizie e informazioni’, Rassegna musicale, 5/4 (1932), 265. See ‘Cronache ed incariche sindacali’, Il musicista, 5/8 (1938), 146. David Osmond-Smith, ‘Prove di fede. Appunti sulla formazione ideologica di Luigi Dallapiccola’, in Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola nel suo secolo, 30n16. Dallapiccola’s Union position presumably explains the dubious honour of his seat in ‘Enclosure C’ of the Piazza della Stazione in Florence on the occasion of Hitler’s visit in May 1938. See Mario Ruffini, L’opera di Luigi Dallapiccola. Catalogo ragionato (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 2002), 428. Fedele d’Amico, Massimo Mila, Leonardo Pinzauti and Roman Vlad, ‘“Tavola rotonda” su Luigi Dallapiccola’, Antologia Vieusseux, 9/23–4 (1974), 21.

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together every day at the same trattoria. Here he ‘received’ guests rather than having them visit at home, which would have taken up too much time.55 One imagines he was using lunches at Dell’Antico Fattore to get ahead with Union business. Biographical information on Dallapiccola’s life in the 1920s and 1930s is thin on the ground, striking in a composer so given to autobiographical reminiscence.56 Nor is this situation about to change. Access to Dallapiccola’s diary – which he apparently kept religiously, and from which we would learn the truth about his affiliations of the 1930s, for example – is proscribed under the terms of the composer’s will until fifty years after his death (which will fall in 2025), a period which his daughter has recently extended by a further fifty years. There is a positive way to view such obstruction. With Dallapiccola’s biography during the fascist period reduced to scraps, including later assertions by the composer himself that cannot always be trusted, interest in his early career must necessarily be concentrated on the music – and that is as it should be. If here too Dallapiccola’s pronouncements seem dubious, they can be checked against the sources without difficulty. Consider the declaration, cited at the start of Chapter 1, that ‘the teaching at the Florence Conservatory remained without influence on my compositional development’.57 At other times, Dallapiccola could tell a different story. Thus Gianandrea Gavazzeni, in a memorial tribute, recalled some of Dallapiccola’s reminiscences of Roberto Casiraghi, his teacher of harmony and counterpoint during the academic year 1923–4. Ten years later, Casiraghi had asked his former pupil ‘what memory he had of him, as a teacher’. And Dallapiccola had replied (as he recalled with embarrassment), ‘You taught me how man makes himself eternal’ (Dante’s words to Brunetto Latini in Inferno XV). Casiraghi’s lesson had been that ‘the page must become transparent by dint of crossings-out’. As Dallapiccola put it, ‘I have learnt Casiraghi’s rule, which has almost always been the fundamental rule of my compositional technique’.58 Dallapiccola’s composition teacher was not Casiraghi, however, but Frazzi. It is Frazzi at whom the dismissive attitude towards the Conservatory would appear to be aimed. At the end of their careers (both men would die in 1975), he and Dallapiccola seem not to have been on good terms.59 Already in 1948, Frazzi 55

56

57 58 59

Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Dell’Antico Fattore’, in Marcello Vannucci (ed.), Firenze: dalle ‘Giubbe Rosse’ all’‘Antico Fattore’ (Florence: Le Monnier, 1973), 67. It has been noted how the essay first published as ‘The Genesis of the Canti di prigionia and Il prigioniero: An Autobiographical Fragment’, trans. Jonathan Schiller, Musical Quarterly, 39/3 (1953), 355–72, the primary source for most commentators’ accounts of the composer’s early life, ‘jumps significantly over the years 1920–37’. See John C. G. Waterhouse, review of Rudy Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera (London: Toccata, 1987), in Music & Letters, 70/3 (1989), 439. Ursula Stürzbecher, Werkstattgespräche mit Komponisten (Cologne: Gerig, 1971), 223. Gianandrea Gavazzeni, ‘Discorso per Luigi Dallapiccola’, Chigiana, 32/12 (1975), 12. Evidence may be gleaned from the appearance of the score of Dallapiccola’s Estate. While the first edition (Padua: Zanibon, 1933) bears the inscription ‘A Vito Frazzi, mio Maestro’, this is missing from the 1972 reprint.

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had attacked twelve-note technique as ‘a closed circle, abstracted from the fecund flow of expression and thus not susceptible to further developments’: not an attitude to endear him to his most famous pupil.60 But in the mid-1930s, the two men were closer, at least artistically. Compare Example 2.1 with Example 2.2, from the opening Allegro of Frazzi’s Piano Quintet (1912–22), a movement submitted in 1912 as part of the composer’s successful application to the post (which in 1934 would become Dallapiccola’s) of professor of piano as second study (pianoforte complementare) at the then Istituto Musicale in Florence.61 There is an obvious similarity in the arch-like contour of the opening motifs: Dallapiccola’s bars 1–4 and Frazzi’s bar 18. When Frazzi shifts his motif to begin on d1 (Violin I at [2]), notes 6–11 (e2−g2−e2−d2−a1−g1) of his eleven-note pentatonic motif are simply a transposition of Dallapiccola’s bars 22–41 up two octaves. There is no doubt that Dallapiccola knew this music. As the pupil made clear in an article published in 1937, Frazzi taught composition by reference to his own work. Dallapiccola praises the first movement of Frazzi’s Quintet for the way it ‘offers a quantity of interesting particulars from the metrical, rhythmic and expressive point of view’.62 Like Frazzi in Example 2.2, Dallapiccola in Example 2.1 employs an ‘additive’ mix of duple and triple time, though while Dallapiccola spells this out with changing time signatures, Frazzi is more subtle: his 7/4 can be a bar of 5/8 followed by one of 9/8 (as at bars 18–19 of Example 2.2), or two bars of 6/8 and a bar of 1/4 (as at bar 20), or simultaneously bars of 5/8 and 9/8 (in the strings) together with bars of 3/4 and 4/4 in the piano (see bar 21). These parallels seem telling enough. But the teacher–pupil relationship is felt most profoundly at the level of syntax. In Chapter 1, the tendency of Casella immediately to repeat thematic fragments, often only a bar in length, was labelled a ‘French’ characteristic. The lack of periodic structures in Debussy’s work explains why Bastianelli heard turn-of-the-century French music as ‘prose’ rather than ‘poetry’. This kind of repetition is also found in Example 2.2. Yet the prose/poetry distinction is not clear cut. As Avo Somer has argued, repetition in Debussy does not imply a rupture with tradition. Employing the Schoenbergian technical vocabulary of William Caplin’s Classical Form, Somer suggests that the ‘formal function’ of Debussy’s ‘immediate “duplication” of phrases or short, one-measure or twomeasure motives . . . should not be heard in isolation but in the context of a sentential presentation – together with a subsequent, possible continuation function’.63 60

61

62 63

Vito Frazzi, ‘Il superamento della tonalità ed il nuovo concetto armonico’, in Atti del Quinto Congresso di Musica (Florence: Barbèra, 1948), 91. Bercella, Vito Frazzi, 36, 105. Frazzi became professor of harmony and counterpoint in 1924 and of composition in 1926. Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 262, 261. Avo Somer, ‘Musical Syntax in the Sonatas of Debussy: Phrase Structure and Formal Function’, Music Theory Spectrum, 27/1 (2005), 71–2. See also Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein (London and Boston: Faber, 1967); William

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Ex. 2.2 Vito Frazzi, Quintetto (1912–22), bars 18–29.

At the start of Example 2.2, an unmodified repetition (bar 19) is followed by a continuation (bar 20), characterized – as is typical of classical continuations – by fragmentation and an increase in harmonic intensity. Of course, Frazzi’s continuation in bar 20 is too short by classical standards: we should label bars 18–20 of Example 2.2 not a sentence but a ‘bar’ form, aab, where b is (typically) an intensification of a. It is surely no coincidence that Virgilio Bernardoni, in an article on E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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Ex. 2.2 (cont.)

Dallapiccola’s early choral music, finds such bar forms in a number of opening themes in the composer’s work of the 1930s.64 But our concern here is with Frazzi’s (and Dallapiccola’s) larger-scale procedures. In Example 2.2 (as we have seen), the opening three bars (on the dominant of an Aeolian E minor) are repeated at [2] (pentatonic G major with the addition of C♮ in the harmony). Here the continuation is extended (bars 23–4). At [3] there is a second repetition, which has the harmonic function of a modulating link (note at bars 266–7 the transposition to the piano’s black keys of the falling pentatonic line). At [4] there is a third repetition, beginning 64

See Virgilio Bernardoni, ‘Dallapiccola e le radici della coralità novencentesca’, in Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola nel suo secolo, 91–2.

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in a Phrygian G♯ minor. As the music continues beyond Example 2.2, there is a further expansion of the continuation phrase, on the model of bars 23–4, followed by a series of further varied repetitions of the material presented at bars 18–20. The entire first theme of Frazzi’s sonata form (up to bar 68) consists of repetitions of this material: eight versions are heard. We might seek a model for Frazzi’s formal procedure in the chamber music of Pizzetti. Frazzi described himself as a pupil of the composer of Fedra, even though he never took formal lessons with him.65 At the start of Pizzetti’s A major String Quartet of 1906, there is a good deal of repetition of the opening material. Yet Bastianelli had his doubts about the ability of Pizzetti to write instrumental prose, and a closer look at the score of the A major Quartet shows why: the first subject (up to [2]) unfolds as a sustained period of some 65 bars. Frazzi’s work is closer to what Bastianelli recognized in the instrumental music of the French composers: a series of ‘sonorous gestures’.66 In Example 2.2 the model would seem not Debussy so much as Ravel. In the Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet of 1905, for example, the first theme takes the form of three sentences, all employing the same material. In the second theme, and what Mark DeVoto calls the third theme (which takes the place of a development), the principle of the immediate repetition of discrete musical units is retained. Sometimes the units are sentence-like; more often they form what Somer calls ‘parallel phrase-pairs’.67 Let us return to Example 2.1. Repetition occurs here both on the small scale and the large. At bars 5–8, bars 1–4 are immediately repeated. The Seconda serie seems to be launching itself with a sentence. But what follows is not a continuation: at bars 9–16, there is no developmental fragmentation. Instead Dallapiccola gives us two further statements of the opening four-bar idea, each an expansion of the last in terms of pitch content, register and rhythm/metre. The 3/4 bars become 4/4 and then 5/4; the highest pitch of the melodic arches moves from g to b and then to c1 and d1; the opening pentatonic collection (C, D, E, G, A) is enriched by the pitch classes B, E♭, G♭, A♭ and D♭. Bars 1–16 constitute Dallapiccola’s first ‘strophe’. The term does not imply a traditional syntax (as it does in Bastianelli). Dallapiccola’s strophes are blocks: they do not combine to form periods. But they do follow each other immediately. The second begins at [1] (bar 17); the third – after the interpolation of a single bar (bar 33) – at [3] (bar 34). This third strophe presents the material of bars 1–16 in inversion and is extended by two bars with respect to the model (bars 50–1). Strophe 4 follows at [5] (bar 52). And so it goes on.

65 66 67

See Vito Frazzi, ‘Due studenti’, in Firenze a Ildebrando Pizzetti (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947). Giannotto Bastianelli, La crisi musicale europea (Pistoia: Pagnini, 1912), 185n1. See Mark DeVoto, ‘Harmony in the Chamber Music’, in Deborah Mawer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103; Somer, ‘Musical Syntax in the Sonatas of Debussy’, 74.

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V A further presence in Example 2.1 must now be registered: that of the ‘Russian’ Stravinsky, the composer of Les noces (Paris, 1923). Dallapiccola certainly knew this work. The title page of his battered copy of the miniature score is dated ‘4 aprile 1927’; on the following page Dallapiccola has written ‘firenze 6 aprile 1927 – sala bianca’ and ‘padova 9 aprile 1927 – teatro verdi’: the places and dates of two of the six performances conducted by Casella in Italy that year, on tour with his Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche (CdNM) (of which more later). Dallapiccola presumably heard Les noces a third time when Casella presented it at the 1928 ISCM festival in Siena.68 The Stravinskian character of Example 2.1 is most obvious in the hard-edged sound of Dallapiccola’s ensemble, and in the rough, ‘popular’ character of his materials. There are also specific technical elements that Dallapiccola has picked up. Consider the phrase on the horns heard four times during strophe 2 of Example 2.1, the last time in a kind of ‘organum’ harmonization. Of these four statements, the first two and last are arranged so that the initial e1 (or e2) coincides with the C in the bass at the start of each ‘line’ of the strophe. But in the case of line 3 (beginning at bar 25), the e1 is displaced from this position by the late arrival of the final pitch of the horns’ statement 2. Dallapiccola is employing a quasi-isorhythmic technique, whereby the same succession in the horns (e1–d1–c1–d1–e1–g1) is repeated with varied durations, producing the kind of on-beat/off-beat play with which all listeners to Stravinsky are familiar. Another characteristically Stravinskian procedure is described by Taruskin as follows (his example is the ‘Mystic Circles of the Young Girls’ at [91] in The Rite of Spring): Particularly fascinating and innovative is the way the two rhythmic/metric situations – the ‘passive’ ostinato and the active shifting stress – are often vertically aligned, creating one of Stravinsky’s most original textures and one that over the next decade would become a veritable trademark. The melody . . . is accompanied in the lower strings by an ostinato of an unvarying four-eighths duration, which shifts in and out of phase with the variable downbeats of the main tune.69

There is already a hint of this kind of texture in strophe 2 of Example 2.1. But for a thoroughgoing adoption by Dallapiccola of this ‘veritable trademark’, we can turn to Example 2.3. In this passage from the ‘Capriccio’, the second of the two choruses of the Seconda serie, Dallapiccola brings back the music of the middle section of the opening instrumental ‘Esposizione’. His ostinato has two layers: the viola’s accented c1 and the five-quaver pattern in the clarinet, bassoon and cello. These are ‘passive’. 68

69

See Casella, Music in My Time, 176–7, 179. Dallapiccola’s scores of music not by himself are housed in the Saletta Dallapiccola of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. His copy of Les noces has the call number MUS.Dallapicc.1345. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through ‘Mavra’, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1996), I, 961.

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Ex. 2.3 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Capriccio (Il papavero)’, from Luigi Dallapiccola, Seconda serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (1934–5), bars 279–89.

Meanwhile, the opening five-bar melody in the horn (note the bar form), though it fits neatly with the notated 2/2 metre, could be rewritten as two bars of 3/2 and one of 4/2. In terms of stress patterns, it is ‘active’. And it is not just the texture of Example 2.3 that suggests the ‘Russian’ period. At two levels – e1–f♯1–g1–a1(–b1) (also an octave higher) and a1–b1–c2–d2(–e2) – Dallapiccola’s melodic writing exhibits the kind of obsession with the (0235) tetrachord that ‘imposed itself with such regularity by way of all manner of reiterating, folkish fragments’ in Stravinsky’s music of the 1910s.70 Dallapiccola’s model in Example 2.3 would seem to be the passage at [61] from ‘Ritual of the Rival Tribes’ in Part 1 of The Rite of Spring. In the Seconda serie, Dallapiccola wrote, ‘it seemed to me that I had taken a real step forward in my quest for myself’.71 This ‘self’ was embodied in a ‘Franco-Russian’ 70

71

Pieter C. van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 394. Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 158.

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idiom, somewhere between Stravinsky and Ravel (or rather, Frazzi). The observation is not new. Massimo Mila spoke of ‘the love for repetition, that is to say, the persistent taste for ostinato, be it vocal or instrumental, in the form of the chaconne or passacaglia, but also of obvious Russian or oriental influence’.72 But what would Dallapiccola have said? Here he is at the start of the 1960s: Among contemporary composers – the great ones – there is one who has not affected my music at all, and that is Stravinsky. It would be very difficult to find a single measure in my scores which shows his influence – even in the scores of my youth.73

By then Dallapiccola had been making efforts to distance himself from Stravinsky for decades. In 1936 he looked forward sarcastically to the Russian’s centenary: ‘the year in which the attempt will be made to pass off as masterpieces even his “pieces for quartet”’. In 1950 he remarked scornfully that, ‘notwithstanding the noisy fiasco of Le Sacre, [Stravinsky] swiftly won over at least the ballet public which, listening to the music with its eyes, found justification for it that way’. For Dallapiccola, The Rite of Spring was not fated to belong among the masterpieces ‘of our or any other epoch’: thus he wrote to Mila. ‘How do I come to exclude it? By instinct. I have no other arguments.’74 The Rite and the Quartet pieces are ‘Russian’ Stravinsky: just the sort of music that had such an impact on Dallapiccola’s own. Even they had to be abjured. And woe betide any commentator who stepped out of line. In his article for the old MGG, Mila noted how, in Dallapiccola’s early music, receptiveness to the sounds of Istria is reflected in ‘a certain Slavic nationalism’.75 The reference to Istria is odd: one can hardly imagine a D’Annunzian irredentist infusing his work with the folk music of Croats or Slovenes. When H. H. Stuckenschmidt took Mila’s suggestion a stage further, suggesting that, in Dalla mia terra, ‘there appear folk melodies’, Dallapiccola bristled. ‘Today, I think, I can rule out the presence there of even a crumb of folklore or of Slavic nationalism.’76 But if ‘Slavic nationalism’ was Mila’s code for ‘“Russian” Stravinsky’, the critic was not wrong. Dallapiccola did not express a blanket hatred. In a letter of 1947 he lists the pieces he admires: 72

73

74

75

76

Massimo Mila, ‘Sulla dodecafonia di Dallapiccola’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, III, 6/3 (1976), 1105. Hans Nathan (ed.), ‘Luigi Dallapiccola: Fragments from Conversations’, Music Review, 28/4 (1966), 297. See Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 208–9; Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, trans. Deryck Cooke, in Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller (eds.), Music Survey: New Series 1949–1952 (London: Faber, 1981), 320; Luigi Dallapiccola and Massimo Mila, Tempus aedificandi. Carteggio 1933–1975, ed. Livio Aragona (San Giuliano Milanese: Ricordi, 2005), 124. Massimo Mila, ‘Dallapiccola, Luigi’, trans. Anna Amalie Abert, in Friedrich Blume (ed.), Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 17 vols. (Kassel and Basel: Bärenreiter, 1949–86), II, col. 1875. H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Schöpfer der Neuen Musik (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1958), 230; Dietrich Kämper, Gefangenschaft und Freiheit. Leben und Werk des Komponisten Luigi Dallapiccola (Cologne: Gitarre + Laute, 1984), 6.

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Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Renard, Les noces, Histoire du soldat, the Capriccio, the Duo concertant and Perséphone.77 On the other hand, the Scènes de ballet are ‘obscene’, and the Circus Polka and Scherzo à la russe belong on a similar level.78 Dallapiccola doubts the value of the Divertimento, Apollon musagète, the Sonata for two pianos, the Symphony of Psalms, Dumbarton Oaks and even The Rite of Spring (as we have seen); the Poétique musicale makes him ‘shudder’.79 Enthusiasm for the Capriccio, the Duo concertant and Perséphone complicates the issue. Yet it is clear that when Dallapiccola criticizes Stravinsky, it is neoclassicism he has in mind. Certainly in Oedipus rex and the Symphony of Psalms, he appreciates the continuing presence of ‘Russian’ elements.80 Here he is at the start of the 1970s: I am certain that you will find in my entire output not a bar, not a crotchet, which was written under the influence of Stravinsky.

He goes on: That might sound almost unbelievable; since in the 1940s, that is, at the time when my real development into a composer took place, there was no music in Italy apart from this loathsome neoclassicism. Stravinsky had proclaimed ‘Back to Bach’ – and every composer was now writing banal imitations of Stravinsky . . . The biggest attraction in Italian musical life was a concert with works by Hindemith and Stravinsky. And I didn’t want to write this neoclassical music, as it was done in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s. It was my hatred for neoclassicism and the neoclassicists that inspired me. One can be inspired by hatred too, not just by love!81

For Dallapiccola, neoclassicism was not just ‘loathsome’; it was ‘this unfortunate period’, ‘the worst period of twentieth-century music’.82 In a letter of the early 1970s to the musicologist Bruno Zanolini, who had found the BACH motive in the third of the Tre laudi – at the words ‘Non fu mai gran bisogno / A penitenzia retornare’ (‘Never was there so great a need / To return to penitence’) – Dallapiccola explained that ‘my hatred for neoclassicism (YOU MUST return to Bach [BISOGNA ritornare a Bach]) was such that I allowed myself this cynical attitude towards a religious text’.83 77 79

80

81 82

83

Dallapiccola and Mila, Tempus aedificandi, 115–16. 78 Ibid., 81, 125, 214. Ibid., 214, 115, 124; Livio Aragona, ‘Strategie seriali in Requiescant (A proposito di una analisi di Luigi Nono)’, in Mila De Santis (ed.), Dallapiccola. Letture e prospettive. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Empoli–Firenze, 16–19 febbraio 1995 (Milan/Lucca: Ricordi/Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1997), 208. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Die moderne Musik und ihre Bezeihung zu den übrigen Künsten’, trans. Gottfried Beutel in Die Neue Weltschau. Zweite international Aussprache über den Anbruch eines neuen aperspektivischen Zeitalters (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), 71. Stürzbecher, Werkstattgespräche, 223. Nathan (ed.), ‘Luigi Dallapiccola’, 296; Everett Helm, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola in einem unveröffentlichen Gespräch’, Melos NZ, 2/6 (1976), 471. Bruno Zanolini, Luigi Dallapiccola. La conquista di un linguaggio (1928–1941) (2nd edn, Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1997), 83.

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What are we to make of all this? With regard to the figure of Stravinsky, one suspects a case of Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’. As Taruskin puts it, ‘[a]n artist’s own testimony . . . is the least reliable indicator as to his real creative forebears . . ., except insofar as disapproval, betokening anxiety, may arouse suspicion’. Or more simply: denial ‘is the telltale, indispensable symptom of true influence’.84 We should not be surprised to find that Dallapiccola’s library contained no fewer than forty scores by Stravinsky, not many fewer than he owned of Schoenberg (forty-nine) or Webern (forty-four), and more than he owned of Debussy (thirty-two), Ravel (eighteen) or Frazzi (ten). Dallapiccola’s collection evinces an interest in all phases of Stravinsky’s career, up to Requiem Canticles (1965–6). He owned as many neoclassical as ‘Russian’ pieces, with the serial ones trailing slightly behind. At some level, the Italian does seem to have regarded himself as competing with the older (and much more famous) composer. One commentator tells how, in conversation with an American pupil of the late 1950s, Dallapiccola remarked that, in his Cinque canti for baritone and chamber ensemble (1956), ‘he had wanted to show what could be made’ of the Petrushka chord – as if Stravinsky had failed properly to exploit it.85 In his Tartiniana for violin and orchestra (1952), Dallapiccola set himself against the fashion launched by Stravinsky’s arrangements of Pergolesi and other eighteenthcentury composers in Pulcinella (Paris, 1920), a fashion that had a particular success in Italy, where Pulcinella was anticipated by Tommasini’s Le donne di buon umore (1917) and Respighi’s La boutique fantasque (1918), and followed by Malipiero’s La cimarosiana (1921), Respighi’s Rossiniana (1925) and Casella’s Scarlattiana, Op. 44 (1926) and Paganiniana, Op. 65 (1942). In an evident attempt to create a ‘Second Viennese’ response to these ‘neoclassical’ examples (as if Pulcinella had been composed by Webern), Dallapiccola elaborated Tartini’s themes in canonic textures, following the procedure of his Sonatina canonica for piano (1942–3) on themes of Paganini. The late Pierluigi Petrobelli links these works of Dallapiccola’s (as well as his Tartiniana seconda of 1955–6) to the composer’s interest in Busoni. The relation to the latter’s notion of ‘transcription’ explains why ‘it has never crossed the mind of even the most implacable old fogey [parruccone] to pigeonhole the two Tartiniane under the label “neoclassical”, seeking to read them as manifestations of nostalgia for an irrecoverable past’.86 Quite the contrary: without Stravinsky’s example, Dallapiccola’s pieces are unthinkable. Nor is it just the wilfully anti-Stravinskian element in Tartiniana that displays ‘anxiety of influence’, namely, the strict canonic texture – of a kind that, ironically, just as Dallapiccola was composing his piece, Stravinsky was employing for the first time in the Cantata (1952). Even more revealing are the work’s final bars 84

85

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Richard Taruskin, ‘Revising Revision’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 46/1 (1993), 118. Michael Eckert, ‘Octatonic Elements in the Music of Luigi Dallapiccola’, Music Review, 46/1 (1985), 40. Pierluigi Petrobelli, ‘Dallapiccola e Busoni’, in De Santis (ed.), Dallapiccola. Letture e prospettive, 29.

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(from [77]): a brief fortissimo tutti led by a sequential downward motion in the solo part, which breaks into the preceding pianissimo in a manner transparently indebted to the close of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1923–4). Then there is Dallapiccola’s final chord, separated from the rest of the tutti by a crotchet rest on the first beat of the bar, just like the final chord of the Octet (1922–3). It is the return of the Stravinskian repressed. Aversion to neoclassicism is not just a matter of psychology. Expressions of loathing for this kind of music fit a pattern typical of Cold War musical politics: one in which, as Taruskin puts it, the Schoenbergian ‘Permanent Revolution’ is married to the ‘Great Tradition’, while neoclassicism is ‘constructed as an “other”, concomitantly reduced and totalized, and variously marginalized from the mainstream as a pusillanimous nostalgia, a reaction-formation, a temporary war-scare’.87 The extent of Dallapiccola’s taste for neoclassicism bashing can be measured by his enthusiasm for the 1946 diatribe, ‘Igor Strawinski ou le choix de la misère musicale’, by the composer, conductor and critic René Leibowitz (1913–1972), in which Stravinsky’s failure to grasp the consequences of his ‘authentically historical’ early work is traced, in the existentialist jargon of the day, to the weakness of his ‘self choice’ as a musical revolutionary. The Rite of Spring has been overrated, while in his neoclassical work Stravinsky returns to an academic tonality of the kind ‘that had already ceased to interest our grandfathers’. Dallapiccola thought Leibowitz’s article ‘[b]rilliant’, albeit ‘also odd and unnecessarily ill-mannered’.88 But from Taruskin’s point of view, neoclassicism is the opposite of what Leibowitz proposed: not a ‘right deviation’ from the progressive course of twentieth-century musical history, but an ‘end run around Romanticism’ that signalled ‘a true break with the past rather than mere maximalization of familiar aims and means’.89 In any case, neoclassicism’s insertion of ‘an ironic distance’ between the present and the musical past was instituted not just in Stravinsky’s Paris but in Schoenberg’s Vienna too. Twelvenote technique was another ‘end run around Romanticism’, as the spiky baroque dance forms of the first serial compositions attest.90 Musical modernism’s ‘second moment’ can be traced to the other arts as well, especially architecture and painting. And in philosophy, Fredric Jameson writes, ‘the equivalent would no doubt be the opposition between the content of latenineteenth-century vitalism and the purer formalisms of everything from pragmatism and phenomenology all the way to structuralism and communication theory’.91 It is this same opposition – in T. E. Hulme’s formulation as ‘vitalism’ 87 88

89

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Taruskin, ‘Revising Revision’, 125. See René Leibowitz, ‘Igor Strawinsky ou le choix de la misère musicale’, Les temps modernes, 1/7 (1946), 1336, 1327, 1334; Dallapiccola and Mila, Tempus aedificandi, 111. Richard Taruskin, ‘Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology’, 19th-Century Music, 16/3 (1993), 287. Taruskin, ‘Revising Revision’, 134–6. 91 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 150.

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versus ‘geometry’ – that Taruskin employs to mark the contrast between the postWagnerian, ‘humanist’ and maximalist phase of musical history, and the antiWagnerian, ‘dehumanized’ and modernist one that followed.92 Of course (as we saw in Chapter 1), maximalism is by no means free of dehumanized ‘objectivity’. But modernism in its first moment is rarely given to irony. It is a character that enters the new music sporadically: in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912), and Stravinsky’s First World War alienations of popular dance forms. The ironized reference to the musical past in the modernism of the early 1920s constitutes a break, one that was precisely not ‘nostalgic’.

VI To be fair to Petrobelli, he simply follows Dallapiccola. Here is the composer once again on his hobbyhorse, this time in relation to the Prima serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti: There is no doubt that one may at first seem to hear in the First Series (‘Chorus of the Unhappily Married Women’ and ‘Chorus of the Unhappily Married Men’) echoes of the music of the Italian Renaissance. But anyone who is willing to probe just a little below the surface will realize that the seemingly archaic echoes are in no wise borrowings (as was indeed customary in those years when everything seemed to revolve around an illusion of neoclassicism, a bubble that burst following World War II, and now, fortunately, has fallen into oblivion) but have filtered down through other more recent experiences. By this I mean that no names of Renaissance masters could be cited, but that the name of G. Francesco Malipiero, the master who taught my generation what the true spirit of Italian music was, would be in order.93

Three points can be made straightaway. First, that Dallapiccola’s contempt for neoclassicism is based on an unsatisfactory conceptualization. Even in those (rare) neoclassical compositions where the material consists primarily of ‘borrowings’ (an example would be Tartiniana), these are not the totality of the work. Tartini has been ‘filtered down through other more recent experiences’: neoclassicism is not pastiche. Second, that in naming Malipiero as the model for the Prima serie, Dallapiccola claims that the composer of Pause del silenzio avoided the taint of neoclassicism. As he put it elsewhere: ‘I am eternally grateful to [Malipiero] that, by his example, he protected me from neoclassicism.’94 Finally, that, as his reference to ‘the true spirit of Italian music’ shows, Dallapiccola’s ideological framework remains – even in the 1960s and 1970s – the ‘Vocian’ one of 1910. An anti-giovane scuola nationalist historicism is still in force. In his opera Torneo notturno (Munich, 1931), Dallapiccola recalls, 92

93

See Richard Taruskin, ‘The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past’, in Nicholas Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford University Press, 1988), 137–210. Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 156. 94 Helm, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola’, 471.

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it seemed to me that Malipiero had discovered the old, authentic spirit of Italian music, the spirit which – to tell the truth – I had never found in verismo operas . . . It was my impression in 1932, as it remains today, that Malipiero had resumed the line of the grand Italian tradition, the tradition which made our music great and universal.95

Example 2.4 gives a passage from ‘Il coro dei malammogliati’ (‘The Chorus of the Unhappily Married Husbands’), the second of the choruses of the Prima serie, which sets the following text: Me ne stetti al ditto altrui: Un buon mi disse: ‘Fa!’; Oh minchion, minchion ch’io fui! Inciampai (e ben mi sta) ’N una diavola infernale, ’N una zucca senza sale. [I trusted in the advice of others: / A good man told me ‘Do it!’; / Oh idiot, idiot that I was! / I stumbled (and it serves me right) / On an infernal devil, / On a pumpkin without salt.]

‘Inheritances from the Baroque are many, in this First Series’, Dallapiccola writes, and points to the ‘Fa!’ at bar 145 as an example of word-painting: he calls it an ‘ideogram’.96 The textures of classical vocal polyphony have indeed ‘filtered down through other more recent experiences’. No sixteenth-century composer could have written bars 1373–423, with their layers of repeating fragments; nor the dissonant white-note counterpoint of bars 1413–32; nor the ninth chords (with flattened fifth) of bars 1434–4; nor yet the roughly dissonant bars 1463–82. This music is precisely ‘neoclassical’: not pastiche, but ‘old’ and ‘new’ at once. Was Malipiero really the model? For all his interest in Monteverdi – between 1926 and 1942 he published the first complete edition of the latter’s music – Malipiero composed little for unaccompanied voices. A more likely model was Pizzetti, whose ‘La rondine’, the second of the Due canzoni corali published in Dissonanza, has a madrigalian character similar to that of Dallapiccola’s Prima serie. Dallapiccola’s claim that ‘no names of Renaissance masters could be cited’ is easy to dismiss. The vivid characterization of Example 2.4 suggests madrigal comedy, specifically L’Amfiparnaso (1596) of Orazio Vecchi (1550–1605), a work Dallapiccola certainly knew, since Casella took it on tour as a companion piece to Les noces in 1927.97 In the 1930s, the comparison was made repeatedly.98 Late in life, Dallapiccola seems to 95 97

98

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 112. 96 Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 156. See Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Casella e la musica di Stravinsky in Italia. Contributo a un’indagine sul neoclassicismo’, Chigiana, 29–30 (1972–3), 53. See Guido M. Gatti, ‘Nuovi aspetti della situazione musicale in Italia’, La rassegna musicale, 7/1 (1934), 35; Luigi Rognoni, review of Luigi Dallapiccola, Sei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti (Prima serie) (Milan: Carisch, 1936), in Rivista musicale italiana, 40/3–4 (1936), 362; Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Trent’anni di musica (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 194.

The true spirit of Italian music

Ex. 2.4 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Il coro dei malammogliati’, from Prima serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (1933), bars 135–58.

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Ex. 2.4 (cont.)

have remembered this. Contradicting what he had previously written, he confessed that he too ‘was not free from the influence of old Italian masters; Orazio Vecchi above all had captivated me’.99 It is not only Petrobelli who wants to disassociate Dallapiccola from neoclassicism. This is a topos for commentators on Dallapiccola’s early work. But as Mila asks, ‘What is the problem? [Che male c’è?]’.100 There is a simple answer to his question, though it involves an equation of musical style and politics that Mila could not approve. Dallapiccola had fewer qualms. In the Italy of the 1930s, he recalls, 99

Stürzbecher, Werkstattgespräche, 224.

100

Mila, ‘Sulla dodecafonia di Dallapiccola’, 1106.

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Every first performance of a work by Stravinsky was the event of the musical year; Hindemith was the fashion [. . .] Whenever I turned to anyone for light on the twelvenote technique, I always received the reply ‘It’s finished’. Someone advised me in a kindly way not to waste my time on such unrealistic matters. In Italy, at that time, baroque music was considered realistic, and an attempt was being made to write music equivalent to the architecture of Bernini. (Alas! in too many cases it turned out to be merely an equivalent of the architecture of Piacentini . . .).101

Neoclassicism was a political issue: this is the point of the reference to Piacentini (and of that to ‘realism’, a topic to be addressed in Chapter 3). Marcello Piacentini (1881–1960) was the leading architect of the regime. What Richard Etlin describes as the ‘severe’, ‘stripped’ or ‘abstracted’ classicism of his monumental designs of the 1930s – seen, for example, in his rectorate for Rome’s Città Universitaria (1932–5) – was taken to embody a stile littorio, or ‘lictoral style’: ‘the appropriate type of modernism for the Fascist state’.102 And if Piacentini had an equivalent in the field of musical composition, his name was Alfredo Casella. When Dallapiccola mentions Bernini, we are to think of the Casella who wrote of how his Concerto romano for organ, brass, timpani and strings, Op. 43 (1926), was his ‘first attempt to achieve a style which I will not call “neo-classic” . . . but rather baroque in its monumentality’. A few years later, he described his Triple Concerto (1933) as ‘composed in pure “stile littorio”’.103

VII In a flood of articles, appearing internationally, Casella boasted of the fascistic character of his compositions of the 1920s and 1930s. ‘[A]lready one can affirm’, he wrote in 1935, ‘that there exists today in Italy a music that, in its sobriety, in its dynamism, in its boldness, in its architectonic sense, in its absence of all rhetoric, may be said to adhere to the Lictoral Epoch’.104 Given the shrillness of these cultural politics, it is surprising that Dallapiccola did not make the equation of neoclassicism and fascism more directly. But this is a delicate point. When critics on the left – notably Luigi Pestalozza – began in the early 1960s to condemn Casella (who had died in 1947) on political grounds, both Dallapiccola and Mila were dismayed. Pestalozza’s argument is a version of the Cold War Schoenberg/Stravinsky opposition, in which homologies are constructed between the ‘reactionary’ music of neoclassicism and right-wing politics, on the one hand, and between ‘progressive’

101 102

103 104

Dallapiccola, ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, 322. Richard A. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), 418–26. Casella, Music in My Time, 172; Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 253. Alfredo Casella, ‘Problemi della musica contemporanea’, La rassegna musicale, 8/3 (1935), 170.

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twelve-note music and the politics of the left, on the other. Apart from Casella’s own writings, Pestalozza’s source was, naturally enough, Adorno. It was in a review of the 1927 ISCM festival held in Frankfurt that the philosopher first developed a politicized reading of the dominant styles in contemporary composition. In 1923 the ISCM had been a secession: ‘the possibility of social revolution brightened the horizon of the aesthetic’. But four years later European politics had ‘stabilized’, and musical styles with them. Composers were working in playful, folkloric and community-oriented idioms that provided an ideological cover for the consolidation of capitalist power. Only the work of an Alban Berg (whose Kammerkonzert for violin, piano and 13 wind instruments (1923–5) was given at the 1927 festival) ‘links itself faithfully to people’ and keeps hope alive by refusing to align itself with the existent.105 Adorno’s review remained unpublished. So it was with indignation that he responded to Casella’s article ‘Scarlattiana’ of 1929. Here Adorno found a restatement of his ideas, but with a reversal of political values. For Casella, atonality was an ‘intermezzo’, now liquidated. The return to the ‘order’ of old forms, and to tonality, was enthusiastically compared to ‘the modern political development’, whereby individual freedoms were curtailed in favour of the abstract authority of the state. The recent interest of Italian composers in the pre-1800 repertory of their country ‘goes hand-in-hand with the general human and social reconstruction that – for six years [since the March on Rome] – has granted Italy the status of a great nation’.106 Wrong-footed by this brazen fascism, Adorno asserted the historical priority of his analysis: an otiose gesture, and not only because the Frankfurt review had never appeared. Casella had been arguing along these lines well before 1927.107 As Adorno concedes, the problem Casella poses for a ‘dialectical’ argument is his disregard for the traditional conservative’s respect for aesthetic autonomy. The philosopher is denied the materialist coup de grâce he would have applied to any notion that neoclassicism was the product of purely musical pressures. He is reduced to reiterating points made in 1927. First, Adorno argues that Casella’s appeal to ‘order’ can only be ideological, since it is an appeal to musical forms that correspond to a social order long gone: ‘not even fascism can reinstate feudalism within today’s thoroughly rationalized capitalist economy’.108 This is a version of the point Dallapiccola would make. And as Casella himself makes clear, it is weak, since Scarlattiana (like 105

106

107

108

Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–86), XIX, 100–2, 103–5. Alfredo Casella, ‘Scarlattiana. Alfredo Casella über sein neues Stück’, Anbruch, 11/1 (1929), 26, 27. See Theodor W. Adorno, Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Wieland Hoban (London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009), 324–5; Alfredo Casella, ‘Die “Reaktion” in Italien’, trans. Paul Stefan, Musikblätter des Anbruch, 7/7 (1925), 380–2. Adorno, Night Music, 325–6, 328–30.

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Tartiniana) is not merely retrospective: it is ‘new’ as well as ‘old’, music in a ‘synthetic style’.109 Second, Adorno insists that atonality’s critique of the ‘natural’ character of tonality has an inherently political force. Atonality was not an ‘intermezzo’: it is ‘the future of music’.110 The mature Adorno would never have permitted himself such optimism. Yet for the musical wing of the Italian Communist Party in the early 1960s, released from the Zhdanovism of the previous decade into an enthusiasm for the work of the Second Viennese School, and finding inspiration in Nono’s twin political and musical ‘commitment’, Adorno’s analysis was of crucial significance. In the middle of a celebrated 170-page article, Pestalozza launched a ferocious assault. Casella’s declarations of the un-Italian character of atonality demonstrate ‘a disconcerting incomprehension, and also ignorance, of the significance and importance of the international avant-garde movements’. Putting forward a ‘transcendental and naturalistic defence of tonality’, Casella shut himself into a ‘nationalistic provincialism’, whose significance ‘cannot be underestimated’, given his influence as the ‘leader of [Italian] musical modernism between the wars’. His compositions are ‘committed to idealizing fascist man by way of a flight from the concrete historical context’. ‘[W]illfully ignoring fundamental musical questions’, this music of ‘nationalistic mystification’ affects blindness to ‘human conflicts’ as a means to persuade others also to shut their eyes.111 Mila had served five years in jail for anti-fascist activity.112 Yet he defended Casella against Pestalozza’s accusations. There was no doubting the composer’s fascism. But Pestalozza was wrong to harp on his provincialism. It was Casella who, against the wishes of fascist conservatives, fought to maintain contact with Schoenberg, Berg, Bartók and Stravinsky.113 Mila does not defend Casella’s music from the charge of ideology: that would be to descend to Pestalozza’s ‘obscure sociology of Marxist origin’.114 But other commentators have risen to the challenge. John C. G. Waterhouse confronts the idea that the ‘optimism’ of Casella’s music of the 1920s onwards is ‘something constructed in a programmatic manner and . . . determined by external political concerns’. The fact that a similar mood can be found in music from Casella’s Paris years suggests that his optimism was ‘biological’.115 Mila De

109 111

112 113

114 115

Casella, ‘Scarlattiana’, 28. 110 Adorno, Night Music, 337–8. Luigi Pestalozza, ‘Introduzione’, in Luigi Pestalozza (ed.), La rassegna musicale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966), lxvn99, lxvi, lxiv. See Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 49–52. See Massimo Mila, ‘Le due battaglie di Casella’, in Dallapiccola and Mila, Tempus aedificandi, 232–4. Originally published in L’Espresso (8 July 1962), 22, this was a response to an early version of Pestalozza’s critique, ‘Futurismo e nazionalismo in Alfredo Casella’, Rinascita, 19/7 (1962), 26. Mila, ‘Le due battaglie’, 232. John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘Continuità stilistica di Casella’, in Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo novecento, 67, citing Pestalozza, ‘Introduzione’, lxi.

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Santis follows Nicolodi, who suggests that Casella became a convinced fascist only in 1926.116 For De Santis, Casella was not concerned to compose a musica fascista; rather his aim as a theorist was to ‘make his own aesthetic orientation coincide with the cultural politics of the regime’, such that the ‘classicist modernism’ he supported would ‘win the competitive tender for the representation of the new historical and political course of Italy’.117 Are these arguments convincing? As De Santis acknowledges, a recently published document from January 1923, barely three months after the March on Rome, finds Casella excitedly linking his plans for a revitalization of Italian musical life with political developments. The prospectus for an Associazione Italiana (originally ‘Fascio Italiano’) di Cultura Musicale Moderna, intended as a successor to the Società Italiana di Musica Moderna, declares that: Our country seems to be rousing itself to new life. Those Italian energies which seemed forever paralyzed by the insufficiency and incapacity of our leaders have answered to the call of a young dictator . . . Everything – or almost everything – will have to be reconstructed in our country. And – among the many things that will have to be remade – there is also the art of sounds.118

Already in 1918, Casella was arguing that young Italian composers were rediscovering their true national characteristics, ‘those ancient and noble virtues of our stock [stirpe]’, which are not ‘melody’, but ‘grandiosity, severity, concision, fullness of relief and architectural balance, vivacity, boldness and tireless searching for novelty’.119 So when does Casella’s neoclassicism begin? In his autobiography, he asserts that the breakthrough to a terza maniera was achieved in November 1920, with the Undici pezzi infantili for piano, Op. 35. Certainly these pieces demonstrate a textural and harmonic simplification with respect to the music Casella had been composing since 1913. But if these miniatures ‘mark my final liberation from uncertainty and experimentation and my secure and knowing entry into a creative phase now fully personal and clarified’,120 it seems odd that Casella should then have dried up for almost three years. Nor, when he began to write music again, was the new style immediately established. The largest of the compositions of autumn 1923 (they are all songs with piano), the setting of D’Annunzio’s ‘La sera fiesolana’, is still music of the seconda maniera, its piano writing close to that of the Sonatina. It was not until 116 117

118

119

120

Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 245. Mila De Santis, ‘Casella nel ventennio fascista’, in Roberto Illiano (ed.), Italian Music during the Fascist Period (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 377–8. Ibid., 371. For the information that the Associazione was originally named ‘Fascio’, see Francesco Parrino, ‘Between the Avant-Garde and Fascist Modernism: Alfredo Casella’s Aesthetics and Politics’ (doctoral dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2006), 210. Alfredo Casella, ‘La nuova musicalità italiana’, Ars nova, 2/2 (1918), 4; see also Alfredo Casella, ‘Impressionismo e anti-medesimo’, Ars nova, 2/4 (1918), 4–5. Casella, Music in My Time, 151.

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March 1924 that Casella completed the work that seems truly to inaugurate his neoclassical phase, the Concerto per due violini, viola e violoncello, Op. 40 (1923–4). Example 2.5 shows the opening statement of the first theme of the first movement, which is a sonata form, albeit one that bears the defiantly Italian title ‘Sinfonia’. There is good reason, pace De Santis, to suppose that this was intended as musica fascista, or at least, as a decisively conservative yet modern expression of renewed national pride. The year 1923 had been difficult. The scanty representation of Italian composers at the first ISCM festival had led to protests. A letter signed by Alfano, Casella, the conductor and composer Victor de Sabata (1892–1967), Malipiero, Molinari, Pizzetti and Respighi – though apparently the work of Casella alone – and widely published in Italy and abroad, announced Italian withdrawal. ‘Italy is presented at Salzburg’, Casella wrote, ‘in conditions of evident inferiority, conditions that could make people think that our musical school is incapable of producing anything of importance in the field of chamber music.’121 In the end, Casella went to Salzburg and smoothed over the conflict, albeit in a high-handed manner that brought him criticism from the Italian press.122 And there remained the appearance of Italian inferiority. One successful Italian contribution to the modern chamber music repertory did exist. As one of the ISCM jury members, the conductor Ernest Ansermet (1883–1969) explained, Malipiero’s string quartet Rispetti e strambotti (1920) could not be considered for performance because it was already too well known.123 Nevertheless, for Casella, the composition of a large-scale chamber work evidently was a national imperative. Consider the performance instruction – Vittoriosamente – at [22] in the ‘Sinfonia’ of Casella’s Op. 40, when the music of Example 2.5 returns to round off the movement. The unusual marking could be interpreted merely as the composer’s response to the character of his music, or as bearing witness to personal feelings of triumph in bringing to completion a large-scale instrumental structure after his three-year hiatus. But given Casella’s excitement over Mussolini’s take-over of power, it seems reasonable to view this ‘Vittoriosamente’ as an attempt by the composer to link his music to history: a triumphant personal and national musical rebirth to correspond to the political one. Casella was quick to exploit the polemical possibilities of his Concerto. Its première in Rome on 16 March 1924 was followed by a series of seven further performances throughout Italy, accompanied by Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, conducted by the composer. The tour was organized by the CdNM, the same body that would take on tour Les noces and L’Amfiparnaso three years later, and which had been formed by Casella and Malipiero – with the high-profile backing of D’Annunzio – at the end of 1923.124 Casella later recalled that he had ‘wanted 121 123

Nicolodi, ‘Su alcuni aspetti dei festivals’, 148. 122 Ibid., 152–6. See Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, I, 519. 124 See Casella, Music in My Time, 158–65.

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Ex. 2.5 Alfredo Casella, Concerto per due violini, viola e violoncello, Op. 40 (1923–4), first movement, bars 1–27.

The true spirit of Italian music

Ex. 2.5 (cont.)

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Pierrot lunaire to be accompanied by an Italian work in order to demonstrate how much our new sensibility and our resurrected tradition were independent of the Viennese master’s art’.125 As Nicolodi puts it, the pairing of Casella’s Op. 40 with Schoenberg’s Op. 21 was meant to hold up ‘the saving power of [Italian] holy water against diabolical Viennese temptations’.126 In an article of March 1924 for his new but short-lived journal La prora, Casella declared that ‘after audacious polytonal and atonal experiments, young Italians have recognised – in conformity with the healthy down-to-earth shrewdness that is a Latin prerogative – the necessity of maintaining tonal centres; consequently they have returned to tradition’.127 Six months later, in Musica d’oggi, the house journal of his Italian publisher Ricordi, Casella described Pierrot lunaire as ‘a “Bolshevik” work’: the music of a composer whose ‘lack of luminousness and thus of joy’ made his compositions the antithesis of the new, sunny school of Italian music.128 For Casella, three features of the early 1920s – the return to tonality, the emergence of neoclassicism and the fascist revolution – formed a nexus. Thus, in his autobiography, the description of a springtime trip made to Tuscany in 1923, during which he learnt from ‘the transparent clarity of the . . . landscape’ that ‘an Italian cannot . . . be an impressionist’, comes hard on the heels of a passage (excised after the first clause of the first sentence in the published translation) in which the composer tells how: I was in Munich at the time of the March on Rome, the news of which was received with delirious joy by the small group of co-nationals who were with me that evening. For years Benito Mussolini had struck me as a truly great figure. His rise to power seemed to me an act of national destiny, and I had the immediate certainty of an imminent, prodigious resurrection of our country.129

So much retrospective myth-making, the composer’s apologists would argue. But it seems, on the whole, that it was not.

VIII The stylistic contrast between Casella’s Elegia eroica and his Concerto per due violini, viola e violoncello is striking. Given the ongoing attempts of commentators to argue for the composer’s stylistic continuity,130 it is worth holding these works of 1917 and 1923–4 up to one another. It is true that passages from the Parisian Casella, such as that 125 127

128

129 130

Ibid., 163. 126 Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 243. Alfredo Casella, ‘Contributo ad un nuovo stile musicale nostro’, La prora, 1/2 (1924), 37, cited from Parrino, ‘Between the Avant-Garde and Fascist Modernism’, 227. Alfredo Casella, ‘Arnold Schönberg e la nuova musica italiana’, Musica d’oggi, 6/10 (1924), 300–1, cited from Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, III, 1603, 1605. See Casella, Music in My Time, 156; Casella, I segreti della giara, 210. See Joachim Noller, ‘Le conseguenze di Parigi. Una critica storica (e non ideologica) di Casella’, in Giovanni Morelli (ed.), Alfredo Casella negli anni di apprendistato a Parigi. Atti del convegno

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shown in Example 2.6, from the final ‘Bourrée’ of the Suite in C (à Jean Huré) (1909– 10), sound distinctly ‘neoclassical’. As Taruskin points out, there is a stylistically retrospective strain in French music dating to well before the First World War.131 The model for Casella’s ‘Bourrée’ was presumably Chabrier’s ‘Bourrée fantasque’ of 1891. But closer comparison of Examples 2.5 and 2.6 suggests that the similarity of Casella’s idioms of 1910 and 1924 may be only apparent, a matter of not much more than Waterhouse’s ‘optimism’. It is not simply that the ‘Bourrée’ is ‘traditional’ and the Concerto ‘modernist’. The ‘Bourrée’ is evidently ‘progressivist’, as witnessed by the startling harmonic progressions of bars 26–34 and the ‘white-note’ dissonances of bar 15, none of which is resolved in a traditional manner. The phrase structure of Example 2.6 is also disconcerting: there are five-bar units at bars 202–51 and 292–341. And yet these harmonic surprises and irregularities are contained within a small ternary structure, whose final phrase returns the music clearly to the tonic – even if the reprise (bar 342) begins in the flattened mediant and the final cadence (bars 42–31) leaves the tonic harmony in first inversion. Amid his dissonant voice-leading, Casella maintains a firmly established C major, launching most bars with a pure triad, and forming the perfect cadence that closes his opening sentence (at bars 242–51) with a conventional ii–V–I progression. Casella’s Op. 40 begins in a C major of a different kind. With the exception of the F♯s in bars 8 and 15, the first violin in Example 2.5 plays diatonic pitches throughout. But between bars 3 and 21, not a single pure triad appears. This is not to deny the presence of tonal feeling. At [2], the underlying harmonies V and ii are unmistakable; at the start of bar 21, chord IV appears twice. In general, though, the opening of the Concerto presents dissonant ‘white-note’ counterpoint – along the lines of that of bar 15 in Example 2.6 – free of triadic moorings. Whenever Casella suggests dominant harmony, he tends simultaneously to frustrate it, as in the dissonant accompaniment to the first violin in bars 13–15. The subversion of the dominant may suggest Stravinsky;132 the non-classical, ‘popular’ handling of the instruments, with its extensive use of open strings in double-, triple- and quadruple-stopping, certainly does. In place of the quasi-classical phrasing of Example 2.6, Casella now employs a cross between Debussian sentential repetitions and a neo-baroque Fortspinnung; rhythmically, the debt to Bach (or Vivaldi) is clear. At the same time, the Concerto takes over from Stravinsky the ‘rapid succession of bars of different length, which yet preserve as a link a quaver of always identical value’: the rhythmic/metrical character that Casella would later trace to Petrushka (his example seems to be the music first heard at [7] in the 1911 version).133 As Taruskin would have it, the opening of the

131 133

internazionale di studi, Venezia, 13–15 maggio 1992 (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 17–23; Virgilio Bernardoni, ‘Classico e neoclassico in Alfredo Casella’, in Virgilio Bernardoni and Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), Suono, parola, scena. Studi e testi sulla musica italiana nel Novecento (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2003), 43–59. Taruskin, ‘Back to Whom?’, 289–90. 132 See ibid., 292. Alfredo Casella, Strawinski (2nd edn, Brescia: La Scuola, 1951), 33.

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Ex. 2.6 Alfredo Casella, Suite à Jean Huré, Op. 13 (1909–10), third movement, bars 12–43.

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Concerto is ‘monometric’.134 The sense of differentially articulated upbeats and downbeats is attenuated, in a manner quite foreign to Example 2.6. Following Taruskin, the confrontation of Examples 2.5 and 2.6 would speak of different attitudes towards the past. In the ‘Bourrée’, the ‘sense of tradition’ is ‘immediate’. The stylistically retrospective and progressivist elements are heard side by side within a musical language undergoing maximalist expansion. In the Concerto, by contrast, the challenge posed to stylistic retrospection by disruptive components places the eighteenth century at ‘an ironic distance’.135 Casella’s neoclassicism has tended to be written off as mere Stravinskian camp-following, but in the case of Op. 40, this is unfair. We can dismiss the story, told by Stravinsky half-acentury later, of how Casella’s neoclassicism was ‘born’ when the Russian played him the ‘Polka’ from the Three Easy Pieces in 1915. As Nicolodi points out, the music Casella wrote under the influence of these piano duets, notably his Pupazzetti, Op. 27 (1915), belongs to the seconda maniera.136 Certainly there are Stravinskian elements in Casella’s Concerto, yet when he began the work on 28 November 1923, the neoclassical Stravinsky had barely been unveiled. The Octet (1922–3), for example, was given its première in Paris (which Casella did not attend) only the previous month.137 In some of the music Casella could have heard at Salzburg – Krenek’s Third Quartet, Op. 20, or the first version of Hindemith’s Clarinet Quintet, Op. 30 (both 1923) – there is plenty of dissonant ‘linear’ counterpoint and ‘motoric’ rhythm, of a vaguely neo-baroque cast. But in neither is there anything so startlingly retrospective – or rather, so old yet new – as Casella’s C major. In Example 2.5, then, we witness musical modernism’s second moment in one of its very first manifestations. There are still distinctions to be made. For Nicolodi, the ‘good-natured irony’ of Casella’s neoclassicism ‘has none of the prickly and self-satisfied sourness’ of Stravinsky’s. There are ‘no brusque or unexpected caesuras . . . or uncritical shifts from one century to another’. Italian neoclassicism has a ‘constructive’ rather than an ‘ironic’ character.138 This perhaps does not adequately describe Op. 40. The journalist and politician Roberto Forges Davanzati (1880–1936) – a leading force in the new regime – was surely not wrong to refer to ‘part-ironic part-parodic 134

135 136

137

138

Taruskin, ‘The Pastness of the Present’, 169; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, I, 961– 2; II, 1600–1. Taruskin, ‘Revising Revision’, 135. See Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (London: Faber, 1968), 41; Nicolodi, ‘Casella e la musica di Stravinsky’, 54–5; Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Aspects compositionnels et esthétiques du néoclassicisme en Italie’, in Hermann Danuser (ed.), Die klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1997), 79–80. Casella’s whereabouts at this period can be traced from his correspondence with D’Annunzio over the foundation of the CdNM. See Maria Adelaide Caponigri (ed.), ‘Il carteggio Alfredo Casella – D’Annunzio’, Italianistica, 1/2 (1972), 273–7. Nicolodi, ‘Casella e la musica di Stravinsky’, 61, 62; Nicolodi, ‘Aspects compositionnels et esthétiques’, 87.

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transformations of traditional modes and songs, chosen with taste from among the mass of secular and popular examples, but broken down here and there in order sarcastically to reveal their construction’.139 It is Casella’s music of the later 1920s that supports Nicolodi’s thesis. By this stage, the Italian had become uncomfortable with the neoclassical Stravinsky. Even if, as Nicolodi tells us, he later came to appreciate Oedipus rex and Apollon musagète, in 1929 he found ‘a disquieting mix’ of idioms, expressed in a counterpoint that was ‘shabby, crude and, it would seem, almost amateurish’. Italians, he declared, who have ‘a quite different notion’ of classicism, will be able to accept this music, ‘so meagrely harmonious, so heterogeneous, so willed . . . only with reservations’.140 As Adorno saw it that same year, the ‘diabolically elegant irony’ of Stravinsky merits ‘some defence’ when ‘[c]ompared to the serene blood-and-soil art espoused by Casella’.141 It is wrong to suggest that the philosopher was implacably hostile to neoclassicism. When, at the start of Philosophie der neuen Musik, he complains that ‘[s]ince the heroic decade, the period around World War I’, the ‘history of new music’ has been one ‘of decline, of involution to the traditional’, it is not neoclassicism per se he has in his sights but what neoclassicism became.142 With regard to Stravinsky’s music of the early 1920s, Adorno comes close to enthusiasm: There are works . . . such as the Concertino for String Quartet and the Octet for Wind Instruments, of which it would be difficult to say whether they are to be chalked up to the infantilistic or neoclassical phases, and they are especially successful because they conserve the aggressive disjointedness of infantilism [Adorno’s term for Stravinsky’s First World War music] without involving a palpable model that is deformed: They neither parody nor celebrate.143

The Stravinsky of the early 1920s remains a modernist. Up to this point, and in contrast to his followers (with the ‘possible exception’ of Varèse), he maintains the negativity of an ‘aversion to the entire syntax of music’.144 Like Taruskin, Adorno equates Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s music of this period. He notes how, in the work of both, ‘means shaped and articulated in a highly specific fashion [those of musical tradition] are metamorphosed into a quasineutralized and indifferent material detached from the original meaning of its appearance’.145 What offends Adorno in Stravinsky, of course, is his music’s ideological character. Its enthusiastic sacrifice of the individual to the collective affirms 139

140

141 144

Roberto Forges Davanzati, ‘Il Pierrot lunaire di Schönberg’, L’Idea nazionale (30 March 1924), cited from François Lesure (ed.), Dossier de presse Press-Book de Pierrot lunaire d’Arnold Schönberg (Geneva: Minkoff, 1985), 192. Nicolodi, ‘Casella e la musica di Stravinsky’, 58–9, citing Alfredo Casella, ‘Il neoclassicismo mio e altrui’, Pègaso, 1/5 (1929), 578–9. Adorno, Night Music, 332. 142 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 9. 143 Ibid., 150. Ibid., 116. 145 Ibid., 151.

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the totalitarian liquidation of the bourgeois subject. As he puts it, Stravinsky’s ‘infantilistic’ work ‘presents schemata of human comportment’ – ‘self-effacement, unconscious dexterity, and adjustment to blind totality’ – which ‘then became universal under the inescapable pressure of late-industrial society’.146 If in the Octet, ‘palpable’ models were avoided, in the Concerto for Piano and Wind the formulae are Handelian: Stravinsky makes an authoritarian appeal to the musical past. But Handel is ‘combed against the grain’. Expectations of traditional musical continuity are raised only to be maliciously deceived, resulting in an ‘anorganic’ construction of ‘objective incomprehensibility’. This is presented in a grandiose manner that anticipates ‘blind obedience’ from its audiences. As Adorno concludes, ‘The saying attributed to Hitler – that one can only die for an idea that one does not understand – could be inscribed over the gateway to the neoclassical temple.’147 Casella’s initial reaction to the Stravinsky Piano Concerto was one of admiration: ‘a marvellous thing’, he wrote.148 But this work would surely have deserved the strictures he applied to Oedipus rex or Apollon musagète. Its ‘contorted concatenations of harmonies . . . affront culturally devout listeners more fundamentally than did the earlier dissonances’, Adorno suggests.149 Rather than trust Casella’s words, we might instead gauge his response to Stravinsky’s neoclassicism from his compositions: from Example 2.7, for instance, composed a couple of years after Op. 40. Here, at the opening of the Concerto romano, the model is the opening of Stravinsky’s Octet, whose Italian première Casella had directed in Rome in 1924. Example 2.7 shares with the Stravinsky the key signature of E♭, the use of a Lento introduction to a sonata form Allegro, and the choice of ‘Sinfonia’ as the title of the first movement. In some details, it is so close to the Octet as to suggest plagiarism. Casella’s Lento concludes (bar 25) with a pause on a dominant seventh chord in E♭, just as Stravinsky’s does. And the first theme of Casella’s Allegro follows Stravinsky’s closely in its rhythm and melodic contour, in its somewhat martial character (accentuated by Casella’s scoring), and in the diatonic dissonance of its contrapuntal texture. The way in which Casella’s brass and violin lines compete for melodic priority at [7] to [8] seems modelled on the similar competition between high woodwind and brass at the start of Stravinsky’s Allegro. Even Casella’s accompaniment in staccato quavers seems to draw on the Stravinsky (see the Octet at [7]). A closer look points up the differences. There is little sense of classical phrase structure in the first theme of Stravinsky’s Allegro ([6]–[8]). By contrast, Casella’s theme at [7] to [9] of Example 2.7 is a ‘hybrid’ sentence, in which the eight-bar presentation phrase (concluding conventionally on V at bar 332) takes the form of 146 148

149

Ibid., 126. 147 Ibid., 151–2. See Annalisa Bini, ‘Alfredo Casella e Roma. I rapporti con l’Accademia di Santa Cecilia’, in Mila De Santis (ed.), Alfredo Casella e l’Europa. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Siena, 7–9 giugno 2001 (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 414. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 152.

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Ex. 2.7 Alfredo Casella, Concerto romano, Op. 43 (1926), first movement, bars 1–49.

the antecedent of a period. The continuation at bar 333 is expanded to twice the length of the presentation phrase. There are three subphrases: the first ends on the dominant at bar 391, while the end of the second in bar 44 overlaps with the beginning of the cadential third, marked by a return to the rising fifths of bar 26. Like Stravinsky, Casella switches between 2/4 and 3/4. But there is no comic subversion in the Concerto romano (of the kind that occurs in the Stravinsky at the bar before [7]): Casella’s 3/4 bars act as metrical expansions that consolidate rather than undermine

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Ex. 2.7 (cont.)

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Ex. 2.7 (cont.)

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resolutions. The harmonic scheme of Example 2.7 is conventional: half-cadences at bars 33 and 39, a full cadence at bar 48. Casella’s E♭ major, unlike Stravinsky’s, is unambiguous, even if the voice-leading is deliberately crude by academic standards. In the Lento introduction, Casella’s response to ironic Stravinskian deformations of classical conventions is to revive the harmonic idiom of his seconda maniera. The levels of chromaticism and dissonance at bars 1–24 of Example 2.7 are high. But the formal framework is clear. Two sections (bars 1–7 and 12–22), which adumbrate the Allegro’s first and second themes, alternate with passages moving mainly in quavers. Amid the chromaticism, the voice-leading has a logic. The inverted dominant pedal that arrives at [2] is prepared (at bars 10–11) by an ascent: f♭2–g♭2–g♮2–a♭2–a♮2. And where Stravinsky’s dominant seventh (before [6] in the Octet) appears as a non sequitur, Casella’s – though it retains an element of surprise – follows from the descent in the bass (bars 23–4): E♭–D♮–D♭–C♮1–C♭1. It is this conventionalization that Adorno objects to. He appreciates Stravinsky’s wit of the early 1920s, the composer’s enjoyment of ‘the impossibility of a restoration of the past that he himself initiated’. But with the Sérénade en la for piano (1925) and Apollon musagète, Stravinsky turns ‘toward the positive, toward integrally absolute music’. The composer expands his range of reference to include the nineteenth century and ‘increasingly smoothes over the fissures between then and now’. His music becomes conformist, offering to audiences ‘that everyday style in which everyone believes anyway’.150 Here Casella moved more quickly and decisively than his model. As late as Jeu de cartes (1936), which Adorno describes as ‘insipid’, Stravinsky maintains an ironic distance from the past that is essentially foreign to the Casella of the later 1920s and 1930s. In Adorno’s phrase, the Concerto romano is meant ‘to be taken literally’. The turn to the conventional conceals the negativity – the ‘dark secret’ of subjective self-sacrifice – to which neoclassicism bore witness. To put it another way: both composers began in the mid-1920s to address audiences beyond ‘the inner circumference of specialist music’.151 With regard to Stravinsky, Joan Evans wonders whether Jeu de cartes might have been deliberately intended for the theatres and concert halls of Nazi Germany, where it scored a particular success.152 Casella’s desire for broad exposure was explicit. What mattered to him about Scarlattiana was that it was ‘easy to understand’. ‘The times are long gone when art was a kind of rebus or even a punishment. Today’s people yearn for clarity and happy optimism.’153 This position was political as much as it was aesthetic. Like the art of the Novecento painters he collected – Felice Casorati (1883–1963) famously painted 150 152

153

Ibid., 148, 153, 149. 151 Ibid., 154, 151, 150, 153. Joan Evans, ‘Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56/3 (2003), 557–9. Casella, ‘Scarlattiana’, 28.

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the composer’s portrait – Casella’s terza maniera involves ‘a less than subtle realigning of the classical tradition with nationalistic and ideological imperatives’.154 That much is obvious from the Concerto romano’s title. The fact that stylistic parallels might be drawn between the ‘Bourrée’ of the Suite in C and the opening Allegro of the Concerto romano does not let Casella off the ideological hook. It does not follow from the observation that the composer was already an ‘optimist’ in 1910 that he was not also a nationalistic classicist at this date. As Francesco Parrino has concluded from his investigation of Casella’s involvement with Ricciotto Canudo’s Montjoie!, this ‘intellectual relationship . . . supports an interpretation of Casella’s right-wing outlook as originating in Paris’.155 Contemporary leaders in art, as in politics – declared Mussolini’s mistress, the influential art critic Margherita Sarfatti (1880–1961) – are ‘revolutionaries of the modern restoration’.156 At the opening of the Allegro of the Concerto romano, the overcoming of atonality is enacted in unmistakable form. The authoritarian character of Casella’s E♭ major cannot be missed. Stravinskian monometry becomes a matter of crotchets rather than quavers: a hard, inflexible march of equal beats. Waterhouse refers cautiously to the composer coming ‘perilously close to the . . . spirit of the passo romano [goose step], the Roman salute and living romanamente’.157 More frankly: in his Concerto romano, Casella established a monumental, fascist ‘modern classicism’.158 It is not strictly a fascist neoclassicism (a term that implies the modernist negativity of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind, or of Casella’s Op. 40), but a fascist style of modern compromise: what Casella came to call his stile littorio.

IX It is not hard to see why the post-war Dallapiccola wanted to distance himself from this kind of music. For the composer of such renowned works of anti-fascist protest as Il prigioniero or the Canti di prigionia, any hint of an association with the Stravinsky or Casella of the 1930s would have been politically compromising. As the Swiss critic Jacques Wildberger suggested, Dallapiccola could only understand Stravinsky’s masterly and mannered neoclassicism as a winking complicity with the ruling balance of powers . . . Above all, Dallapiccola could not forget that during the Thirties, after a visit to Palazzo Venezia, the worldly Russian 154 155 156 157

158

Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, 99. Francesco Parrino, ‘Alfredo Casella and “The Montjoie! Affair”’, Repercussions, 10 (2007), 121. See Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, 101. John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘Casella, Alfredo’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols. (2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 2001), V, 234. The term is drawn from James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11.

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declared that Mussolini was the saviour of Italy and – so he hoped – the saviour of Europe.159

Fedele d’Amico declared it ‘impossible . . . to find four bars that recall Casella in the whole of Dallapiccola’.160 And yet this is not so. Example 2.8 gives the opening of one of the songs of autumn 1923, ‘Giovane bella, luce del mio core’, the first of the Tre canzoni trecentesche, Op. 36. The text is from Cino da Pistoia (1270–1336/7): Giovane bella, luce del mio core, Perchè mi celi l’amoroso viso? Tu sai che’l dolce riso E gli occhi tuoi mi fan sentire amore. [Beautiful girl, light of my heart, / Why do you hide your lovely face from me? / You know that your sweet smile / And your eyes fill me with love.]

‘At this moment’, Waterhouse reckoned, ‘some important aspects of inter-war Italian music were born.’161 Looking back at Example 2.1, especially at the start of strophe 4 (at [5]), we can see what he means. There is a similarity of melodic outline between the two passages, both emphasizing perfect fourths and major seconds in a white-note, modal context. The harmony in both extracts is poised on the edge of C major. But most significant is the archaizing, ‘stripped-down’ character of the musical textures: there is nothing ‘eighteenth century’ here. The plainness is heightened by the rhythmic/metric idioms. Again, Casella’s music is ‘monometric’. Crotchets follow each other in a stream tending towards uniformity of metrical weight. And much the same can be said of the Dallapiccola. More precisely, the opening of the Seconda serie displays two kinds of downbeat, of which those marked with sforzandi are obviously the stronger. There are no upbeats. As we saw, for Dallapiccola, it was not Casella but Malipiero who was the guiding spirit of his early music. The claim is worth investigating further. In his expressions of gratitude, Dallapiccola tends to single out the same compositions, both operas: It would be sufficient to listen to the beginning of the Sette canzoni [Paris, 1920], to the place where the voice begins with the words, ‘La mi porse la staffa ed montai in arcione’, or to the aria of the Spensierato [the Carefree One], which dominates Torneo notturno, to find the oldest and truest Italian tradition: the genuine tradition, which has no rhetoric, the tradition which has its roots in Claudio Monteverdi.162

159

160 161

162

Jacques Wildberger, ‘Luigi Dallapiccolas musikgeschichtliche Sternstunde’, Schweizerische Musikzeitung, 115/4 (1975), 173. Fedele d’Amico, I casi della musica (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1966), 467. John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘ The Emergence of Modern Italian Music (up to 1940)’, 2 vols. (doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1969), I, 347. Dallapiccola, ‘Die moderne Musik’, 79.

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Ex. 2.8 Alfredo Casella, ‘Giovane bella, luce del mio core’, from Tre canzoni trecentesche (1923), bars 1–18.

Example 2.9 gives the music to which Dallapiccola refers from ‘I vagabondi’, the first scene of the Sette canzoni. The text, sung by ‘Il cantastorie’ (‘The Ballad Singer’), is fifteenth century: La mi tenne la staffa, et io montai in arcione: la mi porse la lancia, et io imbracciai la targa; la mi porse la spada, la mi calzò lo sprone; la mi misse l’elmetto, io gli parlai d’amore: a dio bella sora, ch’io me ne vo a Vignone: et da Vignone in Francia, per acquistare honore.163 [She held my stirrup, / and I climbed into the saddle; / she gave me the lance, /and I took the shield; / she gave me the sword, / she fitted the spurs; / she put on my helmet, / I spoke to her of love: / farewell lovely sister, / for I am going to Avignon: / and from Avignon to France, / to gain honour.] 163

Gian Francesco Malipiero, L’Armonioso labirinto. Teatro da musica 1913–1970, ed. Marzio Pieri (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), 74.

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Ex. 2.9 Gian Francesco Malipiero, ‘Il cantastorie’, from Sette canzoni (1918–19), bars 1–16.

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Ex. 2.9 (cont.)

In an essay published on the occasion of the work’s failure at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome in January 1929, Malipiero explained how in ‘old Italian poetry’, he had ‘found once again the rhythm of our music, that truly Italian rhythm which little by little, over the last three centuries, has been losing its way in opera’.164 In both Dallapiccola and Malipiero, it is clear, the lessons of Torrefranca and Bastianelli had been well learnt. Malipiero sets these settenari in a declamatory arioso that pays careful attention to poetic structure. The articulation of the text into three quatrains, beginning at bars 3, 7 and 12, is further marked by a distinction between the mostly rapidly delivered list of activities at bars 3–11 and the more expansive bars 12–16, where the Cantastorie recalls his own speech. The first two quatrains are set to pairs of statements of similar material (there are internal repetitions at bars 5–6 and 9–11), while the vocal line at bars 12–16 is through-composed. Thus the entire passage shown in Example 2.9 (which is the first strophe of a two-strophe construction) has a bar form. The modality – a Dorian E to start with – and the lack of any decorative element lend the vocal line an archaic character, not dissimilar to that of Casella’s ‘Giovane bella’. The accompaniment imitates the strumming of a guitar, at first with open strings. Sometimes (bars 1–6 and 12–16) it is static, like a Stravinsky ostinato. When the harmony moves, with the start of the second quatrain at bar 7, it is rich and quasi-tonal.

164

Gian Francesco Malipiero, ‘Voce dal mondo di là’, in Malipiero e le sue ‘Sette canzoni’ (Rome: Augustea, 1929), 21.

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A particular stylistic debt is revealed in the chord at bar 11, which interrupts the repetition of the V–i cadence in E. As elsewhere in ‘I vagabondi’, Malipiero seems to remember the cante jondo-derived idiom that Manuel de Falla had established in music like ‘Andaluza’ from his Pièces espagnoles for piano (1909): note Malipiero’s Phrygian B♭ in bar 11 and F♮ in bars 12–16. It is Malipiero’s dramaturgy that has tended to attract critical attention. Lasting about forty-five minutes in performance, the Sette canzoni, which run continuously, consist of seven unrelated scenes. In each of these ‘dramatic expressions’, a song is performed: hence the title. There is no recitative, no dialogue. The action – either grotesque or pitiful, usually both – is mimed. In 1929 Malipiero explained that the episodes were based on his own experience. Of the first he relates how: In Venice, a cripple and a blind man, the first a violinist and the second with a guitar, accompanied by a woman who was the blind man’s guide, chose for their ‘concerts’ the most mysterious dark corners, the narrowest streets, almost as if they were trying to avoid the light. I don’t know why they attracted my attention, despite their excruciating unmusicality. And then, one fine day, the blind man was alone, striking desperate chords from his old guitar. His companion had made off with the cripple.165

In the opera, the crippled violinist has become the Cantastorie. At the end of the scene, the blind guitarist, finding himself abandoned, cries out ‘Maria’, flings aside the money the others have left him, and stumbles off in the wrong direction, to a dissonant fortissimo outburst from the orchestra in the manner of the Pause del silenzio. Waterhouse notes that ‘theatrical innovation was very much the order of the day in Italy in the years around and immediately following the First World War’. He mentions Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo (1887–1956), Luigi Chiarelli (1880–1947) and also the futurists: in 1918 Malipiero collaborated with Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) on one of his balli plastici.166 Italian critics have read the hostility to the operatic establishment legible in the Sette canzoni in political terms. For Pestalozza, the lack of dialogue is symptomatic of a situation in which the nineteenth-century bourgeois optimism that history and individual biography are meaningfully interconnected can no longer be sustained. The Sette canzoni bear witness to a society in which atomized individuals no longer communicate, and history has become opaque. It is significant that the guitarist in ‘I vagabondi’ should be blind. Like the bourgeoisie, he cannot see the fate that awaits him.167 Dallapiccola did not take this kind of leftist approach. Nevertheless, Pestalozza’s analysis, which opposes an optimistic and fascist Casella to a pessimistic and 165 166

167

Ibid., 17–18. John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘Between Opera and “Music Theatre”: Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Rebellion against the Italian Operatic Establishment, 1917–29’, ATI Journal, 56 (1989), 27. See Luigi Pestalozza, ‘Gian Francesco Malipiero: le canzoni del silenzio’, in Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento, 311–14; Pestalozza, ‘Introduzione’, lxxi–ii.

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dissenting Malipiero, maps on to Dallapiccola’s judgements. Just as he calls attention – if obliquely – to Casella’s links with the regime, so he makes the point of Malipiero’s distance from it. The composer of Torneo notturno, we are told was certainly not a man who could cherish illusions, neither in 1929 when composing this opera nor later. On every side they were carolling (as they would for many years to come) ‘Giovinezza, giovinezza’, investing this word with elusive connotations. But Malipiero, disillusioned and by nature pessimistic, set to music an admonition: Il tempo fugge e mai non si rinverde E mena al fin le tue bellezze frale, The moments flee, the green of Maytime never Comes again, and your frail charms must go, It shows his awareness of the human condition and contains a presentiment, perhaps, of the abyss into which mankind – and not only we Italians – would sooner or later fall.168

Again like Pestalozza, Dallapiccola supports his argument by reference to what was – prior to the imposition of anti-Semitic legislation – the one major episode of musical censorship experienced by an Italian composer under the regime. This involved the disastrous Italian première at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome in March 1934 of Malipiero’s three-act La favola del figlio cambiato, to a libretto by Pirandello. Displeased by the work, Mussolini forbade further performances.169 For commentators wishing to backdate Dallapiccola’s anti-fascism as far as possible into the 1930s, this reading of Malipiero makes sense.170 So we need to try to separate reality here from myth. Far from acting as a dissident with respect to the regime, Malipiero begged cravenly for its honours.171 Pestalozza’s insistence that Mussolini ‘immediately understood’ how La favola del figlio cambiato bore witness, in formal terms, to ‘bourgeois human relations faced with their crisis’ – and hence also to the crisis of fascism – is dialectical fantasy.172 The opera almost certainly provoked Mussolini on account of its libretto. As prudish on this occasion as any other totalitarian leader, he was apparently ‘upset by the fact that the second act is set in a brothel’.173 Ironically, as Virgilio Bernardoni notes, Pirandello’s libretto is conformist by the standards of the texts Malipiero had previously set, from both formal and thematic perspectives. And the music of La favola del figlio cambiato is inoffensive, except perhaps in its lack of interest. Even the endlessly sympathetic 168 169

170 172

173

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 113. See John C. G. Waterhouse, Gian Francesco Malipiero: The Life, Times and Music of a Wayward Genius 1882–1973 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999), 46. See Kämper, Gefangenschaft und Freiheit, 21. 171 See Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 348–70. Luigi Pestalozza, ‘Malipiero oltre la forma. Gli anni della Favola del figlio cambiato’, in Illiano (ed.), Italian Music during the Fascist Period, 415. Waterhouse, Gian Francesco Malipiero, 46.

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Waterhouse admits to finding ‘long-windedness’ in Act III.174 Contrary to what Erik Levi has suggested, the score of Malipiero’s placatory Giulio Cesare, dedicated to Mussolini, did not require a toning down of the composer’s musical language. From around 1932, as both Nicolodi and Waterhouse point out, his style had settled into a generally serene, lyrical temper.175 Pestalozza contends that Malipiero’s musical language performs a critique of Casella’s, negating the idea that past traditions can be made glorious once again.176 Certainly there is nothing particularly ‘Italian’ about the synthesis of Example 2.9: a neo-mediaevalism mixed with Stravinsky and Falla (elsewhere in the Sette canzoni, Debussy is important too). But as we saw in Chapter 1, claims for Malipiero’s modernism have been exaggerated. In ‘I vagabondi’, Pestalozza finds that the ‘arpeggio which . . . follows the voice’ is ‘disassembled in tonal superimpositions that tend to dissociate the voice from that which accompanies it’. ‘Voice and orchestra find themselves on two separate levels’ in a musical instantiation of the failure of communication at the heart of the work.177 In terms of the stage picture, this makes sense. Voice and guitar belong to two characters who do not communicate. Following Pestalozza, Bernardoni stresses the dissociation of the elements of the scene: a realistic early twentieth-century situation is ‘made strange’ by the way in which the Cantastorie is given fifteenth-century words to sing in pseudo-archaic style.178 But musically, Pestalozza’s thesis is unconvincing. The ‘guitar’ accompaniment is sympathetically coordinated with the voice: the Phrygian dissonance at bar 11, for example, far from being an element of dissociation, helps to colour the expansive setting of ‘amore’.

X In truth, Dallapiccola took little from Malipiero, though he was happy to borrow a title from the older composer. In May 1932 Malipiero wrote three orchestral Inni (the meaning is closer to ‘anthems’ than ‘hymns’). As Waterhouse notes, these short pieces, dedicated to Mussolini, represent an ‘overt’ attempt ‘to write celebratory music in conscious support of the regime’.179 Something similar can be said of Dallapiccola’s own Inni – his Musica per tre pianoforti (Inni), to give the work its full title – composed between August and November 1935. Despite the unusual 174

175

176 177 178 179

See Virgilio Bernardoni, La maschera e la favola nell’opera italiana del primo novecento (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1986), 135–44; Waterhouse, Gian Francesco Malipiero, 189. See Erik Levi, ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Fascist Opera’, in Günter Berghaus (ed.), Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945 (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn, 1996), 272; Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 204; Waterhouse, Gian Francesco Malipiero, 171–2. Pestalozza, ‘Introduzione’, lxxvi–ii. Pestalozza, ‘Gian Francesco Malipiero: le canzoni del silenzio’, 319–20. Bernardoni, La maschera e la favola, 57. Waterhouse, Gian Francesco Malipiero, 179n11; see also Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 148, 217, 357–8.

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scoring, this was one of his more frequently performed compositions during the fascist period, heard fifteen times by 1942, including an outing at the 1937 ISCM festival in Paris. Example 2.10 gives the opening bars (Pianos I and II are in unison; Piano III joins in for the final E♭). Their martial character is not something we have seen before in Dallapiccola’s music, though the treatment of the material quickly reveals familiar traits. Example 2.10 is another bar form, albeit one in which the opening material (bar 1) is heard not twice but three times, or rather four, since the b unit (beginning in bar 4) of this aaab structure opens with yet another statement of a. Then b turns out also to be repetitive. Bars 44–53 (we shall count crotchets) are twice reharmonized via a bass descent b♮–b♭–a. Other features are also characteristic: the hard-edged sound (the ensemble recalls the four pianos of Les noces); the ‘popular’ character of the material; the liberal use of accentuation – here also tenuto markings – which tends to weaken any sense of metrical hierarchy; and the careful control of chromatic pitches within a diatonic context (here G major). From the harmonic point of view, it is worth noting how the melodic fourths and fifths of the Seconda serie have now been ‘verticalized’: the opening chord of bar 6 (anticipated at bar 45) is particularly quartal. The first of Dallapiccola’s Inni is a thoroughgoing display of strophic form. Apart from some linking material first heard at bars 15–16 and a scrap of descant melody (first heard at bars 43–44), Example 2.10 suffices for the entire eighty-bar movement. Dallapiccola presents the theme in inversion and also, as in Example 2.11, in retrograde. Piano I’s music at bars 52–5 should be compared to that of bars 43–7 in Example 2.10, reading backwards. But most striking in Example 2.11 is the way that the retrograde, along with its repetition at bars 56–8 (Piano II has the Hauptstimme here), is joined contrapuntally with fragments of the b unit, both in its retrograde (as in the right hand of Piano II at bar 535–44) and in its prime forms (compare Piano III at bars 533–45 to the melody line of bars 4–53). The overlapping entries in the upper register – where the retrograde of bar 5 is heard no fewer than eight times (there are further incomplete versions) – combine to create the quasimechanical effect of a peal of bells. Reporting on another 1937 performance in Paris (not that at the ISCM), the Dutch critic Fred Goldbeck (1902–1981) characterized the entire work in these terms. ‘Dallapiccola’s keyboards’, he wrote, are cast in the image of a carillon . . . if one wanted to explain the polyphony of this work by means of an allegorical illustration, one would imagine a circle of tiny bell-ringers beating by turns here his gong, here his bell, and whose continual comings and goings one would follow all the more easily in that, at each point of his choreographic journey, each figurine would re-sound the note allotted to him once and for all.180 180

Frederik Goldbeck, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola: Musique pour 3 pianos (“Hymnes”). – Georges Auric: Sonate pour piano et violon (Concert de la Sérénade)’, La revue musicale, 18/173 (1937), 209.

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Ex. 2.10 Luigi Dallapiccola, Musica per tre pianoforti (Inni) (1935), first movement, bars 1–7.

So why the subtitle ‘Inni’? In the early 1970s Dallapiccola suggested that the music was ‘a song, a hymn which a group of children on a flowering slope raise in testament to their own joy’.181 It is not one of his more convincing self-interpretations. In the 1930s, the meaning of the term was unambiguous. Consider this typically selfdeluding passage from a letter sent by Malipiero to the high-ranking fascist arts bureaucrat Nicola De Pirro (1898–1979). Disgusted by the ‘musical dung’ fed to the Italian population, Malipiero viewed himself as coming to their aid, ‘for I am certain that if the state wanted to tackle the musical problem, the Marcia reale and Giovinezza would quickly be replaced by anthems [inni] of a people striving towards new ideals’.182 The inno is an inherently political genre, as Dallapiccola well knew. His whitewashing of the Musica per tre pianoforti began with the work’s second edition in 1954. The first edition is perhaps the single most incriminating public document Dallapiccola put his name to. As the composer explained in a letter of January 1936, ‘the motto chosen by me – and I am proud of it – is the IslamicMussolinian motto ‘Paradise is in the shadow of the sword [literally: ‘swords’]’.183 The motto (which of course disappeared in 1954) is indeed Islamic. And in a speech of 29 January 1926, Mussolini declared that ‘like the paradise of Islam, our most secure peace will likewise be in the shadow of our swords!’184 But Dallapiccola would have known his motto first from D’Annunzio’s poem ‘La canzone dell’oltremare’. As 181 182 183 184

Zanolini, Luigi Dallapiccola, 62. See Nicola De Pirro, ‘Una strada lunga e difficile’, L’approdo musicale, 3/9 (1960), 155. Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 289. See Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Salih Al-Bukhari, trans. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, 9 vols. (Riyadh: Durussalam, 1997), IV, 63; Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini, 12 vols. (Milan: Hoepli, 1934–9), V, 259.

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Ex. 2.11 Luigi Dallapiccola, Musica per tre pianoforti (Inni) (1935), first movement, bars 51–9.

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the composer explained in a different context, it was a favourite of his father’s. ‘How often’, the son wrote, I remember hearing him declaim, in a voice shaking with emotion: O incenso del deserto alla marina, Profumo delle incognite contrade, Fulvo come la giubba leonina. . .185 [O incense of the desert on the sea, / Perfume of unknown lands, / Tawny like the coat of a lion. . .].

Pio Dallapiccola would have declaimed the next tercet as well: aròmati e metalli, armenti e biade, e Berenice dalla chioma d’oro! Il paradiso è all’ombra delle spade.186 [fragrances and metals, herds and fodder, / and Berenice of the mane of gold! / Paradise is in the shadow of the sword.]

‘La canzone dell’oltremare’ is a celebrated document of Italian imperialist ambition: a call for the nation to recover lost Roman glory first published in Il corriere della sera on 8 October 1911, at the start of the Italian invasion of Libya. It was no coincidence that Dallapiccola chose a line from this poem when he did. Indeed, it was a calculated act of international defiance. The Inni had their first performance on 23 January 1936 in Geneva: the work was a runner-up (it came third out of 125) in a competition organized by ‘Le Carillon’, the chamber music society that had commissioned the Divertimento in quattro esercizi. And Geneva was the seat of the League of Nations, which in November 1935 had imposed sanctions on Italy in response to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. ‘At the time’, Petrassi recalled, ‘[Dallapiccola] took a firm stand in favour of the Italian Empire and against the British’:187 The composer’s widow tries to put the episode into perspective: I think it is very difficult today to understand the mentality and sensibility of a young man raised in an atmosphere which praised to the skies Italy and Italianness, the heritage of the Risorgimento, in that part of Italy still occupied by the AustroHungarian Empire. These values, absorbed in infancy, can re-emerge at a moment of crisis when one believes one’s country has been ‘offended’: such as that of the ‘international sanctions’ declared against Italy at the beginning of the Ethiopian war, the period when this music was written. At such moments, the essential thing is wounded national

185 186

187

Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis’, 357. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Versi d’amore e di gloria, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), II, 651. Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 146.

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pride, above all for those who have learned to look upon love of country as the supreme value. These are the concerns of a bygone age, it seems.188

One can accept this explanation (aside from the irrendentist notion that Istria was an ‘occupied’ part of Italy) and yet be struck by Dallapiccola’s vehemence. As Petrassi puts it, ‘Dallapiccola was at first a fervent fascist – so fervent that he sometimes annoyed us, his friends’.189 Reviews of the score of the Musica per tre pianoforti, by the composer Luigi Cortese (1899–1976) and the critic Ferdinando Ballo (1906–1959), make no mention of the motto, as if they were embarrassed by it.190 The case of Ballo is particularly interesting. In a longer article in which, characteristically, he views contemporary music through the lens of an enthusiasm for German expressionism, the motto is read as testimony to the failure of Dallapiccola’s generation to engage with social reality.191 Is the fascism of the Musica per tre pianoforti limited to its essentially peripheral motto and subtitle? Partisans of aesthetic autonomy may like to think so. But the belligerent tone of the work (and thus its connection to contemporary events) was quickly recognized. In a review of the first Roman performance, Gasco spoke of the three instruments being ‘lined up’ like ‘armoured cars ready to wipe out a city’. ‘[E]vidently [Dallapiccola] fears neither dumdum bullets nor perfected flamethrowers.’192 At a more theoretical level, we could make a brief comparison with Petrassi’s music of the period, specifically the Concerto per orchestra (1933–4). Osmond-Smith has put the case for a sociological significance of the monometric character of this work. The first movement, he notes, is marked by ‘the almost total absence of upbeats’. In the eighteenth-century dance movements so frequently taken as compositional models in the 1920s and 1930s, upbeats ‘ask for assent’. They are an invitation to participate in musical movement. A series of downbeats does not invite: it commands. Petrassi’s music is ‘an acoustic symbol of collective labour, of the submission to communal work under the aegis of authority’.193 We have noted the lack of upbeats in Dallapiccola’s music of the mid-1930s. It is telling that Goldbeck should have found an image of disciplined collective work – his ‘tiny bell-ringers’ – to characterize the Musica per tre pianoforti. As he further suggests, there is a sense in which Dallapiccola’s music is pre-subjective:

188 189 190

191

192 193

Pierre Michel, Luigi Dallapiccola (Geneva: Contrechamps, 1996), 29–30. Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 146. Cortese’s review appeared in the Rivista musicale italiana, 40/3–4 (1936), 361–2; Ballo’s in La rassegna musicale, 9/7–8 (1936), 256–7. See Ferdinando Ballo, ‘Le musiche corali di Dallapiccola’, La rassegna musicale, 10/4 (1937), 138–9. Alberto Gasco, ‘Il 5° Concerto di Primavera’, La tribuna (16 April 1936), 3. David Osmond-Smith, ‘Masculine Semiotics: The Music of Goffredo Petrassi and the Figurative Arts in Italy during the 1930s’, ed. Ben Earle, Twentieth-Century Music, 9/1–2 (2012), 21.

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the sonority is profound and neutral, as if still bearing the mark of the magical irradiations of a music from a time before art became individualised.194

The first movement shows why D’Amico, looking back from the 1950s, defined the ‘essence’ of Dallapiccola’s early work as: a kind of static contemplation, which seemed to assign to music the task of revealing spiritual realms which went beyond mere becoming. Think of certain ‘ecstatic’ places in Gluck (the scene in the Elysian fields in Orfeo), in Parsifal or in The Rite of Spring; places which seem to do away with the concept of time and know only a spatial dimension. But while in these examples we are dealing only with a question of scattered places, in Dallapiccola this state of affairs is a lasting one and forms the fundamental starting point of his inspiration.195

The combination of repetitive syntax, strophic form and monometric rhythm produces a music that is thoroughly non-developmental. In the terms of Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik, where musical development – a dynamic transformation of material that transcends variation – equates to the expression of individual autonomy, such deliberate anti-subjectivism, unleavened in Dallapiccola’s case by irony, mirrors the self-inflicted liquidation of the subject of totalitarianism: a ‘ritual of capitulation’.196

XI Does this make the Musica per tre pianoforti ‘neoclassical’? Mila thought the label fitted (in 1976); so did Gatti (in 1937).197 In 1939, Casella evidently considered Dallapiccola’s ‘aggressive but beautiful’ music to be ‘lictoral’: Music made of ‘dissonances and ligatures’, as the good Frescobaldi would have said. Music which nevertheless attains, by means of these blunt sonorities (which could not be less bourgeois or ‘voluptuous’) a rare, masculine eloquence, rising to a luminous solemnity.198

It is Casella’s fascist ideal. The Inni belong to the good, pre-nineteenth-century Italian tradition (note the reference to Frescobaldi), but are at the same time modern (blunt, aggressive and dissonant), anti-bourgeois, manly, solemn and luminous (which is to say: sunny, Mediterranean, Italian). Dallapiccola joins Casella in the expression of a fascist modern classicism. 194 195 196 197

198

Goldbeck, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola: Musique pour 3 pianos (“Hymnes”).’, 209. Fedele d’Amico, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola’, Melos, 20/3 (1953), 69. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 46–7, 146. See Mila, ‘Sulla dodecafonia di Dallapiccola’, 1106; Guido M. Gatti, ‘Modern Italian Composers: II. Luigi Dallapiccola’, Monthly Musical Record, 67/784 (1937), 26. Alfredo Casella, Il pianoforte (Rome and Milan: Tumminelli, 1939), 233.

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But this is not the end of the matter. Dallapiccola was trying to distance himself from Casella well before the Cold War. Consider the following, from 1942: I was instinctively suspicious of a certain ‘return to Bach’ proclaimed some years ago from highly authoritative professorial chairs. I am not connected with the ‘neoclassicists’, and anyone who so labels me must have a very faulty grasp of the meaning of this term.199

If Ballo argued along similar lines in 1937, we can understand his attitude in the light of an attempt to steer Dallapiccola in the direction of a Christian-themed neoexpressionism (an attempt that would be successful).200 Yet it was not only Ballo who distinguished Dallapiccola from ‘neoclassicism’ – which was to say, from Stravinsky or Casella – already in the fascist period. Luigi Rognoni did the same in 1936, as did Gatti in 1934. When in 1937, Gatti found evidence to the contrary, he was not enthusiastic; nor was Gavazzeni in 1935.201 We must proceed carefully. When in 1955 Dallapiccola wrote that his Partita ‘is so far from what was then the “movement” (neoclassicism) that it probably gave the impression of falling from a planet on which Stravinsky was unknown’, there is no need to contradict him.202 The Partita is the work of an academic progressivist. Its last movement (in which a soprano joins the orchestra for a setting of a medieval lullaby) would not have shamed Respighi. On the other hand, Dallapiccola’s music of the mid-1930s has many traits in common with other Italian versions of the conventionalization of neoclassicism we have called ‘modern classicism’: those that Casella lists. A distinction can nevertheless be made. As the composer and critic Roman Vlad put it, Dallapiccola’s early compositions ‘have very little of the eighteenth century about them’. ‘[D]iatonic simplicity in Dallapiccola’, Vlad wrote, ‘does not take on . . . the elegant artificiality of the works which crowd the twentieth century Arcadia.’203 The passages we have seen from the Seconda serie and the Musica per tre pianoforti lack retrospection of the ‘back to Bach’ variety. They are not thus instantly placed outside Casella’s sphere of influence, as the example of ‘Giovane bella’ indicates. The lack does, however, begin to justify the talk of Malipiero (‘I vagabondi’ has similarly little overt modelling) and goes some way to explain Dallapiccola’s anomalous enthusiasm for Stravinsky’s Perséphone and Duo concertant, two of the least 199 200

201

202

203

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 90. See Ballo, ‘Le musiche corali’, 139; Ballo, review of Dallapiccola, Musica per tre pianoforti (Inni), 256. See Rognoni, review of Dallapiccola, Sei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (Prima serie), 363; Gatti, ‘Nuovi aspetti della situazione musicale in Italia’, 35; Gatti, ‘Modern Italian Composers: II. Luigi Dallapiccola’, 26; Gavazzeni, Trent’anni di musica, 195–6. See Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola. Saggi, testimonianze, carteggio, biografia e bibliografia (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1975), 89. Roman Vlad, Luigi Dallapiccola, trans. Cynthia Jolly (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1957), 6.

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referential of his 1930s compositions. But what, then, is the positive content of Dallapiccola’s early manner? The key is the ‘popular’ element noted more than once above; something that was also recognized by critics of the period.204 In an article on a group of composers who had called themselves ‘I tre’, Casella acknowledged a stylistic alternative to that of old/new synthesis. If Vittorio Rieti (1898– 1994) and Labroca belong unquestionably to the stream which has its source in Scarlatti, Monteverdi and Rossini . . . Massarani’s vigorous ‘peasant character’, redolent of the soil, springs rather from Verdi, who was rightly called the ‘peasant-hero’ . . . Works such as the magnificent [Due] canzoni corali [1923] . . . seem to have come straight from the mouth of the people.205

Massarani developed a musical language based in the folk idioms of his native Lombardy. As Carlo Piccardi explains, the desire to recapture the ‘innocence of the popular peasant tradition, viewed as uncontaminated with respect to the redundant patrimony of inherited nineteenth-century bourgeois culture’, served a political end. In the ‘essentiality, sobriety and simplicity of gestures’ characteristic of folk music, a composer could ‘find once again the primordial energy, the vitalistic substance sought by a regime that wished for epochal significance’.206 That a fascist composer should have had an interest in folk music is hardly surprising. The contrast between ‘synthetic’ and ‘popular’ styles maps on to a broader distinction of the period between ‘Novecento’ and ‘Strapaese’ factions. If Novecento art (as we saw above) referred to the country’s high cultural traditions, Strapaese (literally: ‘Supercountry’) was a regionalism. Focused on Tuscany and Emilia Romagna, its artists embodied ‘a reactionary culture that wanted to get back to basics and expunge the contaminating effects of industrialisation and European (especially Parisian) ideas’. ‘Here, the local stood as synecdoche for the national, and the village as a repository of national tradition.’207 The emphasis was prominently felt in architecture. Giovanni Michelucci (1891–1990), architect of the Santa Maria Novella train station in Florence (1932–3), found a link between the geometrical forms of Italian rationalism and Tuscan vernacular architecture.208 The term Strapaese found its way into musical discourse too. Casella used it in connection with his Pirandello ballet La giara, Op. 41 (1924); it was also employed by critics to describe Massarani’s music, 204

205 206

207

208

See Rognoni, review of Dallapiccola, Sei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (Prima serie), 363; Gatti, ‘Modern Italian Composers: II. Luigi Dallapiccola’, 26. Alfredo Casella, ‘The Italian “Three”’, Christian Science Monitor (29 August 1925), 12. Carlo Piccardi, ‘La parabola di Renzo Massarani, compositore ebreo nell’ombra del fascismo’, in Roberto Illiano and Massimiliano Sala (eds.), Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 231. Emily Braun, ‘Speaking Volumes: Giorgio Morandi’s Still Lives and the Cultural Politics of Strapaese’, Modernism/Modernity, 2/3 (1995), 91; Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 26. See Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 297–310.

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not least by Dallapiccola. In his account of the Venice Festival première of the Sonatina for Cello and Piano (1937), he referred to Massarani as ‘the most sincerely strapaesano of our musicians’.209 In his earliest surviving compositions, as we have seen, Dallapiccola set dialect and folk texts from Istria. In the Cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, the geographical focus is altered. But the ‘popular’ character of Buonarroti’s verse may explain Dallapiccola’s sustained interest in it. Consider the composer’s recollection (after thirty years) of performances of Buonarroti’s 1611 ‘rustic comedy’ La Tancia at the Teatro Romano in Fiesole in the early 1930s: ‘full of the most authentic peasant fascination’.210 A contributor to the Florentine Vocabolario della Crusca, Buonarroti was concerned with the collection and preservation of Tuscan speech, which features in La Tancia as well as in the poetry chosen by Dallapiccola. Here, for example, is the text set in the ‘Invenzione’, the first choral movement of the Seconda serie: Cinque fratelli siam, ch’alla sorella Facciam serraglio intorno Ch’uscendo fuora all’apparir del giorno, Non men d’ogni altra sposa è vaga e bella. [We are five brothers, who / Make a ring around our sister, / Going out at the break of day / She is no less charming and beautiful than any other bride.]

It is a riddle, whose solution is the title, ‘I balconi della rosa’. This is itself mysterious: it is the name given to ‘the points of the already open bud, out of which the rose flowers, showing itself as if from balconies’ – so Buonarroti’s nineteenth-century editor puts it.211 More difficult is ‘serraglio’, which refers neither to a ‘menagerie’ nor to a ‘harem’, as it would in modern Italian, but is Tuscan dialect: ‘a joke played on the bride on the day of her wedding by a group of young men, consisting in blocking her path until she gives them a present or a tip’.212 Does Dallapiccola match this toscanità with a musical analogue? One commentator of the 1930s thought so. ‘Who has said that Luigi Dallapiccola is the most “Tuscan” of young Italian composers?’, asked Antonio Pedrotti (1901–1975), best known as a conductor, in an article from 1936. Pedrotti may have been thinking either of Gatti or Gavazzeni, both of whom had called attention to the ‘Tuscan’ or ‘Florentine’ character of Dallapiccola’s early music. Pedrotti heard ‘Clarity, felicity of images, sharpness of contours’: enough for him to conclude that ‘this musician from 209

210 211

212

See Alfredo Casella, 21+26 (Rome and Milan: Augustea, 1931), 231; Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Lettera da Venezia. Considerazioni sul Festival Musicale’, Il Brennero (28 September 1937), 3. Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 155. Pietro Fanfani (ed.), Opere varie in versi ed in prosa di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (Florence: Le Monnier, 1863), 396. Salvatore Battaglia (ed.), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1961–2002), XVIII, 747.

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the two Venices [an irredentist reference to Venezia Tridentina (comprising the Trentino and Alto Adige) and Venezia Giulia (including Istria)] has “washed his linen in the Arno”’.213 Dallapiccola ‘knows how to make the taste and the pungent freshness of a certain popular singing his own’, yet does not indulge in ‘facile references’.214 There are no quotations of folk material in Dallapiccola’s music. And the same is generally true of Massarani. In Piccardi’s account, Massarani does not ground a new language in authentic folk idioms; instead he treats ‘popular’ music as the model for a style whose elements are a ‘stripped-down’ melodic and harmonic character, a concision and terseness of musical discourse, a tendency to contrast rather than to mix colours, an anti-romantic linearity, and more generally, an expressive quality suggestive not of subjective individuality but of timeless collectivity.215 A comparison could also be made with Frazzi, who, though he engaged directly with folk melodies, publishing a number of arrangements, did not incorporate these materials in his own compositions – so Dallapiccola himself points out. There is a ‘lyric element of popular character’, in Frazzi’s work, Dallapiccola wrote in 1937, yet Frazzi ‘does not believe in folklore. He feels himself to be one of the people, but does not accept musical elements of popular origin. He wants, little by little, to invent the spirit of the people’.216 It is in terms such as these that we can understand Dallapiccola’s early ‘Tuscan’ manner: his expression of the ‘true spirit of Italian music’. As a final illustration, Example 2.12 shows the opening of the last of the Cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, ‘I lanzi briachi’ (‘The Drunken Mercenaries’); the passage sets the following lines: Addio bische, addio osterie, Sì difficili a lasciar: Addio, patrie lastre mie, Sì soavi a calpestar. Alla guerra: andar, andar. [Farewell gambling dens, farewell inns, / So difficult to leave, / Farewell stones of my homeland, / So sweet to tread underfoot. / To war: let’s go, let’s go.]

There is more difficult vocabulary here. Dallapiccola himself attaches a footnote to ‘lastre’, which refers to ‘not very large stones with flat surfaces used for roofing and for paving’.217 The ‘popular’ elements are those that Piccardi finds in Massarani: diatonic and modal harmony, conjunct melodic motion doubled in thirds (this can 213

214 215 217

Antonio Pedrotti, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola: musicista’, Il trentino, 2 (1936), 52–3; see also Gatti, ‘Nuovi aspetti della situazione musicale in Italia’, 35; Gavazzeni, Trent’anni di musica, 189. Pedrotti, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola: musicista’, 53. Piccardi, ‘La parabola di Renzo Massarani’, 294. 216 Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 258. Luigi Dallapiccola, Terza serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (2nd edn, Milan: Carisch, 1967), [ii]n4.

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Ex. 2.12 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Il coro dei lanzi briachi’, from Terza serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (1935–6), bars 1–53.

The true spirit of Italian music

Ex. 2.12 (cont.)

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Ex. 2.12 (cont.)

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also be seen at the start of the Inni), ostentatiously simple textures (at least to start with). Other features of Example 2.12 should barely require comment by now: repetition on the small scale and the large (strophes begin at bars 1, 13, 23 and 30); avoidance of upbeats by means of continual accentuation; quartal harmony (at [27] and [29]–[31] but also at bars 45–52); contrapuntal employment of prime and inverted forms of the opening material (the inversion enters at [29]); Stravinskian ‘layered’ textures (the fourths at [27] onwards seem to operate on a completely different plane from that of the voices); a hard-edged instrumental sound. What is new in the ‘Coro dei lanzi briachi’ is the raucous aggression of the music at bar 40 onwards: a call to arms that would have had obvious political connotations as Dallapiccola worked on this music in 1935 and 1936. The last of the three stanzas Dallapiccola selected from Buonarroti’s verse is especially bloodthirsty (literally so): Lieti, svelte, alto! alla via: Diam nel corno a cavalcar. Stammi allegra, spada mia, Spera averti a imbriacar. Affettar, sbranar, spallar Tutto dì Fia tuo mestier E piacer: Sì sì sì: Spada mia, quant’hai tu a ber! [Be merry, be quick, up! get going: / Give the signal to ride. / Look lively, my sword, / Be hopeful that you will get drunk. / Slicing, tearing to pieces, breaking horses’ shoulders / All day / This shall be your business / And pleasure: / Yes yes yes: / My sword, how much you have to drink!]

Nor was the political character of the Terza serie lost on at least one member of its first audience. As the critic (later a key player in post-war German neo-modernism) Heinrich Strobel (1898–1970) reported for the Berliner Tageblatt, he heard ‘strict form, rhythmic clarity, unambiguousness of sonority, now and then also violence’. It was a music that had ‘learnt just as much from Stravinsky as from Bach and Vivaldi’ – in short, a ‘fascist classicism’.218 218

Heinrich Strobel, ‘Moderne Musik in Florenz’, Berliner Tageblatt (20 May 1937), 1. Beiblatt, 5.

3 Fascist modernism

What does – or did – it mean to receive the essential negativity of musical modernism positively? Typically, modernist compositions caused bewilderment, if not outrage, the corollary of which could range from critical puzzlement to physical violence. But what of those parts of an audience (usually a minority) who were enthusiastic? Was their applause based on nothing more than Schadenfreude at the discomfort of the unenlightened majority? The ethos of modernism surely ought to have amounted to more than épater les bourgeois – class snobbery on the part of a ‘spiritual’ aristocracy that, more often than not, was thoroughly bourgeois in origin. On the other hand, if by ‘bourgeois’ we refer to the expectation that a work of art will be an object from which to derive pleasure in disinterested contemplation, then modernist works were indeed anti-bourgeois. For Fredric Jameson, modernism aspires to the Sublime as to its very essence, which we may call trans-aesthetic, insofar as it lays claim to the Absolute, that is, it believes that in order to be art at all, art must be something beyond art.1

An enthusiast for Scriabin, Schoenberg, Stravinsky or Varèse clings to these composers’ offences against aesthetic proprieties not (or not just) out of one-upmanship but in the name of the truth to which such offences bear witness. It is a truth manifested in the incompatibility of musical modernism with pleasure. The sublime, Kant insisted, cannot be an object of the senses. In Kant’s terms, the encounter with an object that is ‘contrapurposive for our power of judgement’ incites the mind ‘to abandon sensibility and to occupy itself with ideas that contain a higher purposiveness’.2 Musical modernism distinguishes itself from the liberal-bourgeois progressivism of a Puccini, Mascagni, Zandonai or Respighi – or from the modern classicism of Casella’s terza maniera and the early Dallapiccola – by what T. J. Clark calls its negation of the ‘medium’s ordinary consistency – by pulling it apart, emptying it, producing gaps and silences, making it stand as the opposite of sense or continuity’.3 One cannot ‘just listen’ to a work of musical modernism, in Nicholas Cook’s phrase.4 In the absence of reflection, the work’s ungraspability at the moment-to-moment 1 2

3 4

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 83. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129. T. J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry, 9/1 (1982), 152. Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford University Press, 1990), 68.

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level will remain senseless. Indeed, to say that modernism lays claim to the Absolute is to suggest, with Hegel, that this art is concerned to express ‘the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind’.5 Viewing modernism in this Hegelian light, Jameson follows Adorno. But as Clark emphasizes, the point about transcendence in Adorno is that it can be achieved only by ‘an absorption in the logic of form’.6 The negativity of modernist art does not transcend itself to politics or religion: instead, transcendence and negation are held in dialectical tension. In the dehumanized musical visions encountered in Chapter 1, we see society revealed ‘to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light’. ‘[C]onsummate negativity, once squarely faced’, Adorno writes, ‘delineates the mirror-image of its opposite.’ The modernist views the world from ‘the standpoint of redemption’.7 Dallapiccola certainly read Adorno; the two men shared many of the same musical enthusiasms. But their opinions did not correspond in any simple manner. In September 1935, at the Prague ISCM festival, Dallapiccola attended the première of Webern’s Concerto, Op. 24 (1931–4). He wrote about the event in his diary, one of a selection of excerpts that he later chose to publish. The Webern was not unanimously well received. Dallapiccola’s Italian colleagues (they included Casella and Petrassi) ‘seemed to be taking it in a jovially frivolous spirit’. The music was difficult: ‘too difficult for me’, Dallapiccola admitted. But even though he ‘did not understand the work well’, he declared himself impressed.8 Some of the components of the positive – or positively negative – reception of musical modernism are present in this account: for example, the sense that partial comprehension must lead to reflection. ‘I did not listen to the whole programme this evening’, Dallapiccola wrote. ‘Webern has given me food for thought.’9 At the same time, though, there is a clear awareness of the social benefit to be gained from an enthusiasm for Webern. Simply to take the Concerto seriously was to set oneself apart from the rest of the Italian delegation. In his contemporary public account of the 1935 ISCM festival (Dallapiccola’s first piece of published criticism), he makes no confession of incomprehension. The Webern Concerto ‘was listened to by us with all the more joy, so alive, rational and interesting did it appear’.10 While cultural conservatives such as the critics 5

6 7

8

9 10

G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, 7. T. J. Clark, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 2 (2000), 95. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 1974), 247. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Meeting with Anton Webern (Pages from a Diary)’, trans. John C. G. Waterhouse, Tempo, 99 (1972), 2, 5. Ibid., 2. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Lettera da Praga’, Bollettino mensile di vita e cultura musicale, 9/9 (1935), 203.

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Guido Pannain (1891–1977) and Andrea della Corte (1883–1968) condemned the Austrian’s music as ‘without any vitality or future’, Dallapiccola clung to an image of Webern – found in a 1926 article of Adorno’s – as ‘a solitary soul that clings on to its faith’.11 The image of the composer as ‘isolated’ was of the greatest importance for Dallapiccola: he quickly applied Adorno’s description of Webern to himself.12 Yet Webern’s music did not sound to Dallapiccola as it did to the philosopher. The Austrian’s later twelve-note work did not represent the cessation of composition, the ‘total surrender to the objective compositional process’, the ‘fetishism of the row’, the abdication of the subject.13 Nor does Dallapiccola sign up to Adorno’s vision of Webern’s faith as essentially hopeless, his music a message to a God who has abandoned man.14 The contrast between the two men’s attitudes returns us to the distinction between modernism and symbolism. As Thomas Harrison puts it, ‘Symbolism valorizes consciousness at the very edge of perception. It suspects that there may be some unifying ground of signs and surface appearance.’ But in expressionism – the form of modernism to which both Dallapiccola and Adorno were drawn – ‘the “phenomenon of discord” is heightened. Here artistic revelations of “another world” beyond the apparent one become all but impossible.’15 On the occasion of a second Webern première (that of the choral and orchestral Das Augenlicht, Op. 26 (1935), at the ISCM in London in 1938), Dallapiccola remarked on ‘the musical allusions which seem to emerge, like distant harmonic overtones, from the twelve note series and its developments’.16 Rather than understand the discontinuity of Webern’s music as crucial to its significance, Dallapiccola senses that while Das Augenlicht is barely graspable, its meaning is only just out of reach. In 1950, looking back on the Prague première of fifteen years earlier, Dallapiccola wrote of how he admired the Webern Concerto ‘because it seemed to me to express the composer’s highest ideal, not because I had understood it as music’.17 The Absolute hovers over the work, we might say. It is not grasped togther with modernist negation.

11

12 13

14 15

16 17

Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–86), XVIII, 516; Dallapiccola, ‘Meeting with Anton Webern’, 6, 3. Dallapiccola, ‘Meeting with Anton Webern’, 6. Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford University Press, 1999), 101, 102; Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 86–7. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, XVIII, 516. Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), 36. Dallapiccola, ‘Meeting with Anton Webern’, 2, 4. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, trans. Deryck Cooke, in Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller (eds.), Music Survey: New Series 1942–1952 (London: Faber, 1981), 323.

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I In the 1930s, Webern’s Concerto and Das Augenlicht were too distant from Dallapiccola’s musical manner to serve as any kind of model. His work shows little sign of Webernian influence until the early 1950s. Something similar can be said of the Italian’s relationship with the music of Schoenberg, where Dallapiccola’s pre-war enthusiasm disguises an almost total lack of musical affinity. The Florentine public could have heard this for itself when, in April 1938, Dallapiccola played the second of Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (1908), before taking part in a performance of his own Musica per tre pianoforti.18 The tightly disiplined, non-developmental, primarily diatonic music he was writing in the mid-1930s could scarcely have been more different from the atonal free flow of Schoenbergian expressionism. Nor was the ‘Franco-Russian’ syntax of Dallapiccola’s music converted to an ‘AustroGerman’ idiom on his adoption of twelve-note technique. In later life, Dallapiccola would describe his purchase of the Harmonielehre in 1921 and attendance at the Florence leg of the 1924 Pierrot lunaire tour as life-changing events.19 And yet, to paraphrase his own anxious words with regard to Stravinsky, it is difficult to find many bars in Dallapiccola’s work – even in the scores of his maturity – that sound like Schoenberg. There was, of course, a third member of the inner circle of the Second Viennese School, whose music did leave echoes in Dallapiccola’s work of the 1930s. As we saw in Chapter 2, Berg’s music was heard quite regularly in fascist Italy: the 1942 Rome Wozzeck did not come out of the blue. In 1934 Dallapiccola attended performances of Der Wein (Venice Festival) and of the three central movements of the Lyric Suite (Florence ISCM); in 1935 he heard a broadcast from Rome of the same three movements in the composer’s arrangement for string orchestra; in 1936 he heard the three movements yet again, this time in quartet form (Venice Festival); in 1937 he heard the Violin Concerto (Maggio Musicale Fiorentino). That same year he caught the Zurich première of Lulu on the radio; he had heard the Symphonic Pieces from Lulu at Prague in 1935.20 It became a crucial element of Dallapiccola’s self-image as ‘isolated’ that, as he told the story, he had been cut off in the Italy of the 1930s from the members of the Second Viennese School, unable to hear their music, see their scores or read useful analyses of them.21 And yet, so far as Berg is concerned, not only had Dallapiccola heard several of the major works by 1942; he also owned vocal scores of both Lulu and Wozzeck. 18 19

20

21

The programme is preserved in the composer’s archive (LD. XXIV.4.7a). See Luigi Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1980), 240; Dallapiccola, ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, 318. See Fiamma Nicolodi, Orizzonti musicali italo-europei 1860–1980 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 249, 250, 252–3, 255, 260, 261–2, 263. See Dallapiccola, ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, 321–2.

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The copy of the former in his library is dated 11 June 1937, of the latter December 1941, but he had access to a vocal score of Wozzeck from at least 1936, as Fiamma Nicolodi has pointed out.22 Where analyses are concerned, in a letter to Massimo Mila of September 1943 Dallapiccola described himself as ‘knowing well’ the 1937 volume edited by Willi Reich, which contained essays by Reich, Krenek and Berg himself, as well as first versions of several of the chapters familiar from Adorno’s 1968 monograph.23 In the 1950 article cited more than once above, Dallapiccola presented himself as a traveller ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, a gift to commentators, who have busied themselves ever since with demonstrations of increasing serial ‘strictness’ on the composer’s part. Shortly before Dallapiccola came up with his teleological metaphor, Roman Vlad proposed a similar interpretative framework. From around 1936, he suggests, Dallapiccola began to interweave in the diatonic warp of his works ever more numerous chromatic fibres which, from a certain moment onwards, assumed the aspect of true and proper dodecaphonic series and ended by absorbing every remaining diatonic element in his most recent works.24

This account is still sometimes cited. Yet it is not always borne out by Dallapiccola’s scores. The ‘road’ to the Goethe-Lieder is by no means straight, nor are its products homogeneous. In works as late as the Piccolo concerto per Muriel Couvreux for piano and chamber orchestra (1939–41) and the ballet Marsia (1942–3), there are long passages, even entire movements, in the ‘Tuscan’ idiom. And if Vlad highlights ‘the interpenetration of heptatonic and dodecaphonic spaces’, the ‘almost miraculous . . . stylistic synthesis’, in which ‘diatonic and dodecaphonic elements sit side by side’,25 it should be stressed, first, that the Dallapiccola of the later 1930s and early 1940s achieves his effects by juxtaposition as much as by synthesis, and second, that his harmonic vocabulary is rather more complex than this simple opposition of seven versus twelve notes implies. As for the process by which Dallapiccola turned himself into a twelve-note composer, this moved not smoothly but by leaps. One of these is shown in Example 3.1: the opening of ‘Il coro degli zitti’ (‘The Chorus of the Silent’), the fifth of the Michelangelo Choruses, which was already 22 23

24 25

Nicolodi, Orizzonti musicali italo-europei, 257. See Luigi Dallapiccola and Massimo Mila, Tempus aedificandi. Carteggio 1933–1975, ed. Livio Aragona (San Giuliano Milanese: Ricordi, 2005), 64; Willi Reich (ed.), Alban Berg. Mit Bergs eigenen Schriften and Beiträgen von Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno und Ernst Křenek (Vienna, Leipzig and Zürich: Herbert Reichner, 1937); Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Roman Vlad, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola’, trans. Toni del Renzio, Horizon, 20/120–1 (1949–50), 380. Ibid., 380, 384.

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Ex. 3.1 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Il coro degli zitti’, from Terza serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (1935–6), bars 1–30.

close to completion in short score by early 1935.26 The example gives bars 1–30 from the movement’s ‘Prima parte’, which sets the following text: Avezzi a non veder nè sol nè cielo, Usi a non uscir fuor, se non notturni, 26

See Mila De Santis (ed.), Fondo Luigi Dallapiccola. Autografi, scritti a stampa, bibliografia critica con un elenco dei corrispondenti (Florence: Polistampa, 1995), 45.

Ex. 3.1 (cont.)

Ex. 3.1 (cont.)

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E feltrati i coturni; Il crin cinto d’un velo, In questa sbernia imbacuccati e fitti, Servimmo un tempo a Plauti e a Terenzio. Noi siam, noi siam gli Zitti, Paggi, messaggi, ostaggi del Silenzio. [Accustomed to see neither sun nor sky / Used not not going out, except by night, / And with felt buskins; / Our hair covered by veils, / Muffled up in these cloaks and pressed together, / We once served Plautus and Terence. / We are, we are the Mute, / Pages, message-bearers, hostages of Silence.]

Buonarroti’s poem, extracted from his five-act veglia (a nocturnal theatrical performance) Le mascherate (The Masquerades) of 1641, involves a complex poetic conceit. The chorus introduces itself as that of Roman comedy, despite the facts that its members are wearing buskins (the boots that were reserved for tragic actors), and that there is no chorus in Roman comedy: Plautus and Terence had dispensed with it. In so far as Buonarroti’s chorus ‘served Plautus and Terence’, it was already silent in the third century bc. Its seventeenth-century role, explained in the second and third stanzas, is to keep the Florentine audience quiet, on pain of violence: Qua son venti balestre, Mala di quei ventura, Ch’a scurar l’atrui vista staran ritti. Per chi apre bocca qua si stilla assenzio. [Here are twenty crossbows, / Bad luck for those, / Who are standing upright to block others’ views. / For he who opens his mouth we here distill wormwood.]

It is not the only text set by Dallapiccola at this period that reprimands its audience. As we saw in Chapter 2, the third of the Tre laudi urges penance. At the opening of each of the three parts of ‘Il coro degli zitti’, and at the climax of the central section, Dallapiccola confronts listeners fortissimo. The grandeur of the first bars of Example 3.1 is not without precedent in the composer’s work: something of the same character can be found at the climaxes of the opening ‘Passacaglia’ of the Partita, and of the second movement, ‘Un poco adagio; funebre’, of the Musica per tre pianoforti. What is new for Dallapicola at the opening of ‘Il coro degli zitti’ is the textural and harmonic complexity. The music is immediately in three contrapuntal parts (the lowest doubled in fifths), becoming four at bar 7. And there is no tonic, or not until the C minor triad at [2]. The music is not totally chromatic. At bars 3–4, the harmonic progression suggests a modal D minor: certainly the E♭ at the end of bar 4 is heard as dissonant. But in the absence of any clearly defined tonal centre, the effect (up

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to [2]) would perhaps best be summed up in terms of Schoenberg’s ‘fluctuating tonality’.27 Other aspects of Example 3.1 would seem obviously Viennese, such as the ‘violent, shrill’ sound of the orchestra at the opening, which Dallapiccola related directly to Schoenbergian precedents (at the Prague ISCM he had also heard the 1928 Variations for Orchestra).28 Late in life, he also told an anecdote about the descending line of minims that begins with the F in the top stave of Example 3.1 at bar 63: during a friendly conversation with [the conductor] Maestro Zoltan Peskó I was asked how and why the chord formed with a diminished fifth plus a perfect fourth [the ‘Viennese’ triad] had become almost the fundamental chord of our music. Not finding the answer, I began by relating to him how (in 1935), while I was working on the ‘Coro degli zitti’ . . . because I wanted to see what would happen if diminished fifths were substituted for the odd-numbered fourths in Schoenberg’s example in the chapter on the ‘Fourth-Chords’, I noted with great satisfaction that, also in this case, all twelve notes in the chromatic scale were represented.29

In fact, the progression at bars 63–101 of Example 3.1 (F–B–F♯–C–G–D♭–A♭–D♮– A♮–E♭–B♭) is not quite dodecaphonic, since it lacks a final E♮. The complete twelvenote row is heard (in retrograde) at bars 223–62. Such technical observations can easily be made to fit the composer’s teleological narrative. Just as important for the development of his style is the canon at the octave between tenor and soprano saxophones at bars 10–19: a Bergian moment. What Dallapiccola appreciated in the composer of Wozzeck was his creation of expressive atmosphere. Writing to Laura from Venice in 1934, he described the final section of Der Wein in terms of ‘nameless and endless sadness’: for two days he had been singing the passage at ‘Du gibst ihm Hoffnung, Liebe, Jugenkraft’ (bars 202–4) to himself in the street.30 It is not just the sound of saxophones in Example 3.1 that is Bergian. What takes after Der Wein or Lulu here is the arching quality of the melodic lines Dallapiccola writes for these intruments at bars 15–17 (tenor) and 17–19 (soprano), complete with ‘sighing’ appoggiaturas. There is a late Romantic espressivo here that the ‘Tuscan’ manner does without. But for all these ‘Viennese’ traits, Dallapiccola remains true in Example 3.1 to many of the characteristics observed in Chapter 2. The ‘Coro degli zitti’ is a

27 28

29

30

Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (London: Faber, 1978), 383–4. Hans Nathan (ed.), ‘Luigi Dallapiccola: Fragments from Conversations’, Music Review, 27/4 (1966), 308. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Notes for an Analysis of the Canti di liberazione’, trans. F. Chloë Stodt, Perspectives of New Music, 38/1 (2000), 8 (slightly modified); Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 406. See Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola. Saggi, testimonianze, carteggio, biografia e bibliografia (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1975), 118.

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chaconne, whose large-scale ternary structure rests on strophic repetitions. The theme (strophe 1) is bipartite; its second half (which does not always appear) is formed by the alternating fourths and tritones. The first half, introduced in the upper stave at bars 1–62, alternates a pedal A with a downwards chromatic motion from F♯ to C♯. Strophe 2, which Dallapiccola names ‘I. Var. (Canone all’ottava)’ in the 1935 sketch, is at [1]: it lacks the fourths and tritones; Dallapiccola’s ‘II. Var. (Tema per moto contrario)’ – strophe 3 at [2] – includes them (as we have seen). Strophe 4 (at [3]) presents a shadowy echo (flute and clarinets) of strophe 2; the almost improvisatory clarinet solo leads into strophe 5 (at [4]). And so on. It is telling that Gianandrea Gavazzeni, in a review of the première, should have referred to ‘una vena berghiana ridotta all’osso, a uno stado fossile’ (‘a Bergian vein reduced to the bone, to a fossilized state’). His point was appreciated by Mila, who argues that Dallapiccola’s music is separated from Berg’s by a gulf in taste.31 Indeed, the single most striking debt to another composer evident in Example 3.1, as so often in early Dallapiccola, is to Stravinsky. The four-minim ostinato (D–A–E♭–B♭) that accompanies the canon in strophe 2, cutting across the 3/2 metre, has an obvious model: the four-minim ostinato (E♭–B♭–F–B♭) that cuts across the slow 3/2 at [22] in the last movement of the Symphony of Psalms.

II What made Dallapiccola want to become a twelve-note composer? In ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, the technique is an ‘answer to the problem of the method of composition’: the one, Dallapiccola writes, ‘that allows me to express what I feel I must express’.32 Yet as the comments in the same article on fascist cultural politics make clear, twelve-note technique was no mere ‘method’ in the 1930s. The question of what it meant to be a composer like Schoenberg – to be a modernist – was one that came to occupy Dallapiccola profoundly in the latter part of the decade. We can observe him answering it in his writings of the period, and also in his one-act opera Volo di notte. This last assertion may seem odd. The ostensible topic of Volo di notte, for which Dallapiccola prepared the libretto himself, based on the short 1931 novel Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), involves the heroics of the early days of

31

32

See Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Musicisti d’Europa. Studi sui contemporanei (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1954), 192; Massimo Mila, ‘Sulla dodecafonia di Dallapiccola’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, III, 6/3 (1976), 1108, 1113–15. Dallapiccola, ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, 321, 330.

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aviation in South America. Yet amid the concerns for fuel levels, weather conditions and take-off schedules, the opera presents nothing less than a sociology of musical modernism. As for the aeroplanes, they may not have been such a surprise to the audiences of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in April 1940. As far back as 1914, Balilla Pratella had completed his L’aviatore Dro, Op. 33, a three-act futurist aeroplane opera that employed Russolo’s intonarumori to simulate the sound of the eponymous hero’s monoplane. Pratella’s opera was not a success; one can hardly expect many in Florence to have known it. But the 1940 audience surely recalled the operatic novelty at the 1937 Maggio, Casella’s one-act Il deserto tentato, Op. 60, which featured a crash-landed plane at the back of its set and a cast headed by nine aviators.33 Dedicated to ‘Benito Mussolini, Founder of the Empire’, Il deserto tentato was intended as a commentary on recent events. Months before the première the work was being promoted as ‘a true and proper apology for the African undertaking’.34 Just as obvious was the desire of its librettist, Corrado Pavolini (1898–1980: brother of Alessandro), to clothe the Ethiopian campaign in mythical dress. Casella wrote of how his third opera would be a mystery of predominantly religious and martial character, evoking the abstract voices of a virgin Nature, anxious to be fertilized by human civilization; there would be the arrival of a group of aviators, who descend from the sky into the horrible desert like modern Argonauts, their struggle against the dark forces of barbarism and the snares of nature, and finally peace after the transformation of the colossal ambe into gigantic human edifices.35

Next to the quasi-mythology of Il deserto tentato, the modernity of Volo di notte was uncompromising. The backcloth, by the composer’s friend Baccio Maria Bacci (1888–1974), presented the geometrical framework of a wall of steel and glass superimposed upon an airport runway and, in the distance, the outlines of a modern industrial city at night.36 The stage was divided in two. As the curtain rose, the left-hand side showed a small office where Rivière, the director of an airline company, had his desk. On the right was a larger office where four clerks were working at tables.

33

34 35

36

See Leonardo Pinzauti, Storia del Maggio. Dalla nascita della ‘Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentina’ (1928) al festival del 1993 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1994), plate 4 in the illustrations following p. 388. Ibid., 35. Alfredo Casella, Music in My Time, trans. and ed. Spencer Norton (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 214 (slightly modified). Ambe refers to Ethiopian mountains shaped like truncated pyramids. See Raffaele Monti (ed.), Pittori e scultori in scena. Il Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 2 vols. (Rome: De Luca, 1986), I, 36.

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As for the music of Volo di notte, it ‘probably reached the utmost limit of modernity yet experienced by a normal Italian opera-audience at that time’.37 Example 3.2 presents another stylistic leap. The short score of Volo di notte was composed between April 1937 and April 1938; at the latest, Example 3.2 was composed three years after ‘Il coro degli zitti’. But here we have left the ‘Tuscan’ style behind. There is an atonal fragmentation in Example 3.2 unseen in Italian composition since Casella’s seconda maniera. Dallapiccola’s music is not fully dodecaphonic. Harmonically, this passage makes use of whole-tone and pentatonic collections, triads and fourth chords, independently of the opera’s principal series. Melodically this series is dominant. At P9, its home transposition, it is given in the bass at bar 798: A–C♯–C♮–B–D♯–D♮–G♯–A♯–F♯–G♮–E–F♮. Striking in Example 3.2 are the imitations of Second Viennese models. In bars 800–1, the trombone’s and horn’s presentation of the BACH first tetrachords of R1 (A♮–G♯–B–A♯) and R7 (E♭–D–F–E♮) in the manner of a cantus firmus suggests bars 24–5 in Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra. At bar 799, the continuous semiquaver movement, combined with the imitative entries (P9, P7, R2, R5) and rapid crescendo, recalls bars 13–17 in the ‘Ostinato’ second movement of Berg’s LuluSuite. Berg’s example would seem particularly important, in that this scene of Volo di notte (Scene 5) is organized – along the lines of Berg’s employment of ‘closed’ forms in his operas – as a set of chorale variations. But most significant in Example 3.2 is the expressionistic violence with which Dallapiccola’s music disrupts conventional notions of musical syntax, especially given the comparatively stable character of the phrases in the previous chorale variation (variation 6, starting at bar 775). At bars 798–803, the music can be grouped into three two-bar units, all of which share the same material. But with the increasing gaps between the orchestral entries, which serve to punctuate the moments of bewildered recitative, any sense of overarching coherence begins to dissipate. In the juddering repetitions of bar 804, there is something like a breakdown of musical sense. Two characters are on stage: Rivière and a nameless Radio operator. According to Rivière’s plan, three planes are meant to arrive during the evening: from Chile, from Asunción (Paraguay) and from Patagonia. Each is bringing a cargo of mail. These cargoes will be combined and loaded on to a flight bound for Europe the same night. The plane from Chile has arrived safely (at the start of Scene 2); the one from Asunción is making good progress. But the Patagonia plane is in trouble. Rivière has asked the Radio operator to get in touch with the pilot, whose name is Fabien. By the time we arrive at Example 3.2, it is clear that Fabien is struggling for his life in the midst of a violent storm. The situation, hundreds of kilometres distant, has been rendered powerfully immediate by the way the Radio operator, conveying Fabien’s 37

John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘The Emergence of Modern Italian Music (up to 1940)’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1969), 233.

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Ex. 3.2 Luigi Dallapiccola, Volo di notte (1937–9), Scene 5, bars 795–812.

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Ex. 3.2 (cont.)

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Ex. 3.2 (cont.)

desperate pleas for help, has started to take on the pilot’s identity. Fabien is doomed: that is what Rivière thinks. To the Radio operator’s scream of ‘“It’s the sea!”’, the director cries out ‘Lost!’ and collapses into a chair. It is all over, surely – so the musical disintegration tells us. But no: high above there sounds a consonance. At bar 805, a B major triad hangs ‘suspended in space’,38 pulsing slowly and irregularly. The scoring is delicate: flutes, celesta, string harmonics. An invisible soprano starts to sing – wordlessly – a lyrical melody, full of yearning apoggiaturas. It is music Dallapiccola had composed in late 1936 to open the first of 38

John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘Dallapiccola, Luigi, Volo di notte. Octavo Score’, Music & Letters, 46/1 (1965), 87.

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his Tre laudi, which he described as ‘a “study” for the opera’.39 Stylistically, it is another Bergian moment: the melody’s first phrase (bars 8064–92) is not just a bar form, but an ‘Austro-German’ developing bar. The opening three-note motive, a1–c♯2–c♮2, immediately repeated in sequence, b1–d♯2–d♮2 (as in a Schoenbergian sentence), is transcended in the continuation (from the last crotchet of bar 807). The first phrase is also the opera’s principal twelve-note row, at P9, which is followed by its retrograde (R9). The Radio operator/Fabien is no longer anxious. ‘“I see the stars!”’, he intones in his Sprechstimme. ‘“At the risk of not being able to come back down again, I want to reach up to them!”’ What has happened?

III Fabien has seen some stars. Flying towards them, he has found himself above the storm, where all is peace and light. But the music tells us that this is only the beginning. Guido M. Gatti, looking back at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino from the perspective of 1950, spoke of ‘the modern taste for symbolism’.40 The predominating realism of Dallapiccola’s opera is being transcended here; as we shall see, there is a good deal of the mystical quality of Il deserto tentato in Volo di notte after all. Yet there remains a distinction. Casella spoke of Pavolini’s text as an act of faith in the possibility of renewing opera by returning it to its point of origin, the miracle plays and the old mysteries, and by animating it with the breath of current reality.41

If Casella reanimates the mysterious origins of opera with the breath of reality, Dallapiccola animates reality with a breath of the mysterious. The point in bringing these works together lies less in their aeroplanes than in the way this basic contrast can be interpreted in terms of rival literary movements of the period. Prior to alighting on the subject matter of Il deserto tentato, Casella had planned with Pavolini to fulfil his Maggio commission of 1937 with a setting of a play by Massimo Bontempelli: his ‘fine Nembo’.42 Casella (born 1883, the same year as Mussolini) and Bontempelli (born 1878) were members of the same generation that had brought fascism to power. The spirit of Il deserto tentato accords with what Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls the ‘collectivist and mythopoetic sensibility’ of the literary Novecento movement in which Bontempelli was the guiding spirit. Thus Casella and Pavolini take on ‘the role of bards of the fascist national community’, transmuting ‘chronicle into epic and history into nature’ in the service of imperial expansion.43 But as Ben-Ghiat points out, younger Italians of the early 1930s, keen 39 40 41 43

Rudy Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera (London: Toccata, 1987), 95. Guido M. Gatti, ‘Italian Music Festivals’, trans. Deryck Cooke, Tempo, 16 (1950), 14–19, 16. Casella, Music in My Time, 214. 42 Ibid., 213. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001), 28.

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‘to create a culture that would reflect the regime’s “revolutionary” achievements in the political and social spheres’, rejected the ‘mythmaking and evasion’ of Bontempelli’s ‘magic realism’.44 In their search for ‘a uniquely Italian and fascist literary aesthetic’, intellectuals of Dallapiccola’s generation directed their interest towards the very different realism of American and German writers such as John Dos Passos (1896–1970) and Alexander Döblin (1878–1957).45 Their ‘antiaesthetic aesthetic’ was felt to be consonant with Italian fascism’s vision of itself as an ‘anti-ideological ideology’. Indeed, ‘realism became a signifying category of the third way’.46 The new ‘aesthetic of the concrete’ met with official approval. In Dallapiccola’s defence of his subject matter, from an essay published in the Florentine journal Letteratura to coincide with the Rome revival of Volo di notte in 1942, one can still hear the echo of Mussolini’s 1933 injunction to writers that they ‘immerse themselves in life’ and become ‘interpreters of their own time’.47 As the composer puts it, If we are compelled to create poetry today, I think it right to choose the forms most relevant to our time. In every age, bravery has been a source of poetic inspiration. But why continue indefinitely to extol the Argonauts, for example, who have only moved us vicariously through the work of art, when a Lindbergh can thrill us with direct and pristine emotion? Let us then make art out of our personal experiences, those which are likely to be the most authentic.48

It is not only the distaste Dallapiccola shows here for the mythological that places him in the realist camp. The mention of Lindbergh carries with it a reference to just the kind of Neue Sachlichkeit enterprise about which younger Italian intellectuals were so enthusiastic: the Brecht–Weill–Hindemith Lindberghflug, which went through various versions between 1928 and 1930. There is no reason to suppose that the Dallapiccola of the mid-1930s would have been unwilling to carry out his creative projects in accordance with Mussolinian dicta. The Duce’s 1933 speech, widely covered in the cultural press of the time, could have been a motivating factor in the decision to set Vol de nuit, first mooted the following year.49 There is little to suggest an enthusiasm for realism in Dallapiccola’s previous selection of texts. If his ‘Tuscan’ musical manner indicates a Strapaese rather than Novecento orientation, his poetic choices in works up to the Tre laudi are nevertheless consonant with architectural and artistic Novecentism’s desire ‘to create a modern aesthetic with visible roots in Italy’s rich cultural past’.50 44 46

47 49

50

Ibid., 29, 50. 45 Ibid., 13, 51–5. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Fascism, Writing, and Memory: The Realist Aesthetic in Italy, 1930–1950’, Journal of Modern History, 67/3 (1995), 637–8. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 63. 48 Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 90. Ben-Ghiat, ‘Fascism, Writing, and Memory’, 655; Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 83. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 27.

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Italian realism of the 1930s did not simply ape foreign models. As Ben-Ghiat emphasizes, young fascist novelists, conscious of their allegiance to a regime that defined its ‘general conception of life’ as ‘spiritual’,51 tended to shy away from the impersonal objectivity of a Dos Passos or a Döblin. Critics put their faith in ‘the notion of a “spiritual” realism, that would “transfigure” reality rather than merely register it’. The writer was assigned ‘a transformative role’, urged ‘to manipulate reality in the service of a moral vision’.52 At the most obviously realistic point in Volo di notte, towards the end of Scene 1, an offstage jazz band accompanying a blues forms the background to a spoken conversation between Rivière and Leroux, a faithful old foreman. The jazz is supposed to sound as if it is coming from the city: Rivière has opened a window. But this is no neutral observation of a popular style, let alone a celebration of it. The ‘Movimento di Blues’ (at bar 71) is a distorted parody, full of unidiomatic dissonance and clumsy syncopation; the ‘Introduzione al Movimento di Blues’ (bars 65–70) is marked sfacciato (shameless) and smorfioso (affected). Dallapiccola’s jazz is made to sound all the more coarse by the way it breaks without mediation into a statement (at bars 57–64) of the ‘other-worldly’ music heard at bars 805–12 in Scene 5. And while the offstage blues sings suggestive praise to ‘Love, joy of the world’, Rivière, giving more than a hint of the ethical confrontation to be presented later in the opera, rejects love and ‘everything that makes men’s life easy’ in favour of action. In a paradigmatic expression of the central idea driving the fascist realism of the early novels of Alberto Moravia (1907–1990), Umberto Barbaro (1902–1959) and others, the moral degeneracy of an Americanized mass culture is denounced in favour of the purity of individual commitment. Yet Volo di notte belongs only in part to the realist movement sweeping through Italian culture in the 1930s. Mention has been made of ‘the modern taste for symbolism’. Quintessential product of the fin de siècle, by the later years of the fascist regime, symbolism may have been ‘modern’; it was hardly new. The idea of some kind of cross between D’Annunzio and mail planes sounds unpromising. But D’Annunzio did in fact publish an aeroplane novel, Forse che sì forse che no (1910), and was a daring aviator during the First World War.53 And there is a strong symbolist element in Volo di notte, which stems from Saint-Exupéry. As Carolyn Abbate has explained, ‘symbolist literature, with its rhapsodies to musical mystery, dealt profitably in poetic images of suggestive but unimaginable sound’.54 SaintExupéry calls on such images at crucial moments in his narrative. Particularly 51

52 53

54

Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo. Con una storia del movimento fascista di Gioacchino Volpe (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1938), 1–2. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 50. See John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 242–8, 297–311. Carolyn Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 10/1 (1998), 67.

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significant is the equation he draws between music and the radio messages by which communication between the pilots and the ground is sustained. Late on in the novel, when Rivière has given up hope, the director muses on the fact that one radio station is still listening for Fabien’s messages: ‘A faint melodic beat, a modulation in the minor key was all that now linked Fabien to the world. Not a plaint, not a cry. Only the purest sound despair has ever formed.’55 ‘Such literary conceits’, Abbate notes, ‘demanded hard labours for composers who took inspiration from them.’ How were they to rise to the challenge of ‘the purest sound despair has ever formed’? Drawing on the notion of music’s ineffability, finde-siècle writers employed such images to create the ‘perfect noumenon, an inaudible musical object’: a ‘perfect symbol’. It should seem (in the words of Maurice Blanchot) ‘prodigiously far away, like a strange apparition’, be ‘unattainable, uninterpretable and transfixing’.56 But Dallapiccola was not to be put off, and if Saint-Exupéry’s literary technique can be seen to be indebted to writers of his parents’ generation, then, at bar 805 in Volo di notte, Dallapiccola draws on the work of their operatic counterparts. The conception here, with its offstage voice, is Wagnerian. Disembodied singing became a favourite device of the French and Russian symbolist opera that followed in Wagner’s wake.57 Within the Italian tradition, there is the voce dal cielo from the end of Act II of Verdi’s Don Carlo. But as Jürg Stenzl has observed, one can find more recent precedents for Dallapiccola’s voce interna in the work of Pizzetti.58 Towards the end of Act II of Débora e Jaèle (at [119]), Jaèle, hearing the offstage voice of her companion Mara (in a reprise of [113], from near the end of Act I), is suddenly reminded of her mission in the city of the enemy: ‘It is the voice of God, rebuking me’, she sings, terrified. But this is as nothing to the lavish use of disembodiment at the start of Il deserto tentato. Before the curtain rises, Casella’s ‘abstract voices of a virgin Nature’ are a solo soprano, at [9], and alto, at [12], singing from the orchestra pit. When the curtain rises, at [17], the ambe are an invisible chorus. Abbate notes that disembodiment is often associated with ‘[o]mniscience, veracity, the power to convince’. God sings from the wings (as Jaèle finds out). But take away the words and the resulting purely musical voice can be raised to the status of ‘sound-as-symbol’, a ‘mysterious sonic invitation’: opera’s answer to the challenge set by the symbolist poets and playwrights. Dallapiccola’s soprano, singing from the orchestra pit like Casella’s voices, but wordlessly, and without any form of representation on stage, makes ‘the noise of [her] own indecipherability’, as Abbate would have it.59 Nor is this the only point in Volo di notte where the audience hears 55

56 58

59

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail and Night Flight, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1976), 163. Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, 68, 95, 94. 57 Ibid., 70. See Jürg Stenzl, Von Giacomo Puccini zu Luigi Nono. Italienische Musik 1922–1952: Faschismus– Resistenza–Republik (Buren: Frits Knuf, 1990), 158. Carolyn Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, 70, 74.

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wordless disembodied singing. Again like Casella in Il deserto tentato, Dallapiccola employs an offstage chorus. The workers on the airfield vocalize (on ‘a’ or ‘ah!’) to greet the planes from Chile and from Asunción (Scenes 2 and 6 respectively). In both opera and novel (where the sound of the plane finally taking off for Europe is ‘a deep organ note’),60 flying seems to approach the quality of a ‘perfect symbol’. It has something ineffable about it. The uncanny effect of the passage beginning at bar 805 also relies on the recognition that this music has been heard before. These are the very opening sounds of the opera, which have returned only once since (at bars 57–64, as we saw). In these two earlier places, the effect is less special: the melody is given first to a solo viola and then to a solo violin. But the timeless triad has a numinous quality all of its own. Moreover, at its first appearance, this music is heard before the curtain rises. There is immediately a sense that it belongs outside the main body of the work, a sense that is reinforced at bar 805 by the disjunction with respect to the preceding material. So where do these sounds come from? The question leads us to the status of the Radio operator. This character, Dallapiccola explains, is the device that enabled him to resolve the disunity of place in Saint-Exupéry’s novel. But he is more than that. He is ‘the modern Magus, who knows more and learns it sooner than anyone else’: a kind of medium. In Scene 5, ‘with increasing emotion, we see him transformed as it were into the pilot himself’.61 Example 3.3 shows the scene’s initial climax, reached with Fabien’s words ‘You must not abandon me’ at bars 766–9, on the last two syllables of which there is a sudden hush. After the intensively chromatic preceding music, the white-note harmony at bar 766 already comes as a surprise. The reduction in dynamics and rhythmic near-stasis at bars 769–72, eerily scored (note the celesta and string harmonics), are unnerving, particularly after a steady rhythmic and dynamic build-up over five chorale variations (bars 718–65). Following Abbate again, the moment can be read as diegetic: as a disruptive and distanced ‘moment of narration’.62 The ‘voice’ that sings here – or rather, breathes – is proleptic. The flurry of clarinet semiquavers (marked come un soffio (like a breath)) at the centre of the palindrome at bars 669–71 (itself a device suggesting magic) is a statement of the principal twelve-note row, at P5; the semiquaver movement anticipates the collapse of bars 796–803. Dallapiccola himself might have called the effect ‘tempestuoso’. ‘[A] painterly idea’, he explains: the term indicates ‘a nuance, a subdued chiaroscuro verging rather on piano. It evokes the menace of an advancing but still distant thunderstorm.’63 In this case, as Giancarlo Brioschi and Alessandra 60 61 62

63

Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail and Night Flight, 174. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 83–4, 86. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1996), xii–xiii, 19, 26–9, 32, 56–60. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 166, 166n6.

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Ex. 3.3 Luigi Dallapiccola, Volo di notte (1937–9), Scene 5, bars 766–74.

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Pezzotti point out, the storm is interior, symbolic of Rivière’s crisis.64 The director is responsible for the night flights; as the third Clerk puts it in Scene 3, they are his ‘grande idea’. Though Rivière has been listening intently to the Radio operator’s narration, he has not made a sound since bars 726–7. In this context, the clarinet’s semiquavers act as a sort of metaphysical nudge. Following the Radio operator’s hesitant whisper, ‘I’m flying at five hundred metres!’, Rivière advances to the front of the stage, crying out desperately, ‘That’s the height of the hills!’ The chords in the orchestra recall leitmotivically the third Clerk’s ‘great idea’ (see bars 357–60). With the orchestra thundering away beneath him, Rivière plunges into an extraordinary empathetic monologue: All the masses of the ground, as if torn from their supports, unnailed, will start to dance drunkenly about him! They will start the mad dance around him, which will close in on him ever more tightly. Warn him! Warn him!

From this point until the collapse after bar 797, there is a synthesis of offstage and onstage action. Rivière, the Radio operator and – by extension – Fabien, all share the same sonic environment. But at bar 800 (see Example 3.2 once more) there is a split. As the semiquavers of Rivière’s collapse subside, the Radio operator, accompanied by whole-tone harmonies and then not at all, becomes strangely distant. Rivière is not listening any more: his music peters out into silence. The director has collapsed – his world has fallen apart. At bar 805, the sounds are not his. This music comes from another realm, from somewhere beyond the stage: ‘from the not-here’.65

IV With death inevitable, Fabien is granted a vision of the noumenal. He is calm, going to his fate willingly. It is a ‘conscious sacrifice’, Massimo Venuti suggests. There is even a sense in which the pilot avoids death. As Fedele d’Amico put it, Fabien ‘falls upwards’.66 Again, this is Wagnerian cliché – though transfiguration is reserved in Wagner’s operas for joyously self-sacrificing heroines. Volo di notte gives a no more neutral presentation of night flying than it does of jazz. Indeed, the aeroplanes are something of a distraction. As Nicolodi has recognized, a profitable way to read this opera is as itself a metaphor for Art, a transposition onto a symbolic level of the most recondite and worrying artistic questions: those that an ‘aristocratic’ and isolated musician like

64

65 66

Giancarlo Brioschi and Alessandra Pezzotti, ‘Una scena di Volo di notte’, in Arrigo Quattrocchi (ed.), Studi su Luigi Dallapiccola. Un seminario (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1993), 71–2; see also Massimo Venuti, Il teatro di Dallapiccola (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1985), 20. Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, 69. Venuti, Il teatro di Dallapiccola, 18; Fedele d’Amico, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola’, Melos, 20/3 (1953), 71.

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Dallapiccola came to be putting to himself – in the most critical years of the ‘return to tradition’ (and ‘to order’) and of fascism’s creation of a mass culture – with regard to the very meaning of his own compositional practice, with regard to the search for an ideal addressee capable of identifying with and understanding a music couched, like his, in the most exclusive of languages.67

In other words, Volo di notte is an ‘artist opera’, an Italian response to the AustroGerman subgenre launched by Die Meistersinger, which includes Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. In Nicolodi’s reading, Dallapiccola is concerned with the public role of the modernist composer. This is certainly a key issue in Volo di notte. But as a ‘metaphor for Art’, Fabien’s transfiguration has to do with the private business of artistic creation. This reading can be supported by reference to a public exchange between Dallapiccola and the critic and aesthetician Alfredo Parente (1905–85), which took place one year before the première of Volo di notte and just days after Dallapiccola had put the finishing touches to his opera (the orchestration was completed on 18 April 1939), at the fourth and last of the International Congresses of Music that were held alongside the Maggio Musicale during the 1930s. The stumbling block between the two men was a disagreement over the place of technique in the creation of a work of art, a problem that possessed a special philosophical urgency in the Italian intellectual climate of the 1930s. As Enrico Fubini has pointed out, Parente was instrumental in the spread of the neo-idealism of Benedetto Croce (briefly encountered in Chapter 1) to writing on music.68 And the notion of artistic technique is one that engages some of the fundamental assumptions of Croce’s thought. Croce’s ideas were immensely influential; they are also complex and idiosyncratic. Purely ideal, as Croce insisted in his seminal Estetica of 1902, the art-work is formed in a process that is simultaneously intuitive and expressive. It need not be communicated to the outside world. The artist’s decision to make the work public is an act of will that has no intrinsic relation to the aesthetic.69 Neither its content nor its form is chosen. ‘The true artist . . . finds himself pregnant with his subject and does not know how.’70 Prior to expression, the work’s content consists of as yet ungraspable sense impressions. Its form is that by means of which the artist brings these impressions to the clarity of expression. He or she does this consciously, but not logically – not by means of concepts. Form and content are not separable: the work is an organic and indivisible unity.71 The creative process is essentially lyrical. ‘What 67 68 69

70

Nicolodi, Orizzonti musicali italo-europei, 264–5. Enrico Fubini, Musica e linguaggio nell’estetica contemporanea (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), 7–17. Benedetto Croce, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and the Linguistic in General, trans. Colin Lyas (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 8–9, 124–5. Ibid., 57. 71 Ibid., 16–17, 21.

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we admire in genuine works of art is the perfect imaginative form that a state of mind assumes there; and this is called the life, unity, compactness, and fullness of the work of art.’72 Technique is another issue altogether. Defined as knowledge that precedes practical activity, it belongs in the realm of the will, the communicative.73 As Croce affirms, [t]he confounding of art and the technical, the substitution of the technical for the artistic, is a frequent recourse of impotent artists who hope by dint of the practical, that is of practical devices and inventions, to discover the strength and reliance which they cannot muster in themselves.74

Or as the disciple Parente maintained, ‘the only valid artistic inspiration should come from inner lyrical intuition and not from research into the materials of art.’ His paper at the 1939 congress aroused Dallapiccola’s ire not only by the crassness of its title, ‘Aspetti della cattiva musica novecentesca’ (‘Aspects of Bad Twentieth-Century Music’), but also in its heightening of the established Crocean attack on dodecaphony. Echoing his master’s terms, Parente located the contemporary crisis in the way ‘those musicians who are musically, that is artistically most impotent and inept’ have seized on ‘the most advanced technical and stylistic developments of the great revolution born with atonalism’.75 As the most prominent contemporary Italian enthusiast of the Second Viennese School, Dallapiccola could not but experience Parente’s swipe as a personal affront. His response, published immediately in La rassegna musicale (along with a further response by Parente), is a defence of the composer’s right to experimentation: Is it such a dreadful thing that some musicians should risk their whole lives to find something they don’t yet know completely? To try to find clarity in something that, for the moment, is partly in a state of intuition?76

The use of the term ‘intuition’ here would have struck Parente as incorrect. From the Crocean point of view, a feeling that is intuited is a feeling that is expressed. Fubini concludes that each man ‘was speaking an entirely different language’.77 But the 72 73 74

75 76

77

Benedetto Croce, Guide to Aesthetics, trans. Patrick Romanell (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 25. Croce, The Aesthetic, 124. Benedetto Croce, Philosophy Poetry History: An Anthology of Essays, trans. Cecil Sprigge (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 228. Fubini, Musica e linguaggio, 14. Luigi Dallapiccola and Alfredo Parente, ‘In margine al recente Congresso Internazionale di Musica di Firenze’, La rassegna musicale, 12/6 (1939), 290. See Croce, The Aesthetic, 9; Enrico Fubini, ‘L’idealismo italiano e le poetiche dell’avanguardia in Europa’, in Michał Bristiger, Nadia Capogreco and Giorgio Reda (eds.), Il pensiero musicale degli anni Venti e Trenta. Atti del Convegno Arcavacata di Rende 1–4 aprile 1993 (Rende: Centro Editoriale e Librario Università degli Studi di Calabria, 1996), 10.

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situation is more complex. Dallapiccola continues to elucidate his position, stung by Parente’s question, ‘Che vuoi?’: ‘What do you want?’ ‘Musicians, artists’, Dallapiccola replies, ‘are men the same as all the others. And like all men, they have the right to their experience.’78 What does this mean? For one commentator, Dallapiccola’s ‘experience’ may refer to the Erlebnis of phenomenology. Fubini reads the passage in similar terms.79 As Ben-Ghiat explains, for younger Italian intellectuals of the 1930s, phenomenology was the philosophical counterpart to returns to the ‘concrete’ in other areas of culture.80 In a review of Parente’s most important contribution to aesthetics, his 1936 book La musica e le arti, Antonio Banfi (1886–1957), doyen of a phenomenological school based in Milan, had taken the Crocean project to task for remaining fixed to an abstract scheme, accusing it of driving out of philosophical thought ‘the living, complex reality of art’.81 And yet Dallapiccola’s position remains idealistic. What he means by the right to ‘experience’ is the right to an individual self-expressive authenticity. It does not matter whether a critic praises or blames him. What is intolerable is to be accused of bad faith. ‘We artists experiment to find something; we may go wrong ninety times; but it’s not impossible that ten times we “find ourselves”.’82 He illustrates his point by the spiritual journeys of two characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky and his friend Count Pierre Bezukhov. In particular, Dallapiccola calls upon the moment when Prince Andrey, lying wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz after his brief moment of heroics, opens his eyes and looks up: Above him was nothing, nothing but the sky – the lofty sky, not a clear sky, but still infinitely lofty, with grey clouds creeping gently across. ‘It’s so quiet, peaceful and solemn, not like me rushing about’, thought Prince Andrey, ‘not like us, all that yelling and scrapping . . . How can it be that I’ve never seen that lofty sky before?’83

‘On the heights of Pratzen’, says Dallapiccola, ‘Prince Andrey takes the first step of his experience.’84 And here we may draw a parallel with Fabien. Out of the utmost spiritual and physical exertion – the pilot’s struggle in the middle of the storm – there comes an epiphanic moment of serenity: his rapt contemplation of the ‘soft and 78 79

80 81

82 83 84

Dallapiccola and Parente, ‘In margine al recente Congresso’, 290. Giordano Montecchi, ‘Attualità di Dallapiccola’, in Mila De Santis (ed.), Dallapiccola. Letture e prospettive. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi: Empoli-Firenze, 16–19 febbraio 1995 (Milan/ Lucca: Ricordi/Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1997), 394; Fubini, Musica e linguaggio, 14. Ben-Ghiat, ‘Fascism, Writing, and Memory’, 636. See Alfredo Parente, La musica e le arti. Problemi di estetica (Bari: Laterza, 1936); Antonio Banfi, ‘A proposito di un’estetica musicale’, Rivista musicale italiana, 40/5–6 (1936), 531. Dallapiccola and Parente, ‘In margine al recente Congresso’, 290. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Anthony Briggs (London: Penguin, 2005), 299. Dallapiccola and Parente, ‘In margine al recente Congresso’, 290.

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starry clime’ which lies beyond.85 This is the beginning of self-discovery, and of authentic self-expression. For when the self-recognition of individuality comes, it does so unexpectedly, without being willed. As Parente observed, there is nothing for the neo-idealist to object to here.86 Where the composer departs from the Croceans is in his belief that without some kind of preliminary willed effort involving technical experimentation, authentic self-expression is never going to come at all. The idea of individuality as something stumbled upon may appear strange. But it is in these terms that Schoenberg describes the appearance of the new artist in his Harmonielehre: a book that made a more obvious impact on Dallapiccola than any of the Viennese composer’s music. For Schoenberg, ‘a new sound is a symbol, discovered involuntarily, a symbol proclaiming the new man who so asserts his individuality’. In the Harmonielehre, self-expression trumps beauty, which ‘the artist does not need’. But the artist achieves beauty all the same, ‘without his having sought it; for he was indeed striving only for integrity’.87 Beauty is achieved instinctively. But integrity has to be striven for. And this notion, that the artist has to struggle towards authenticity, seems a straightforward source for Dallapiccola’s riposte to Parente. As Schoenberg is concerned to stress, echoing Schopenhauer, consciousness has little influence on the creative process: The artist’s creative activity is instinctive . . . He feels as if what he does were dictated to him. As if he did it only according to the will of some power or other within him, whose laws he does not know.88

By contrast, for Croce, expression, though achieved without recourse to concepts, is a conscious process. As he puts it, art is not ‘feeling as enacted or undergone’, but ‘feeling as contemplated’. What Schoenberg describes would be just another version of romanticism: ‘the over-forcing of art into an immediate expression of the passions and the impressions’.89 Paradoxically, in the Harmonielehre striving is instinctual. In Croce it is, again, conscious: ‘How often we struggle in the effort to intuit clearly what is at work in us!’, he exclaims.90 For all his devotion to Schoenberg, Dallapiccola is closer to Croce here. In an article published just days before the première of Volo di notte, the composer is bullish: ‘If some people are still confusing “inspiration” and “spontaneity”, I am not going to do anything to clear up their misunderstanding . . . And above all don’t get me started on art based on 85

86 87 88

89

The phrase is from Fedele d’Amico, review of Luigi Dallapiccola, Cinque frammenti di Saffo, Sex carmina Alcaei, Due liriche di Anacreonte, Sonatina canonica, in La rassegna musicale, 17/2 (1946), 166. Dallapiccola and Parente, ‘In margine al recente Congresso’, 293. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 400, 325. Ibid., 416; compare Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1969), I, 260. Croce, Philosophy Poetry History, 219, 236. 90 Croce, The Aesthetic, 6.

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improvisation.’ He cites Baudelaire, lines 5–8 of ‘Le Soleil’, from the ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ section of Les Fleurs du Mal: Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime, Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime, Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés, Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés [I’m going to practise my weird fencing alone, / Sniffing out in every corner the chances of a rhyme, / Tripping over words as over paving-stones, / Sometimes bumping into lines long dreamed of].

Dallapiccola praises the ‘humility’ of this artist, ‘who knew he had to torture himself in order to achieve his ideal of form and beauty’.91 But Baudelaire is not talking about torture. His account of the creative process testifies to its accidental quality, which rather contradicts the point Dallapiccola is trying to get across: that inspiration is hard work. On the other hand, Baudelaire’s mention of a technical problem – that of rhyme – is germane to the composer’s concerns. If he has employed closed forms in Volo di notte, Dallapiccola writes, it has been ‘[i]n order to clarify the architecture of the work and to express my thought and feeling as coherently as possible’.92 The equal weight accorded to ‘thought’ and ‘feeling’ suggests a further background against which to view Dallapiccola’s aesthetics. As Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), Croce’s principal philosophical antagonist, had insisted in his La filosofia dell’arte of 1931, artistic creation is not merely conscious, it is self-conscious. As he puts it, There is no writer so unruly that, in giving vent to his eccentricity, he does not prove to have before him an ideal formula for his eccentricity.

Art is a mediated immediacy. It cannot exclude thought, but enters a dialectic ‘which contains art and is not contained by it’. To achieve concreteness, art has to negate its subjective character.93 When Dallapiccola wants to have it both ways, as he would in the 1950s, declaring that he came to the twelve-note method ‘from the necessity of expressing myself’,94 his position could be described as Gentilian. The influence of the Harmonielehre may appear strong here. ‘Every chord I put down corresponds to a necessity’, Schoenberg writes, ‘to a necessity of my urge to expression.’95 91 92 93

94

95

Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘“Volo di notte” di L. Dallapiccola’, Scenario, 9/4 (1940), 177. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 93. Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Giovanni Gullace (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972), 101, 126. See Josef Rufer, Composition with Twelve Notes Related Only to One Another, trans. Humphrey Searle (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961), 179. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 417.

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But from the point of view of the Harmonielehre – and from that of Croce too – Dallapiccola’s position is untenable. There can be no aesthetic technique, no method of internal expression, says Croce: the idea is ‘inconceivable’. For Gentile, though, technique, which ‘in general is thought’, cannot be split off from expression in this manner.96 The post-war Dallapiccola insists on the primacy of self-expression. Dodecaphony is not so much a language or a technique as ‘a state of mind’. The unity of a twelvenote work, ‘like its melody, rhythm and harmony’, will be ‘an interior product’.97 As it happens, we have his own brief account of the conception of the music of Fabien’s transfiguration. It was early in the morning: he woke up and had the notes down on paper after fifteen minutes.98 No doubt there was a feeling of effortless selfexpression in the shaping of the melody’s articulation, perhaps also in the selection of some of the pitches. But a composer does not write a twelve-note row and its retrograde without a clear technical understanding of what he or she is doing. As Gentile would have affirmed, the element of rationality is irreducible. In Dallapiccola’s concept of ‘experience’, it has been dissolved. And here again he follows Gentile. As the author of La filosofia dell’arte explains, the artist must master his technique so that it becomes ‘an element which has become part of the subject or artist and therefore enters into his feeling’. Thus when he sings or paints he will be translating into objective images (into selfconsciousness) only his own feeling, with which everything else has been fused and identified.99

For Fabien, ecstatic above the storm, the struggle is over. As Croce would have said, lux facta est. In Schoenbergian terms, there is a 1:1 ratio between artist and work.100 For Schoenberg, though, the artist cannot achieve perfection. ‘Integrity, truthfulness never turns into truth; for it would hardly be bearable if we knew truth.’101 But ‘truth’, surely, is just what Fabien has come to know. We can let Dallapiccola articulate what in the Harmonielehre is unspeakable, what the anti-metaphysical Croce would have derided as an aesthetic of the mystical. As the composer of Volo di notte writes of Tolstoy’s Prince Andrey, ‘when he dies of the wound received at the battle of Borodino, he can be said to have found God’.102

96

See Croce, The Aesthetic, 125; Gentile, The Philosophy of Art, 186. Dallapiccola, ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, 330 (translation modified). 98 Hans Nathan, ‘On Dallapiccola’s Working Methods’, Perspectives of New Music, 15/2 (1977), 57n18. 99 Gentile, The Philosophy of Art, 186, 220. 100 Croce, The Aesthetic, 132; Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 326. 101 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 326. 102 Dallapiccola and Parente, ‘In margine al recente Congresso’, 290. 97

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V So much for Fabien. With regard to the opera’s large-scale construction, Dallapiccola directs his audience to ‘the concept of drama’, wherein, he says, ‘I saw particularly the artistic solution to a problem of crescendo: a crescendo of emotion, which usually subsides in a resolutive catharsis’.103 This statement needs careful handling. To start with, there is the nod towards Aristotle. For all that Dallapiccola shows himself to have been scrupulous in his attention to the unities of time, action and place, his use of the term ‘catharsis’ is unorthodox. Whatever the word may finally mean in the Poetics, it is clear that a purification of the emotions of pity and fear by means of their arousal is something that happens to the audience: it is part of the effect of tragedy. But for Dallapiccola, catharsis is also an event within the drama, on a par with reversal or recognition. Then there is his assertion that operatic employment of such a catharsis is peculiarly modern. Examples can be found in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Berg’s Wozzeck and Milhaud’s Christophe Colomb: in ‘[t]he first impressionist opera, the first big expressionist opera, and the first modern opera of “the masses”’. By contrast, in verismo, Dallapiccola observes, there is ‘no place . . . for the conclusive catharsis’.104 But as his own comments on the conclusion of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges make clear, what is involved in catharsis is the ‘Verklärung of romantic opera’: something too old-fashioned for Puccini or Mascagni rather than too new.105 Finally, there is the question of how the crescendo-catharsis model relates to Volo di notte. Brioschi and Pezzotti suggest that it applies, above all, to Scene 5, and that the central section of this scene therefore constitutes ‘the fundamental nucleus of the entire work’.106 Their claim is based on Dallapiccola’s enthusiasm for a passage from the study Weltgeschichte des Theaters by Richard Strauss’s sometime librettist Joseph Gregor (1888–1960): extraordinary in the context of an academic treatise, but in the context of Volo di notte, rather normal. Gregor cites a series of telegrams reporting the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique. To the extent that the ensemble of these documents constitutes a crescendo, Dallapiccola states that the ‘fundamental idea’ of Volo di notte is implicit in them. And as Brioschi and Pezzotti point out, the section of the opera that most closely resembles a series of dispatches of this kind is Scene 5, with its messages from the Radio operator.107 But in making this connection, they have fallen into the same trap as Dallapiccola himself, who seems not to have noticed that the point of Gregor’s example was to demonstrate not drama but a lack of it. 103 106 107

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 79. 104 Ibid., 80–1. 105 Ibid., 100. Brioschi and Pezzotti, ‘Una scena di Volo di notte’, 70. Joseph Gregor, Weltgeschichte des Theaters (Zurich: Phaidon, 1933), 15–19; Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 82; Brioschi and Pezzotti, ‘Una scena di Volo di notte’, 71.

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This is not to say that a crescendo is lacking in Scene 5 of Volo di notte. Dallapiccola’s employment of variation form enables him to articulate the increasing tension of the situation with precision, particularly during the Radio operator’s solo. Following the climactic moment of Rivière’s collapse, Fabien’s Verklärung would function as Scene 5’s resolutive catharsis. This makes sense in terms of the opera’s relationship to aesthetic theory. For Gentile, catharsis is the moment in which the subject returns to itself: the moment in which there is ‘liberation from the pain of life’.108 But Gregor’s objection would remain that which he levels at his series of telegrams: the situation lacks conflict. No opposition is set up between Rivière and Fabien or Rivière and the Radio operator. As we saw, in the last hectic minutes before Rivière’s collapse, the three figures tend to merge into one. And the concept of drama, Gregor makes clear, requires opposition: ‘the play and counter-play of powers [that] produce tension and relaxation, a to and fro of causal chains, the final extermination of the one and the victory of the other’.109 Dramatic tension of this type can be found in Scene 5 of Volo di notte, but only if attention is directed to Rivière, ‘the protagonist of my “one act”’, as Dallapiccola describes him.110 Following Gregor’s theory, the fragmentary narrative of Fabien’s final journey does not constitute the opera’s drama. It is the source from which this drama flows. As Dallapiccola declares, he reads Saint-Exupéry’s novel as ‘a drama of the will’.111 The terms of the opera’s central conflict can be summed up in a question. Is Rivière going to be strong enough to stand firm amid the opposition aroused by the night flights? This opposition is external and internal. It comes not just from the subsidiary characters but is experienced, in crises of confidence, by the director himself. Beginning in Scene 3, the drama alternates between its two poles on a roughly scene-by-scene basis. At the start of Scene 3, the third Clerk is loyal, but the fourth is contemptuous of Rivière’s scheme. Opposition is not yet raised in front of Rivière himself. At the end of the scene, though, with Fabien now clearly in trouble, there is a hint of trouble, as Rivière’s second-in-command, Inspector Robineau, admits that he has not yet loaded the mail brought by Pellerin (the pilot who has arrived from Chile) on to the plane bound for Europe. But most striking in this scene are Rivière’s expressions of anxiety. As the weather reports come in, he desperately steels himself against the possibility of weakness. ‘Woe to me if I lose heart’, he cries out. Scene 4 focuses on external opposition. There is an extended confrontation between Rivière and the only female character in the opera, Signora Fabien, who has come in search of her husband. Gathering from Robineau that all is not well, she demands to see the director, and proceeds to beg for his help, finally imploring: ‘Mr Rivière, do something, say something!’ Her plea and his self-defence constitute the 108 110

Gentile, The Philosophy of Art, 228. 109 Gregor, Weltgeschichte des Theaters, 19. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 87. 111 Ibid., 84.

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ethical confrontation referred to earlier: they will be discussed in due course. For the moment, it is enough to note that Rivière is moved by Signora Fabien’s plight. His decision, at the start of the following scene, to get in touch with the doomed pilot, stems from compassion, perhaps even from guilt. ‘How much happiness one can destroy in an instant!’, he muses to himself just after she has left. In Scene 5, opposition to the night flights is internal. Not only do Fabien’s messages lead to Rivière’s outburst and physical collapse; at the end of the scene, for the first time in the opera, he leaves the stage, hurrying on to the airfield with his hat and coat. His absence foreshadows the strongest expression of external opposition to the night flights, which occurs in Scene 6. After the arrival of the second plane, news of Fabien’s death spreads quickly from the clerks to the chorus of workers outside. All of a sudden, there is uproar. The workers force their way towards the front of the stage, shouting ‘No more night flights!’ and ‘It’s Rivière’s fault!’ A climax is reached, labelled in the full score (bar 926) as the ‘loudest’ point ‘of the entire opera’. This is the moment of the work’s great coup de théâtre. Standing in the doorway that connects his room with the larger office, still wearing his hat and coat, Rivière suddenly reappears. ‘He seems to have grown in stature’, Dallapiccola directs. Rivière makes a curt announcement – ‘The plane for Europe leaves in five minutes. The die is cast. We are not stopping now’ – and dismisses the workers with a gesture. They immediately begin to disperse, with not a murmur of protest. To use Dallapiccola’s own terminology, this is the work’s ‘dramatic close’.112 In Gregor’s language, the two ‘causal chains’ have engaged at maximum strength: the result is indeed extermination for the one and victory for the other. But this is not the musical conclusion of Volo di notte. The ‘resolutive catharsis’ follows. Marked ‘Inno’ in the score, it starts off as a monologue for the director but soon becomes a hymn of praise to him. As Dallapiccola puts it, In the face of such confidence, the mob is subdued: those very men who not long ago had uttered the name of Rivière with savage ferocity now repeat it almost in a tone of religious fervour. Rivière’s will has conquered.113

VI The action of Scene 6 is largely Dallapiccola’s invention. Saint-Exupéry merely describes secretaries speaking ‘in hushed tones of Fabien, the cyclone, and above all of Rivière’, and falling silent when the director appears in the doorway. The announcement of ‘the astounding news: the night flights were not being interrupted’, is made by Rivière to Robineau alone.114 But to denounce Volo di notte as fascistic is almost too easy. Nor is it difficult to explain why commentators have generally been 112

Ibid., 80.

113

Ibid., 86.

114

Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail and Night Flight, 151, 171.

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unwilling to do so. Consider the testimony of the musicologist Mario Sperenzi. Dismayed by his first experience of the work, on its first post-war Italian revival in 1964, not only did he find himself unable to confront Dallapiccola (with whom he was in friendly contact); he waited for twenty years after the composer’s death before making his feelings public. But his point was always a reasonable one: I could not get over the fact that Dallapiccola, known for his anti-fascist sentiments, had been able to compose an opera that, at first sight, seemed to me if not exactly an apology for the ideas of the regime, at least highly ambiguous in its exultation, in the character of Rivière, of the figure of the ‘leader’ whose will was invincible.

For someone brought up amid the ubiquitous propaganda of the regime, it was hard not to see in Rivière a representation of the Duce, who ‘watched tirelessly and with “Roman will” over our destinies’. Indeed, there was a straightforward equation to be drawn: ‘Rivière: Mussolini = Aeroporto: Italia’. The director ‘closely recalls those hierarchs who sent others to face mortal risks, [hiding] behind the words of a rhetoric that, in the style of the regime, was somewhat empty’.115 Sperenzi’s point can be developed. To start with, there is Rivière–Mussolini’s tirelessness. As the cultural historian Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi has noted, ‘the mystique of the Duce’s omnipotence’ encouraged the idea that he never slept. Indeed, ‘[a] light was always left on in Mussolini’s office to show that the regime never rested’.116 Rivière never rests either. In the first part of his monologue in Scene 1, he is laying out the schedule for the night’s work. At three o’clock, after the plane for Europe has left, the exhausted crews will go off to sleep, their places filled by new ones. But for him there can be no replacement: ‘I, I alone, Rivière, I will never be able to rest. And that’s how it will be always. Always.’ At the end of the opera, Rivière is the only character left on stage. During the closing bars, he finds a sheet of paper and takes up his work again. The stage is dark apart from the lamp on his desk, set to burn all night, just like the light in Palazzo Venezia. Then there is the exercise of total control, which is not restricted to Rivière– Mussolini’s ability to face down a mob with his mere appearance; though the Duce’s gifts as an orator were, of course, central to his political success, with bodily posture playing a significant role.117 As Falasca-Zamponi puts it, Mussolini ‘attempted to intervene personally in every single affair concerning the regime, from the most minimal to the most important’.118 At the end of Scene 1, the old foreman Leroux approaches Rivière with a rusty axle. In a dialogue of strikingly anti-aesthetic quality, the foreman reports: ‘It was really stuck but we sorted it out’, and his boss replies: 115

116

117

Mario Sperenzi, ‘L’enigma del Volo di notte’, in De Santis (ed.), Dallapiccola. Letture e prospettive, 259–60, 271, 270. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000), 68. Ibid., 86. 118 Ibid., 67.

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‘You must tell the mechanics not to tighten those bits up so much.’ Like Mussolini, Rivière ‘not only conduct[s] the orchestra but also play[s] all the major instruments’.119 Just as the regime proclaimed ‘Believe, Obey, Fight’ and ‘Mussolini is always right’, so Dallapiccola’s protagonist insists on hierarchy and discipline. In Scene 2, Rivière upbraids Robineau for showing friendship towards Pellerin, the pilot who has just landed. The Inspector is ordered to punish Pellerin arbitrarily in order to prevent further intimacy. ‘Distances must be respected’, Rivière says. And at the end of Scene 3, where Robineau ventures a certain resistance to Rivière’s grande idea, he is told exactly where he stands: ‘You must not “believe” [think for yourself], but only, only carry out orders, Mr Robineau.’ Rivière also disciplines himself. Just as Mussolini, in his speeches, rejected rhetoric in favour of simple language: ‘his sentences short and essential, his syntax simple’,120 so Rivière communicates in a direct and functional manner. Examples are his words to the crowd in Scene 6 or the passage from the start of his Scene 1 monologue, both cited above. The moment when he loses control of himself in Scene 5 (also cited earlier) is all the more effective for its departure from his usual restraint. Finally, just as the official rhetoric around Mussolini in the 1930s ‘grew insistent that he was and must be alone’, such that ‘his isolation . . . became, or was said to have become, a natural part of himself’, so Rivière is presented as necessarily a solitary figure. Here is the Duce, speaking to an admirer in 1932 (note the Rivièrelike syntax): One must accept solitude . . . A chief cannot have equals. Nor friends. The humble solace gained from exchanging confidences is denied him. He cannot open his heart. Never.121

For Dallapiccola, Rivière is ‘a man who understands the reason for his solitude’. He is ‘condemned to solitude by his own greatness’.122 It is not just the characterization of Rivière that smacks of fascism in Volo di notte. Commentators have drawn attention to the special significance of manned flight at the period.123 The appearance of Il deserto tentato and Volo di notte – two aeroplane operas – in the Italy of the late 1930s was hardly coincidental. As Falasca-Zamponi observes, ‘Airplanes embodied qualities such as dynamism, energy and courage – attributes that fascism worshipped and claimed as its own.’ Indeed, it ‘appropriated the airplane as its own symbol and transformed it into a cult’.124 ‘The pilot becomes 119 120 122 123

124

R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), 259. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 85. 121 Bosworth, Mussolini, 243. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 85, 83. See Stenzl, Von Giacomo Puccini zu Luigi Nono, 155–6; Raymond Fearn, Italian Opera Since 1945 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997), 3–4. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 70.

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the modern hero, the prototype of the new man of the fascist era’: thus Dietrich Kämper, citing the art critic Susanna von Falkenhausen. ‘Flying’, writes the historian R. J. B. Bosworth, ‘had something viscerally Fascist or Mussolinian about it as man flew heavenwards to challenge the very gods.’125 But these are surface details. The opera is marked by fascism also in its large-scale construction. If Dallapiccola’s confidence in the modernity of crescendo and catharsis was misplaced when it came to the operatic repertory, in other fields of Italian culture, the application of this structural model was indeed novel. In her analysis of the regime’s mass exhibitions, and in particular, of the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, held for the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, Marla Stone notes ‘the employment of a repeated exhibition itinerary or dramatic path’. Departing from a conventional documentary format, one ‘that appealed to the viewer’s reason’, fascism organized its exhibitions of the mid-1930s to take the spectator on a journey ‘from ignorance to realization to epiphany’. As Stone puts it, ‘[t]he itineraries of Fascist theme exhibitions relied on an intensifying emotional register’, wherein ‘[t]he narrative unfolded and then achieved resolution in a calm, quiet “chapel”-like room. In this way, propaganda became spiritualized and the spectator was party to an emotional and transformative experience.’126 Dallapiccola’s crescendo-catharsis model fits the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista neatly. The crescendo was supplied by the first part of the exhibition, which traced the rise of fascism out of post-First World War chaos. A bewildering climax was reached in the ‘Room of 1922’. Resolution followed in the ‘large monumental spaces and orderly perspectives’ of the rooms dedicated to the celebration of the new fascist era. But catharsis had to wait until the final room, the ‘Chapel of the Martyrs’. ‘In the chapel’s charged ceremonial space’, Stone explains, ‘the viewer released the pent-up passions aroused in the earlier rooms. This was the moment in which the conversion took place and the spectator was fully subsumed into the national-fascist community.’127 In the context of Scene 5 of Volo di notte, it is striking to find this narrative structure employed again in the 1934 Mostra Aeronautica, held in Milan. Here the historical-topical rooms were arranged to illustrate ‘an Italian destiny to triumph in aviation’: the cathartic epiphany was provided by the final ‘Room of Icarus’, a chapel, according to Stone, ‘dedicated to the martyrs of flight’.128 Fabien is just such a figure: a modern Icarus. And it seems particularly significant that he does not die, but ‘falls upwards’ into an eternal present. In the original Chapel of the Martyrs, as ‘Giovinezza’ was ‘broadcast softly into the room’ (note the use of disembodied 125

126

127

Dietrich Kämper, Gefangenschaft und Freiheit. Leben und Werk des Komponisten Luigi Dallapiccola (Cologne: Gitarre + Laute, 1984), 32; Bosworth, Mussolini, 143. Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, 1998), 130–2. Ibid., 148, 150, 154–5. 128 Ibid., 132.

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voices), the spectator was brought into the presence of the dead. Behind a cross bearing the inscription ‘Per la Patria immortale’, six bands of light shone out, each made up of dozens of repetitions of the word ‘Presente!’129 In the Dallapiccola literature, Fabien’s transfiguration tends to be interpreted in Christian terms. Commentators read Volo di notte by way of the Marian texts set in the Tre laudi.130 The stars Fabien sees at bar 807 have been understood, in the manner of Dante, as a ‘symbol of knowledge, of “truth made palpable”’.131 Dallapiccola’s re-employment of the B major triad, the twelve-note row – and the stars too – at key moments in his full-length opera Ulisse (Berlin, 1968), not to speak of his reference, in a lecture on its libretto, to Prince Andrey’s battlefield epiphany,132 go together to suggest that Volo di notte should be read as adumbrating the Augustinian search for ‘God within’ at the centre of this late work. But then there are Fabien’s final words, ‘Non abbiamo più essenza.’ ‘His last communication surprises us’, Dallapiccola notes laconically.133 The French word ‘essence’ can be translated into English as ‘fuel’ or ‘essence’, but the pun does not work in Italian: only the latter meaning is possible. ‘We have no more essence’ looks like nonsense. Taken seriously, this sentence certainly undermines the Augustinian reading. For the author of the Confessions, as Charles Taylor explains, at the point where the soul’s striving for self-presence is fulfilled – where it finds God – it experiences a reversal. ‘[T]he way within leads above.’ In other words, ‘we can only understand ourselves if we see ourselves as in contact with a perfection which is beyond us’. There is no dissolution of the self here. On the contrary, it is precisely the fact that I have ‘implanted within me this idea of infinity and perfection’ that allows me to have ‘the notion of myself as finite’.134 Fabien’s ‘experience’ seems to point to something very different: self-discovery in an ego-annihilating absorption into what Stone calls the ‘individual-collective subject’ of fascism.135 To use Mussolini’s words (or those of his ghost-writer, none other than Giovanni Gentile), the pilot demonstrates how his is a higher life free of all limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, by means of the abnegation of self, the sacrifice of his particular interests, his own death, realizes that purely spiritual existence in which resides his value as a man.136 129 130

131 132 134

135

Ibid., 154–5. See Jürg Stenzl, ‘Luigi Dallapiccolas “neuer Weg?” Von den Tre laudi zur Oper Volo di notte’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola nel suo secolo. Atti del Convegno internazionale Firenze, 10–12 dicembre 2004 (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 265–77; also Roman Vlad, Luigi Dallapiccola, trans. Cynthia Jolly (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1957), 14–18. Brioschi and Pezzotti, ‘Una scena di Volo di notte’, 78. See Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 244. 133 Ibid., 86. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 135, 140. Stone, The Patron State, 156. 136 Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo, 2.

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If that seems outrageous, all that is needed is another look at Scene 6. While the ‘microstructural’ crescendo-catharsis of Scene 5, read in the context of the regime’s mass exhibitions, relates to the fascist exaltation of martyrdom, the pivotal events of the opera’s ‘macrostructure’ relate to these exhibitions’ broader historical message, particularly that of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista. In its depiction of a fullscale proletarian revolt, a head-on confrontation with and subjugation of the mob by a single figure of authority and a mass expression of humility before this domineering leader, Volo di notte plays out as allegory what Stone refers to as the ‘ideological core’ of fascism’s own narration of its rise to power: ‘a recreation of the crisis of 1914–20’, followed by the ‘presentation of Fascism as the force responsible both for solving it and for producing social, political and economic harmony’.137 But the connection between Fabien’s transfiguration and Rivière’s triumph is sealed, above all, by Dallapiccola’s music. The moment of ‘macrostructural’ catharsis – which ‘can be brought about in opera, needless to say, only by the music’, as the composer puts it138 – is heard twice: once piano, the second time fortississimo. Example 3.4 shows the latter occasion, the opera’s final climax. There are no twelve-note rows here. The choral material at bars 958–61 employs an augmentation of a melodic fragment from the central section of the second of the Tre laudi, reused in Volo di notte to greet the plane from Chile (see bars 115–23 and 142–68) and then incorporated into the choral revolt (see bars 879– 97 and 922–6). Its sequential repetition (down a tone at bars 962–5) is coordinated with the instrumental line moving in accentuated quavers, which follows the circle of fifths: entries on A (bars 958–9), then D (960–1), G (962–3) and C (964–5). The music finally reveals itelf (at bars 964–5) as a dominant preparation in C major. But at the last moment, the expected tonic is replaced in a leap to repeated E major triads. Note their rhythmic articulation. These are Fabien’s triads: transposed and rescored but unmistakable. Blasted out by the brass section and full-throatedly greeted by the chorus, these triads now return at the moment of Rivière’s triumph. Under the glare of the airfield’s floodlights, we witness the departure of the plane bound for Europe. It is time the customary interpretations – those in which Fabien and Rivière are antagonists, in which Fabien is the ‘spiritual’ hero and Rivière the ‘technological’ villain, or in which the catharsis of Scene 5 constitutes the ‘real’ finale and that of Scene 6 the ‘false’ – were put to rest, for all that they were born out of a sympathetic post-war desire to rescue this opera.139 Whatever the cause in which these two men are engaged finally stands for, it is the same. If there is a spiritual dimension to 137 139

Stone, The Patron State, 135. 138 Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 79. The origin of this reading would seem to be Fedele d’Amico, ‘Canti di prigionia’, Società, 1/1 (1945), 98. Fabien-hero was then endorsed by Waterhouse, ‘The Emergence of Modern Italian Music’, 770; and by Dietrich Kämper, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola und die italienische Musik der Dreißiger Jahre’, in Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and Sigrid Wiesmann (eds.), Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984), 163. In more recent work,

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Ex. 3.4 Luigi Dallapiccola, Volo di notte (1937–9), Scene 6, bars 958–71.

Fabien’s flight above the clouds in Scene 5, it returns in Scene 6. And this is a fascist spirituality as much as it is a Christian one. The chorus are worshipping Rivière, singing their ‘Inno’, as we saw, ‘almost in a tone of religious fervour’.140 As Stenzl has pointed out, Dallapiccola’s model here is not the erotic ‘Hymne’ at the end of Act II of Berg’s Lulu, as so many commentators would like to think.141 A more likely, if

140 141

similar arguments crop up in Mario Sperenzi, ‘L’enigma del Volo di notte’, 268–70; in Raymond Fearn, ‘Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines: The Ideology of Luigi Dallapiccola’s Volo di notte’, Journal of Musicological Research, 16/4 (1997), 283–99; and in two articles by Luca Sala, ‘“Vol de Nuit” de Luigi Dallapiccola. Ce que les sources nous disent’, in Francis Buil, Belén Hernández Marzal and Paloma Otaola González (eds.), Musique et littérature au XXe siècle (Lyons: Éditions Lyon 3, 2011), 401–21; and ‘“Allo stato di intuizione”. Precisazioni a margine di Volo di notte di Luigi Dallapiccola’, Studi musicali, 2/2 (2012), 447–90. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 86. Stenzl, Von Giacomo Puccini zu Luigi Nono, 159.

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Ex. 3.4 (cont.)

unpalatable, source is Il deserto tentato, which, like Volo di notte, reaches its final climax (at [164]) with a choral hymn, Largo molto, religiosamente. But next to Dallapiccola’s massive affirmation, Casella’s seems almost perfunctory. The sacralized totalitarian politics that found their archetypal expression in the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista take centre-stage at the end of Dallapiccola’s first opera as in no other.

VII The composer’s own reading of the figure of the airline director is given in a letter of 17 July 1938 to Malipiero: I would not have chosen Saint-Exupéry’s book and would not have thought about it from 1934 to 1938 if I had not perceived a universal meaning in the figure of Rivière.

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Ex. 3.4 (cont.)

The Americans made a film of Vol de nuit and the result was sheer stupidity [una scemenza], since the adventure of the pilot Fabien was placed in the foreground. The book and my opera have at their centre the will of a man who looks to the future and so Rivière is you, is me, is all of us who stand apart from the ‘masses’, from those masses to whom people today are tempted to give such a worrying importance.142

Two observations can be made immediately. First, Nicolodi’s reading of Volo di notte as an ‘artist opera’ is the composer’s own. Second, for all that the narrative of Fabien’s final flight matches the outlines of his own aesthetic theory, Dallapiccola does not identify with the pilot. Interpretations that place Fabien at the centre of this opera run counter to Dallapiccola’s intentions. We seem to be dealing with a case of artistic megalomania. How many composers have seriously identified with a character like Rivière: one who so obviously manifests the traits of totalitarian demagogy? To be sure, while the opera depicts domination of the masses, the letter speaks of a desire to 142

Nicolodi, Orizzonti musicali italo-europei, 265.

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stand apart from them. But at the very least, Dallapiccola’s attitude is one of aesthetic aristocratism. For Stenzl, ‘the identification with Rivière’, which suggests ‘the idea of a “Kunstführer”’, is ‘unquestionably a D’Annunzianism!’143 To view Volo di notte in the context of the 1900 novel Il fuoco (encountered in Chapter 1) is to see Dallapiccola’s self-portrait in this opera as not so extraordinary; or rather, as falling within a tradition. As we saw, the work of D’Annunzio’s poet-composer Stelio Èffrena will not only be post-Wagnerian, but super-Wagnerian in the inspiration it draws from the immeasurably greater work of old Italian composers.144 Yet it is not so much the recovery of ‘the true spirit of Italian music’ that is important in the context of Volo di notte as the purpose to which this is to be put. Under the patronage of the heroic soul of Monteverdi, Il fuoco envisages an Italian answer to Bayreuth: a Theatre of Apollo to be built on the Janiculum in Rome. This will be ‘the monumental revelation of the ideal towards which the genius of our own race is being led’.145 Fired up by his oratorical success early on in the novel, Èffrena envisages a socio-political mission for his art. Just as Wagner’s work has inspired victory as Sadowa and Sedan, so Èffrena’s ‘new kind of art’ must bring together all the latent forces of the nation’s heritage . . . become a powerful determining factor in building a third Rome . . . show those men in government what basic truths to apply in their new statutes.146

For the Dallapiccola of the late 1930s, this vision remains broadly in place. Standing at the head of the ‘masses’ at the climax of Volo di notte, Rivière boldly leads his people towards the future. The opera exults in celebration of the role of the artist as social and political figurehead. Nor is Dallapiccola’s self-image as Kunstführer confined to Volo di notte. Outside the opera, the figure appears in an address of March 1936 to the ‘reactionary and ignorant academics and conservatory professors’ of the Cherubini (as Laura remembered them),147 at the centre of which stands one of the most striking passages in all the composer’s published prose: ‘Go towards the people’, we have been told. How many interpretations have been given of this famous phrase! For this reason I too assume the right to interpret it. Go towards the people, fine. We modern musicians have never feared the masses, but we want them truly to be the people and not that curious agglomeration of persons that, even today, is practically the sole patron of theatres and concerts. The people have demonstrated, above all in our country, that they do not have prejudices and that, over 143 144 145 147

Stenzl, Von Giacomo Puccini zu Luigi Nono, 159n14. See Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Flame, trans. Susan Bassnett (London: Quartet, 1991), 88–93. Ibid., 96. 146 Ibid., 100. See Michael Eckert, review of Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, in Journal of Musicology, 1/2 (1982), 246.

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time, they can accept many things. And the people, in their grandiose humility, know their position before the artist who creates. ‘To the mothers!’ – says Faust, shuddering to Mephistopheles. ‘But what is this word that I cannot bear to hear?’ And Mephistopheles: ‘Are you so blinkered that every new word disturbs you? Do you want to hear only what you have already heard?’ This is the position of the bourgeoisie before the artist who creates, of that bourgeoisie which has its thousand prejudices and its half culture and which loves the middle way, ‘the only one which does not lead to Rome’, as Schoenberg writes in the preface to the Three Satires. This is the position of the bourgeoisie that still waves the Romantic banner of art for all, of art that is fully comprehensible and perfectly appreciable after a first, distracted listening, and which judges the aesthetic worth of a work on the basis of its box office. When will it realize that the artist has far more serious problems to resolve than that of cheering up the evening of a few hundred people sitting in a concert hall?148

Here we are plunged into the cultural politics of late fascism. The opening reference is to a slogan that had been prominent ever since Mussolini had begun to declare, in the autumn of 1931, that ‘now was the time “to go decisively towards the people”’.149 Dallapiccola’s 1938 letter to Malipiero, with its reference to ‘those masses to whom people today are tempted to give such a worrying importance’, conveys a private dissatisfaction with the regime’s populism, a dissatisfaction that Malipiero himself had expressed publicly in Florence the year before.150 In 1936, though, Dallapiccola had been prepared to argue a version of the party line. In apparent contrast to the aristocratism of the 1938 letter, he launches an antibourgeois and populist polemic. This seemingly leftist attitude was a commonplace among middle-class fascist intellectuals of Dallapiccola’s generation, to the point where it could become the object of parody.151 But it was not confined to the young. Dallapiccola echoes an argument made by Casella, urging the creation of theatres modern in every way, which will welcome at the cheapest prices a totally new public, one no longer laden with prejudices like the haggard aristocratic-bourgeois phalanx that still turns up at La Scala and the Reale.152

There was nothing new here either. The idea that a Kunstführer ought to be seeking out the ‘real masses’ instead of ‘thousands of starched shirt-collars’, is already expressed in Il fuoco.153 New in Dallapiccola’s address is the way Schoenberg’s name is enlisted in the fascist cause. It is the Viennese modernist, ‘the most important musician of today’,154 who is the model for ‘the artist who creates’. Before him stand the unprejudiced and 148 150 152 153

Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 218–19. 149 Bosworth, Mussolini, 260. See Pinzauti, Storia del Maggio, 37. 151 See Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 114. Alfredo Casella, ‘Fascismo e musica’, Educazione fascista, 10 (1932), 871. D’Annunzio, The Flame, 27. 154 Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 209.

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accepting ‘people, in their grandiose humility’. With this not so veiled reference to relations of power under the regime, Dallapiccola equates the activity of the modernist composer with that of the totalitarian leader. The artist’s work is socio-political, concerned with the resolution of ‘far more serious problems’ than that of granting pleasure to an over-privileged minority. Being Schoenberg is much the same as being Mussolini. And ‘the artist who creates’ is also Rivière. In his vision of the masses humbled before the will of the Kunstführer, Dallapiccola sketches out the climactic events of his first opera. The airline director is an Èffrena for the new era: D’Annunzian decadence recast as fascist determination. Indeed, as if to link the moment of Rivière’s triumph with D’Annunzio, Dallapiccola cites his setting of La canzone del Quarnaro. The motif in quavers, anticipated at bar 967, and then treated in imitation at bars 968–70 (see Example 3.4), is the same that opened Example 1.7. At this point it is worth taking another look at the Harmonielehre. For it is not only from Italians, fascist or proto-fascist, that Dallapiccola learnt to hate the bourgeoisie. In the way Schoenberg immediately sets up his principle of ‘searching’ in antithesis to ‘comfort’, in his insistence that ‘a true artist . . . lacks perfect agreement with those average people who were educable, who could submit wholly to the Kultur’,155 the future inventor of twelve-note technique himself contributes to the fascist image of the modernist artist that Dallapiccola will present in his name. There is a common point of origin that binds together Dallapiccola’s D’Annunzian vision and the Schoenberg of 1911, located by Reinhold Brinkman in his reference to the ‘strong Nietzschean resonances’ of the Harmonielehre.156 It is fitting that, prior to the passage from his 1936 address cited above, Dallapiccola discusses the reception of Schoenberg’s music and that of Also sprach Zarathustra (not the tone poem) in the same breath.157 The cultural field from which Volo di notte arises is saturated with Nietzschean rhetoric. The extent to which D’Annunzio was influenced by the German philosopher scarcely needs to be pointed out.158 Saint-Exupéry was another enthusiast: ‘J’aime ce type immensément’, he once wrote to a friend.159 Zarathustra spoke to Mussolini too, of course. The antithesis – searching versus comfort – with which Schoenberg launches the Harmonielehre, reappears almost word for word in La dottrina del fascismo. ‘Fascism wants man active and committed to action with all his energy . . . The fascist disdains the 155 156

157 158

159

Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 1, 400. Reinhold Brinkmann, ‘Schoenberg the Contemporary: A View from Behind’, in Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (eds.), Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997), 205. Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 218. See Mary Ann Frese Witt, The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 32–88. Curtis Cate, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: His Life and Times (London: Heinemann, 1970), 111.

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“comfortable” life.’160 And it is in terms of this same binary opposition, variously expressed by Nietzsche as health versus sickness, strength versus weakness, master morality versus slave morality, Superman versus Ultimate man, that we can now approach the ethical confrontation at the heart of Volo di notte. For Zarathustra, nothing less than the future of humanity is at stake. Modern life celebrates its ‘happiness’, fosters love of one’s neighbours, prudence and health, and above all, is egalitarian. But these virtues are what have made modern man into the ‘Ultimate Man’, in particular the levelling notion that ‘everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same’.161 If there is to be human greatness, there must be social hierarchy. As Nietzsche puts it in Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Every elevation of the type ‘man’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society – and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or the other.162

The weak cannot co-exist happily with the strong. Or as Zarathustra declares, the egalitarian triumph of comfort means the destruction of greatness. As Saint-Exupéry has it, summing up the message of his novel in a single sentence: ‘action and individual happiness know no quarter: they are in conflict’.163 In its opposing ‘causal chains’, Volo di notte turns this conflict into drama. From a Nietzschean point of view, the rebellion of Scene 6 is an instance of ‘ressentiment’: the revenge of the downtrodden against their masters. Signora Fabien puts her case less noisily than the mob, but it is the same: the reactive expression of ‘the slave revolt in morals’.164 Her reproach to the director in Scene 4 runs as follows: That man [she means her husband], whom the night is threatening and already submerging, could have lived happily with me. Is the first law not to make sure of your own happiness? In the name of what cause are you tearing men away from happiness? Do you have the right? Is what you are doing just?

And this is his response: Yes, I have the right. I am telling you that, I, Rivière. Just, unjust: for me they are words without meaning. I take men to launch them beyond themselves, toward that strong life, which, with its joy, with all its pain, is the only one worth living.

160 161

162

163 164

Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo, 2–3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), 46–7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973), 192. Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail and Night Flight, 155. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford University Press, 1996), 22, 20.

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It is not only the exultation of striving at the expense of comfort that recalls Nietzsche. In his declaration that the concept of justice is meaningless to him, the director grants himself a Nietzschean rejection of moral codes. ‘Thou shalt’, says Zarathustra, must be replaced by ‘I will.’165 Crucial here is Rivière’s notion of launching men ‘beyond themselves’. This is Nietzsche’s ‘self-overcoming’. As Zarathustra asks the people: ‘All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?’166 If Volo di notte has a message, that is it. But the manner in which Rivière comes to embody self-overcoming is not straightforward. In 1942 Dallapiccola described the ‘continuous inner drive’ of the opera as ‘its fundamental raison d’être’.167 This looks like an invitation to read Volo di notte as psychological drama. But the large-scale crescendo is ‘outer’ as well as ‘inner’: surely Dallapiccola does not want to deny the existence of the Clerks, Signora Fabien or the workers? Some later comments, inspired by Günther Rennert’s 1954 Hamburg production, are useful here. When the chorus sings offstage in Scene 2 and at the start of Scene 6, Dallapiccola notes, it has no words. It constitutes an ‘anonymous mass’, which ‘participates in the events from the outside’. Later in Scene 6, when the chorus is not only given words but ‘bursts onto the stage’, it ‘at last . . . participates from the inside in an event’. But this is ‘not a visible event’. As Dallapiccola puts it, ‘The chorus becomes the conscience of Rivière and in the same moment acquires a consciousness of itself.’168 The composer wants us to understand the external opposition to Rivière’s night flights as simultaneously internal. There is a theatrical logic here. For when the chorus makes its way towards the front of the stage, Rivière, exceptionally in the work, is off. But especially significant, in terms of a Nietzschean reading of the opera, is Dallapiccola’s mention of Rivière’s ‘conscience’. For Zarathustra, pity is ‘the deepest abyss’.169 As Michael Tanner explains, the Nietzschean must try to avoid sympathy for the suffering of others. To feel pity is to forget to live ‘for yourself’.170 It is pity for Signora Fabien that leads Rivière to attempt to make contact with her husband. It is pity for Fabien that leads to Rivière’s moment of desperate empathy for the pilot and thus to his collapse. And, to follow Dallapiccola’s reading, it is pity, or guilt – Rivière’s ‘conscience’ – that, in the shape of the chorus, threatens subsequently to overwhelm him. Rivière has pity for himself as well. As Dallapiccola tells us, ‘although he dominates and is feared by everyone, he is an 165 167 168

169 170

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 55. 166 Ibid., 41. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 83. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, trans. Madeleine M. Smith, in Robert Stephan Hines (ed.), The Composer’s Point of View: Essays on Twentieth-Century Choral Music by Those Who Wrote It (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963) 174–5. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 177. Michael Tanner, Nietzsche (Oxford University Press, 1994), 43.

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unhappy man’.171 This is why the opera is ‘a drama of the will’. Rivière’s external triumph is, at the same time, a triumph over those internal forces that are distracting him from following his individual path. His victory is a self-overcoming: a winning through to authenticity, celebrated in the self-affirmation of the choral ‘Inno’. As Dallapiccola wrote of his hero in 1940, ‘He has seen much in the souls of men; now he has conquered everything, even melancholy.’172 But what is the relationship of this self-overcoming to Dallapiccola’s aesthetics? Identification with Rivière is identification with Schoenberg, or with a particular image of Schoenberg: it is not only in the ability to dominate the proletariat that the airline director and ‘the artist who creates’, join hands. To follow Rivière’s dramatic itinerary alongside the narrative of Schoenberg’s career (as Dallapiccola tells it in his 1936 address) is to read the same story. In the early years, we find Schoenberg facing a desperate situation: ‘if composers were to continue to make use of the tonal system or the major and minor modes, productivity would very soon be exhausted’. Schoenberg’s reponse is violence. ‘A blow of the hatchet and he explodes the tonic.’ This is the composer as ‘negator’.173 But Schoenberg has not only exploded the tonic: he has replaced it with the ‘new system’ of the twelve-note row. In place of the old ‘force of gravity’ represented by the tonic, each twelve-note composition has as its basis ‘a single chord formed by all twelve degrees of the chromatic scale’. This odd idea does not inspire confidence in Dallapiccola’s understanding of serialism. But the essential point is clear. Dodecaphonic pieces will not ‘appear other than conceived . . . on the basis of’ one of these chords.174 If conventional methods of composition have been thrown out, so have conventional modes of appreciation. Twelve-note technique is the selfovercoming of music. ‘La mia volontà costringerà ogni cosa in mio potere’, Rivière cries out in Scene 3: ‘Everything shall be brought under the power of my will.’

VIII As Gianmario Borio explains, the historical circumstances of the Italian reception of twelve-note technique were such that, after the war, it took on ‘ethical connotations which, at the time of its formulation, it did not possess’. Only a few years earlier, he writes, serialism had been denounced by composers faithful to the regime as ‘degenerate’ and by ‘modernists’ – he means Casella – as foreign to the Italian spirit. Now it was regarded as ‘technical potential for a musical language of freedom, internationalism and democracy’.175 The ascription to twelve-note technique of 171 172 174 175

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 85. Dallapiccola, ‘Volo di notte di L. Dallapiccola’, 177. 173 Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 209, 210. Ibid., 209, 211, 212. Gianmario Borio, ‘Der lautlose Dissens der Musik im faschistischen Italien’, in Horst Weber (ed.), Musik in der Emigration 1933–1945. Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Rückwirkung (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1994), 240.

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‘internationalism’ bespeaks an attempt to reinvest with positive connotations a term that under fascism was used pejoratively. As the older Dallapiccola never tired of reminding audiences, ‘internationalism’ – code for ‘anti-fascism’ or ‘communism’ – was habitually dragged out by party hacks of the late 1930s at the slightest hint of musical modernism, let alone of twelve-note technique.176 With respect to Volo di notte, Dallapiccola takes grim pleasure in citing a review by Alceo Toni, in which the entire intellectual milieu of Florence is tarred with the internationalist brush.177 This review now has an unduly prominent position in the literature. Commentators have been willing bluntly to conclude from it that the regime disapproved of Volo di notte. Others, following the critical line described by Borio, have suggested that the work’s twelve-note and other Second Viennese-inspired elements should be understood as subversive.178 In Luigi Pestalozza’s influential 1966 essay, it is an article of faith that the receptivity towards modernist techniques of the generation of Italian critics and composers emerging around 1935 was inherently bound up with a demystificatory attitude towards fascism. Dallapiccola’s response to Parente is apparently proof of this.179 But the composer had his own views of the period on the relationship between dodecaphony and Italianness, as laid out in his 1936 address. He suggests to students that they try their hands at harmonization of twelve-note melodies. ‘The young should not be frightened of losing their inspiration like this!’, he laughs. ‘And even less their Italian inspiration!’ The Italian adaptation of techniques learnt abroad has a distinguished history. Dallapiccola recalls the example of ‘the very Italian’ Antonello da Messina (c. 1430–1479), who ‘learnt oil painting in Flanders and brought it to our country, where it was known but not used, without thereby losing his specifically national characteristics’.180 As Ben-Ghiat shows, Italian appropriation of the latest American, German and Soviet cultural trends in the early to mid-1930s was encouraged by high-ranking figures in the regime, chief among them Giuseppe Bottai (1895–1959: Minister of Corporations, 1929–32; Governor of Rome, 1932–6). A reinvigorated Italian culture would make good propaganda. There was an element of cultural imperialism involved too. ‘[T]aking the best that other people had to offer was one step on the road to conquering them’, the fascists believed.181 This is the context in which to 176

177 178

179

180

See, for example, Dallapiccola, Parole musica, 166; Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 111. See Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola, 121–2. See Mario Sperenzi, ‘L’enigma del Volo di notte’, 272; Sala, ‘“Vol de nuit” de Luigi Dallapiccola’, 401; Kämper, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola und die italienische Musik der Dreißiger Jahre’, 167; Stenzl, Von Giacomo Puccini zu Luigi Nono, 159–60. See Luigi Pestalozza, ‘Introduzione’, in Luigi Pestalozza (ed.), La rassegna musicale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966), xvii. Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 217–18. 181 Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 6–7, 12.

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view Dallapiccola’s argument. As Ben-Ghiat points out, younger intellectuals of the period typically defended their employment of foreign models in just the terms he uses. As early as 1928, the rationalist architect Carlo Enrico Rava (1903–1986) was attempting to persuade readers that ‘Italy has always absorbed, assimilated, and recreated that which it has received from other races, making it something entirely ours.’182 It seems not at all far-fetched to suggest that, for Dallapiccola, dodecaphony was a musical analogue to those other enthusiasms – realism, phenomenology, rationalism – by means of which novelists, philosophers and architects of his generation asserted an independence from their elders. Even if he nowhere puts the case explicitly, his own work shows how, far from necessarily acting as an agent of subversion, Schoenbergian serialism, like these other foreign imports, could actively serve the regime. The scathing attitude expressed, in his 1942 article on Volo di notte, towards the two principal compositional styles current in the Italy of the period, confirms the sense of generational conflict. Toni’s neo-romantic 1932 manifesto is derided as ‘absurd’; at the same time, typically, Dallapiccola distances himself from neoclassicism. His attack on ‘the various “returns to normality” recommended in recent years’, which he reckons ‘the most abnormal and sick that one could imagine’, is a direct swipe at Casella. ‘[F]or people today nothing should be more true or more normal than the life of today.’183 These anti-establishment boutades are by no means anti-fascist. In so far as Volo di notte counts as a celebration of ‘normal’ life in the late 1930s, the political referent of the realism to which Dallapiccola here reaffirms his commitment is all too clear. ‘Rivière’s feelings’, he writes, ‘are those of all men who work and struggle to reach an ideal.’184 But must the attainment of ideals always involve the imperious annihilation of all opposition? There is nothing ‘normal’ about Dallapiccola’s aims. In his attempt to surpass both progressivism and modern classicism by means of a style that is truly ‘of today’, he bids for the status of Duce of Italian musical modernism. And in Scene 6 of his first opera, he acts out this fantasy on stage. Now we have an explanation for Dallapiccola’s twelve-note enthusiasm. As a means to musical self-overcoming, the technique is a method of domination, and not only in the sense of Adorno’s ‘musical domination of nature’.185 In performance, the violence of the purgation that the serial composer has turned on himself is turned on the audience. There is an ‘intrinsic, necessary aggressivity of the new’, Dallapiccola writes. And the new is bound to be divisive, for only a minority of the population will be ‘attracted’.186 The composer of Pierrot lunaire has scored a failure that is ‘something grandiose and general; the bourgeois public finds itself on the 182 183

184 186

Ben-Ghiat, ‘Fascism, Writing, and Memory’, 635. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 90–1. For the ‘return to normality’, see Alfredo Casella, ‘Problemi della musica contemporanea italiana’, La rassegna musicale, 8/3 (1935), 171. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 87. 185 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 52. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 91.

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same level as the intellectual; there are cries, laughter, whistling, rioting’. As Dallapiccola explains, ‘[w]e well know that Schoenberg has always had in mind a public of the highest spiritual level, one nourished by special, deep preparation’.187 But where does that leave ‘the people’? Does Dallapiccola genuinely believe that unprejudiced working class audiences will be humbly attentive at performances of twelve-note music? They have certainly not been ‘nourished by special, deep preparation’. Evidently he feels not only a hatred for his own class, the bourgeoisie, but a suspicion of any non-elite audience. Dallapiccola’s anti-bourgeois rhetoric belongs to the right rather than to the left. His political stance is clear enough where Volo di notte is concerned. The composer despises the director’s subordinates. He makes Rivière refer to them in Scene 6 as ‘i deboli’ (‘the feeble’), and himself speaks of their ‘mediocrity’.188 The ‘masses’, it will be recalled, were those people from whom Dallapiccola wished to ‘stand apart’. This conjunction of contradictory desires – on the one hand, to lead the people to higher things; on the other, to shun them – has a notable pedigree. If Nietzsche hopes through domination to achieve an ‘elevation of the type ‘“man”’, he also longs for solitude. ‘Flee, my friend, into your solitude’, cries Zarathustra: ‘You have lived too near the small and the pitiable men.’189 Stelio Èffrena dreams anti-democratically of ‘a greater, more majestic form of art that . . . in his hands [would be] at once a sign of illumination and an instrument of subjugation’.190 Indeed, such ambivalence is an essential component of fascism. As Falasca-Zamponi puts it, if people’s senses were excited by ‘[s]logans, rallies, and images’, at the same time, ‘as an object of power’, they ‘were also denied their senses’.191 Consider Scene 6 of Volo di notte once again. Through his commanding presence, the airline director quashes the spontaneous outcry of the workers. The subsequent hymn of praise shows us exactly what is meant by a position of ‘grandiose humility . . . before the artist who creates’. The people’s singing is ecstatic, and, at the same time, imposed from above. Rivière does not resemble Mussolini in spite of his resemblance to Schoenberg but because of it: because he represents the figure of the modernist artist in so pure a form. That is the line Falasca-Zamponi would follow. The ‘narcissistic myth’ of Mussolini’s total control over the masses, she argues, is bound up with ‘the myth of autotelic creation’. The figure of the fascist leader is that of the artist moulding the masses into a beautiful shape. The Duce is able to exert such control over others because, as a self-creating subject, he has succeeded in eliminating any form of external control over him. Falasca-Zamponi points to the parallel with ‘the independent nineteenth-century exponent of l’art pour l’art, [who] claims full autonomy

187 188 190

Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 214, 217. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 84. 189 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 79. D’Annunzio, The Flame, 26. 191 Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 25.

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to his creative will’. The avant-garde declare their ‘independence from nature’, she observes: they claim to create ‘ex nihilo and self-referentially’.192 In the above account of the twelve-note method as self-overcoming, the autotelic myth has been witnessed in action. Its relevance to Volo di notte is clear. As FalascaZamponi argues, just as art’s increasing autonomization during the nineteenth century ‘culminated in the attempt to reduce the sensual and impose form’, so the ‘wholly self-contained’ fascist leader must be ‘sense-dead’. In the face of the irrational masses, he must be thoroughly rational. In Italian fascism, as elsewhere, this opposition was played out in terms of gender. ‘The mass’, said Mussolini, ‘is female.’ For Falasca-Zamponi, following Susan Buck-Morss, ‘the self-creating male subject avoids external control by giving up sex.’193 Rivière has done just that. As Signora Fabien tells the director, in a moment of unparalleled operatic chauvinism: I am a woman and I love; I speak in the name of my great love. You are a man, you follow the idea. Each of us speaks in the name of his world.

But what is the ‘idea’ that Rivière follows? Towards the end of Volo di notte, it becomes clear that he does not really know. ‘Forestalling those feeble people, who tomorrow will repudiate me’, he tells Robineau, ‘I am launching this other machine towards the unknown . . . perhaps . . . perhaps towards death; certainly towards the future.’ And later on: ‘Only events that are in progress are important . . . Remember, Robineau.’ These words are meant to take us to the core of Dallapiccola’s modernist commitment. ‘Happy alone is he who looks to the future’, he would have said, quoting Busoni’s Faust.194 But in their non-specificity, they can also seem quintessentially fascist, redolent of the central vacuity of an ideology that, as Roger Griffin points out, always promised ‘to inaugurate an exciting new world’, but could ‘only maintain its momentum and cohesion by continually precipitating events which seemed to fulfil the promise of permanent revolution’.195 In the words of another of Mussolini’s slogans, ‘Chi si ferma è perduto’ (‘He who stops is lost’). As Bosworth points out, fascist rhetoric about ‘autarchy’ and ‘corporatism’ obscured the fact that, ‘even at the end of the 1930s’, state finances ‘continued to be manipulated by private interests’.196 In his own comments on Volo di notte, Dallapiccola lets slip the true rationale for the night flights. He quotes some words from the novel: ‘“It’s a question of life and death”, said Rivière, “for the lead we gain by day on ships and railways is lost each night”.’197 So now we know: the heroism of self-overcoming serves the profit margin. The scene of Fabien’s transfiguration can be reinterpreted once more. To adapt an Adornian idea of Gary Tomlinson’s: the pilot broaches the metaphysical realm in a nostalgic search for authenticity. The 192 195 196

Ibid., 24–5, 13, 11. 193 Ibid., 11, 24–5. 194 Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 298. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 39–40. Bosworth, Mussolini, 289. 197 Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 84.

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relation he discovers – the relation he must discover in a world in which ‘the encompassing determinant of noumenalism’ has become the commodity form – turns out to be ‘the leveling commonality of exchange value’. In the music of Fabien’s transfiguration, Dallapiccola is Wagnerian in his attempt ‘to reassert some putative earlier, as yet uncommodified noumenon’. But the pilot runs out of essence. As an ideal member of the collectivity whose members sacrifice their individual autonomy to the will of the director in Scene 6, Fabien discovers that, in himself, he is nothing. In commodification he has come to ‘be defined fundamentally by [his] equivalency in exchange with other products’.198 He is infinitely replaceable.

IX We have been neglecting the pilot. His ‘experience’ is surely meant to be read not as nostalgia but as self-overcoming. Yet it is not the same as that achieved by Rivière. The director achieves self-mastery by casting out the heteronomous. By contrast, Fabien’s ‘lonely impulse of delight’, to quote Yeats’s poem (strikingly à propos in terms of subject matter), follows an external prompt. In the pilot’s transfiguration, death is welcomed. Fabien does not just see the light: he is transformed by it. As the Radio operator reports, ‘Tutto si fa luminoso: le mie mani, le mie vesti, le mie ali!’ (‘Everything is becoming luminous: my hands, my clothes, my wings!’). We saw earlier how this self-discovery is stumbled upon, almost accidental. Fabien does not decide rationally to fly upwards to the stars; indeed he knows he will die in doing so. His motivation is feeling alone. The opposition of rationality and feeling was raised in the exchange with Parente, a disagreement over history as much as aesthetics. Dallapiccola is determined to institute progress. His work self-evidently involves critical reflection on his own technique and that of others. But for a Crocean, any notion of the history of an art form is suspect. ‘There is . . ., precisely speaking, no aesthetic progress by humanity’, says the author of the Estetica. As for ‘the zealous pursuit of novelty of effect’, that is the business not of ‘an artist but a technical inventor’.199 Schoenberg takes a similar line. In the Harmonielehre, authentic self-expression is predicated on a self-overcoming of tradition. Nevertheless, the throwing out of ‘the literature’ and the shaking off of ‘the precepts of . . . education’ arrive at the end of a process in which the artist becomes aware of his individuality only as a result of criticism by others. It is not that Schoenberg refuses to believe in aesthetic progress, in ‘the new’. As he puts it, ‘I believe it is that Good and that Beauty toward which we strive with our innermost being.’ But if we ‘persistently . . . strive toward the future’, we do so ‘involuntarily’.200 198

199 200

Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton University Press, 1999), 127–33. Croce, The Aesthetic, 152; Croce, Philosophy Poetry History, 217. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 400, 239.

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In another text from the pre-First World War period – well known to Dallapiccola – we find a less conciliatory approach. Busoni, in his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, summons up the image of a ‘Reformer’ who is ‘undiplomatic’ with respect to nature. Prior to sharing his ‘inner sound’ with the public, this artist effects a tabula rasa. He ‘will first have the negative, the hugely responsible task of freeing himself from everything that he has learnt, listened to, and which has the appearance of musicality’. Busoni famously proceeds to his ‘113 different scales’, a rational procedure akin to the establishment of twelve-note technique.201 But Dallapiccola wants to have it both ways. In the dialectical synthesis provided by Gentile, the two positions – in which novelty either just happens, or is deliberately sought – can be brought together. If Rivière seems to be a strict follower of Busoni’s Entwurf, this is problematic, since for the composer of Volo di notte, selfovercoming is not an act of will alone. Here he is in 1938 on late Debussy: Among great artists, the greatest, usually in their last years, having brought to fulfillment their most ardous experiences, are touched by something that works a final miracle. From the moment they are ‘touched’, a new light seems to cast itself over their work: every outward attitude is abandoned; the material is clarified; the spirit resounds. It is in this moment that the greatest artists succeed in overcoming themselves.202

What was intended by Nietzsche as anti-Christian vocabulary is intermingled here with the notion of divine intervention. Self-overcoming is at least partly miraculous. Dallapiccola might be writing about Fabien in this passage. The scene of compositional inspiration is again comparable to that of the pilot’s transfiguration. But what of Rivière? In his determination to expel anything that might compromise his will, the airline director’s attitude appears at odds with this vision. Yet the situation is not quite so straightforward. In his 1942 essay on Volo di notte, Dallapiccola insists that Rivière is ‘a man of faith’. It is ‘[w]ith his faith’ that ‘he saves his pure, courageous idea’.203 Faith is what the modernist artist needs more than anything. For how does the director gain the strength to go on? How does he know he is right? As Dallapiccola put it while at work on the opera: Composers must be very conscious of the difficulties of the course on which they have embarked; they must be armed with great courage and with an unlimited faith in the future. Not careerists, but men of faith (the example of Schoenberg can never be sufficiently appreciated).204

201

202 204

Ferruccio Busoni, Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, ed. Martina Weindel (Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel, 2001), 48, 42, 49; see also Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 210. Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 265. 203 Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 84. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Opinions sur l’orientation technique, esthétique et spirituelle de la Musique Contemporaine’, La Revue Internationale de Musique, 1/4 (1938), 644.

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And with reference to the opera itself, in a passage that makes his identification with Rivière explicit: The clarification of expression, the purification of material, progress, and improvement are in the final analysis the things that interest me the most – indeed, I would say the only things. This much I feel I have in common with Rivière. And let no one maliciously misinterpret me when I add that, like Rivière, I have unlimited faith in the future.205

But what is the source of this faith? How does Rivière manage to regain it after the collapse of bar 798? The answer to this question comes in bars 823–5, in the midst of Fabien’s transfiguration (see Example 3.5). Rivière has two sentences: ‘It’s the end. But he is still able to smile!’ Note Dallapiccola’s direction: ‘barely containing an almost joyous emotion’. We saw earlier how the music of Fabien’s transfiguration comes ‘from the nothere’. In a curious situation – for the relationship of operatic characters to the music that surrounds them is normally unreflexive – Rivière stands, or rather sits, outside it. In Abbate’s terms, the director’s position ‘allegorizes the experience of the operaspectator’.206 As the Radio operator intones ‘Scorgo le stelle!’ (see Example 3.2), Rivière rouses himself and starts listening again. He is hearing words, of course, but perhaps that is not all. Following the radiant diatonic canon of bars 813–22, at bar 823 (Example 3.5) the orchestra returns to the material of bar 805. It is much altered, though. The triads have shifted up a tone to C♯ major; they are heard on muted trumpets rather than on flutes and celesta. And they are accompanied by strings sliding up to harmonics, muffled whole-tone thumps on pizzicato cellos, basses, harp and timpani, and the ominous combination of a roll on the bass drum and a stroke on the tam-tam. This distortion of the previously pristine B major has been heard before. It accompanied the raising of the curtain at the very opening (bars 19–20). In Scene 1, as the audience’s focus shifted from ‘the not-here’ to the world of the stage, the music brought an echo of the otherworldly with it, heard imperfectly: hence the distortion. In Scene 5, the suggestion is that, earth-bound as he is, Rivière’s position ‘outside’ the music of Fabien’s transfiguration has indeed allowed him to perceive more than just its text. In Abbate’s phrase, sounds normally unheard ‘seem to wash into the protagonist’s consciousness’. Accompanying the only words uttered by the director in the space between his collapse and his domineering reappearance in Scene 6, the ghostly presence of the triads shows us the director ‘glimpsing the noumenal limits of knowledge’.207 Rivière’s tone – quasi gioiosa – is that of revelation. In Scene 4, he told Signora Fabien that he took men ‘to launch them beyond 205 207

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 95–6. Ibid., 122; Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 90.

206

Abbate, Unsung Voices, 119.

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Ex. 3.5 Luigi Dallapiccola, Volo di notte (1937–9), Scene 5, bars 823–5.

185

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themselves’. At the end of Scene 5, the director hears Fabien’s smile: understands that despite the pilot’s imminent death, all shall be well. Rivière has a similar sussulto di gioia towards the end of Scene 6, on hearing his name chanted by the chorus (bar 952). It is no coincidence that the orchestra is building up to the E major return of Fabien’s triads. The music of bar 805 is a vision of an ideal future: Rivière says as much by his reference to ‘il futuro’ at the point where these sounds prepare to return for the first time, at bar 57. And if the triads stand for the Absolute, the twelve-note row, in its presentation as a yearning, lyrical melody, stands for human aspiration towards it. When the plane for Europe takes off at bar 966, reality keeps faith with Rivière’s vision. When the triads and the twelvenote melody return one last time, as Rivière sits alone at his desk (bar 988), they reassure us that his faith has been well placed. The closing moments of the opera have been the focus of contention. ‘Even he, in the final analysis, is a wretched creature: he believes that he holds sway, but there is someone above him’: thus Dallapiccola on Rivière in 1942.208 At the very end of the opera, Rivière remembers the reproach levelled at him by Signora Fabien in Scene 4: I cannot exist without love; but you . . . Whether or not the planes come back tonight, you are and always will be Rivière the great, Rivière the victorious, bearing the chain of his heavy victory.

As the orchestra plays, he repeats her last fourteen words, ‘con grande commozione’. Opposition to the night flights seems to have the last word. Commentators have been keen to find here a pre-echo of the humanitarianism on which Dallapiccola’s post-war reputation rests. ‘Nowhere are Dallapiccola’s personal beliefs clearer than in this closing episode’, writes Kämper. He quotes the composer’s own words from 1965. ‘Without knowing it, in Volo di notte I had made a decision for the first time in my life: to love those who suffer more than those who are the victors.’209 But as Arnold Jacobshagen has pointed out, this statement tallies neither with the work, nor with the 1942 article.210 Then there is the question of transcendence. Who is the ‘someone above’ the director? If the libretto suggests Signora Fabien, it must be pointed out that Rivière has altered her words. ‘Rivière, il vittorioso, che trascina la catena’ has become ‘Rivière, il vittorioso, solo, trascina la catena’.211 The director’s attitude is one of self-congratulation, not of remorse. 208 209 210

211

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 86. Kämper, Gefangenschaft und Freiheit, 34, 37. See Arnold Jacobshagen, ‘Verflogene Träume: Darstellungen des Illusionären in Luigi Dallapiccolas Volo di notte und Il prigioniero’, in Peter Csobádi, Gernot Gruber, Jürgen Kühnel, Ulrich Müller, Oswald Panagl and Franz Viktor Spechtler (eds.), Traum und Wirklichkeit in Theater und Musiktheater. Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposiums 2004 (Anif: Mueller Speiser, 2006), 341. See Luciano Alberti, ‘Dallapiccola librettista di se stesso. Volo di notte’, in De Santis (ed.), Dallapiccola. Letture e prospettive, 255.

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According to Stenzl, Dallapiccola wants us to know that Rivière is ‘Godless’.212 But the music tells another story. Out of the same celestial region into which the pilot disappeared, the orchestra sounds a benediction. The yearning vocal melody may have returned to the solo viola of the opening, but the texture is now overlaid with an ethereal violin line, ppp dolcissimo. When Volo di notte finally settles on triads of E rather than B major, the distinction between ideal (Fabien) and real (Rivière, the workers) is maintained, but also the link that joins them. The broader point here is that the director’s self-overcoming is not merely a triumph of the will: it draws upon knowledge that is indissolubly non-rational. As far as the reading of Volo di notte as an ‘artist opera’ is concerned, this is a crucial point. All works in this subgenre are autobiographical: Dallapiccola repeatedly makes it clear that his is no exception. And the director can only be a self-portrait in so far as Fabien’s vision is, to some extent, also Rivière’s. In the same way that the director’s actions can thus be said to rely on a combination of ‘thought’ and ‘feeling’, Dallapiccola’s work is not merely cold calculation. He may employ a variety of selfconscious technical devices in Volo di notte, of which dodecaphony is only one, but the opera does not break with conventional expressivity. The total rationalization of music has not been achieved just yet. As Dallapiccola wrote in 1938, ‘I have never condemned romanticism outright and I think that no one has condemned it in his heart of hearts.’213 But the work’s approachability – the fact that it does not usher in a consistently new world of sound – cannot be held in its favour. Just as in its ancestor Die Meistersinger, where, as Carl Dahlhaus pointed out, the ‘new’ music is not the Prize Song, but that which accompanies the Act III pantomime of Beckmesser the traditionalist,214 so in Volo di notte (and without ironic intent) it is that most traditional of musical symbols, the triad, that greets the triumph of the new. Dallapiccola’s use of twelve-note technique in his first opera conforms to the type of ideological inversion that Stone, following the art historian Simonetta Lux, views as characteristic of the fascist appropriation of avant-garde techniques.215 If the anti-bourgeois potential of twelve-note technique is visible in the 1936 address (however coloured by aristocratic disdain for the masses on whose behalf it is meant to operate), when it came to Volo di notte, this was discarded. As bars 798–804 in Example 3.2 demonstrate, a breakdown in conventional musical syntax is the means by which Dallapiccola represents a threat to progress, not its instantiation.

212 213 214

215

Stenzl, ‘Luigi Dallapiccolas “neuer Weg”?’, 275. Dallapiccola, ‘Opinions sur l’orientation technique’, 644. Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 74. See Stone, The Patron State, 158.

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There is a sense in which Pestalozza was correct, back in the 1960s, to suggest that Dallapiccola’s work was fundamentally irreconcilable with a sympathy for the regime: that the ‘substantial fractures’ opened up by his compositions provided ‘the basis for an anti-fascist musical culture’.216 But in Volo di notte, dissent is no more than latent. Like fascism itself, for all its trappings of revolutionary novelty, Dallapiccola’s first opera is marked by an essential conservatism. A thoroughly twelve-note setting of Saint-Exupéry’s text, besides presenting an assault on that ‘curious agglomeration of persons’, ‘the haggard aristocratic-bourgeois phalanx’ in attendance at the Maggio (no ‘popular’ audience, this), would have been unable to crown Rivière’s triumph with the kind of tonal resolution that Dallapiccola provides. It would have been compelled to provide a critique of the stage action. To put the point another way, one can imagine a reading of Volo di notte in which the fragmentation of bar 804 is ‘true’: in which this reduction of music to noise represents the devastation wrought by technological development, always hand-inglove with the capitalist necessity to extract profit. Meanwhile, the radiance of bar 805 would be ‘false’: just as the Adorno/Tomlinson interpretation suggested. But in the end, this is not a modernist opera. It is a work of symbolism.

X Let us return to 18 May 1940 and the Teatro della Pergola, where the première took place on a double bill with the Italian première of Busoni’s Turandot. By all accounts (even Toni’s), it was a success. Along with the conductor and singers, Dallapiccola took eight curtain calls. In the gods, two or three hecklers whistled. Unperturbed, the composer acknowledged their protest with a wave of his hand.217 It is wishful thinking to suppose that the regime disapproved of Volo di notte. Toni did, but as a member of what Stone calls the ‘antipluralist’ group centred about the egregious ras of Cremona, Roberto Farinacci (1892–1945), he opposed modernism wherever he found it.218 On the whole, the reviews were good. The conservative Della Corte, in La stampa (Turin), was ‘delighted to write that Volo di notte is rich in modern sensibility and dramatic expression, limpid and personal in style’. Dallapiccola’s colleague at the Cherubini, the musicologist Adelmo Damerini (1880–1976), writing in Il Bargello (Florence), a paper close to the local fascist party, declared that he ‘could not but be overwhelmed by the powerful expressive force [of the music], which in Volo di notte is aimed decisively at the interior drama of the characters and the scenic action’. In Il

216 217 218

Pestalozza, ‘Introduzione’, xv. See Venuti, Il teatro di Dallapiccola, 113; Pinzauti, Storia del Maggio, 60–1. Stone, The Patron State, 45. Toni’s association with Farinacci is attested to by Petrassi. See Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 141.

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lavoro (Genoa), the composer Adone Zecchi (1904–1995) contributed a ringing peroration: In a moment when comfortable artistic conformism is becoming the fashion, Dallapiccola shows us how the artistic path of our time is still that which looks to the future. And he has the faith, strength and preparation to carry forward the flame of youthful Italian music of the time of Mussolini.219

Dallapiccola’s career in the final years of the ventennio provides as good evidence as any of the regime’s continuing support for artistic modernism. Thus in the year of the première of Volo di notte, and on the orders of Bottai himself, who in 1936 had become Minister for Education, the composer was elevated to a personal chair of composition at the Cherubini – ‘per chiara fama’, as the citation had it. To be sure, there were many who were similarly promoted by Bottai’s decree (dating originally from 1938).220 But the list of Dallapiccola’s commissions and first performances in the period 1940–3 is impressive. In October 1940 he was asked by Mario Labroca to provide a realization of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) for what was then thought to be the following year’s tercentenary of its first production. This was not to be completed until 1942; in the meantime Dallapiccola had two major premières at the Teatro delle Arti in Rome, under the aegis of the Confederazione dei Professionisti e degli Artisti. In May 1941 he was the soloist in the Piccolo concerto per Muriel Couvreux; in December there were the Canti di prigionia. For all the post-war reputation of the latter work as music of anti-fascist protest, it evidently did not dent Dallapiccola’s official reputation. In 1942, Dallapiccola’s realization of Il ritorno d’Ulisse gave the composer another success at the Maggio; the production was seen again at La Scala in January 1943. In November 1942, the première of Marsia was on the schedule for the Maggio the following year: that this did not take place was due to the cancellation of the entire festival.221 Luca Sala has recently published a letter from Dallapiccola to Petrassi, dated 25 November 1940, in which the composer of Volo di notte complains about his lack of performances.222 It is worth setting the record straight. Between 1939 and 1943, the

219

220 221

222

Andrea Della Corte, ‘Volo di notte di Luigi Dallapiccola’, La stampa (19 May 1940), 3; Adelmo Damerini, ‘“Volo di notte” di Dallapiccola’, Il Bargello (26 May 1940); Adone Zecchi, ‘“Turandot” di Feruccio Busoni, “Volo di notte” di Z. [sic] Dallapiccola al Maggio Musicale Fiorentino’, Il lavoro (21 May 1940). These are catalalogued in the composer’s archive as LD. XLVIII.1.17, XLVIII.1.14 and XLVIII.1.10, respectively. See Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 285n13. See Pinzauti, Storia del Maggio, 68; Giampiero Tintori, Duecento anni di Teatro alla Scala. Cronologia: opere–balletti–concerti 1778–1977 (Gorle: Grafica Gutenberg, 1979), 93; Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista, 20–1. Sala, ‘“Vol de nuit” de Luigi Dallapiccola’, 404–5.

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Partita was performed in Rome and also broadcast (in separate performances) from there and from Turin (in the latter case only the ‘Passacaglia’ and ‘Burlesca’ were given). The Rapsodia was broadcast from Rome and from Brussels. The Prima serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane was broadcast from Brussels. The Divertimento in quattro esercizi was heard in Florence, Amsterdam, Rome, Lausanne, Budapest and Venice. The Seconda serie was performed in Florence and broadcast three times from Rome (in at least two different performances). The Inni were heard seven times: in Florence, Bologna, Milan and Naples, and in three broadcasts from Rome. The Terza serie was performed in Rome and also broadcast from there (in a separate performance). The Tre laudi were performed in Warsaw and broadcast from Brussels and Paris and twice from Rome (separate performances). Volo di notte was performed five times: twice in Florence (the première was also broadcast) and three times in Rome. The Piccolo concerto per Muriel Couvreux was heard seven times: in Rome, Venice, Florence, Brunswick, Padua, Basle and Geneva. The Canti di prigionia were performed in Rome; the first movement, the ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’, was performed twice in Brussels (including a broadcast of its première), as well as broadcast from Geneva. Dallapiccola had forty-six performances in four years: not bad for wartime. Sala imagines that this letter will help bring to an end the dispute about the ‘fascist’ component of Volo di notte. On the contrary, the news brought by this document, that ‘official spheres’ in 1940 were proposing the publication of a monograph on Dallapiccola, shows just how high the composer stood with the regime in the wake of the opera’s première. Given the prestigious exposure Dallapiccola continued to receive, it is hardly surprising that, in April 1943, nettled by the lack of any Italian equivalent to the patriotic effort of Shostakovich in his ‘Leningrad’ Symphony, Tito Silvio Mursino (aka Vittorio Mussolini, the eldest of the Duce’s three sons) should have seized on the name of Dalla Piccola [sic] to make an example. Exhorting the composer to do his duty and write ‘a symphony on the theme of war’, there seems to have been no doubt in Mussolini junior’s mind that the composer of Volo di notte would make an excellent candidate for the job.223 At this difficult time, Dallapiccola seems to have been living a double life. On the one hand, so we are told, the Canti di prigionia testify to a desire to protest that arose in their composer even as work on the orchestration of Volo di notte was in full swing.224 On the other, there is no sense of a refusal to cooperate with the regime, or not until the October 1941 letter to Di Marzio, discussed in

223 224

See Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 199–200. See Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis of the Canti di prigionia and Il prigioniero: An Autobiographical Fragment’, trans. Jonathan Schiller, Musical Quarterly, 39/3 (1953), 362–3.

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Chapter 2. After the successful première of Dallapiccola’s first opera, its first publisher, Ricordi, attempted to arrange a staging in Nazi Germany. Like an earlier attempt in 1938–9 to mount the première at Brunswick, which had been blocked by the Reichspropagandaministerium, this was unsuccessful. In a letter of March 1941, the Reichstheaterkammer explained that ‘Experience has taught us that the German theatrical public rejects music that is too atonal.’225 After 1945 Dallapiccola continued to drag up this story: he seems to have held Goebbels individually responsible for the initial refusal.226 But can he really have been so upset – indeed, ought he to have been – that he failed to obtain these German performances? There is a sense in which he was lucky to receive the ban. As Erik Levi has pointed out, although Nazi ideologues proclaimed the twelve-note method ‘equivalent to Jewish levelling-down in all other matters of life . . . a complete destruction of the natural order of notes in the tonal principle of our classical music’, the regime’s censorship could be inconsistent. The Schoenberg pupil Winfried Zillig (1905–1963) had his fully twelve-note one-act opera Das Opfer staged in November 1937 at the Hamburg Staatsoper. It seems that the ideologically suitable content of the libretto, ‘a portrayal of heroic self-sacrifice for a higher ideal’, was sufficient for this work to find favour.227 One suspects that if the Nazi censors had looked more closely at Volo di notte, they would have found music no more atonal and certainly less consistently chromatic than Zillig’s. And they would have found a libretto whose celebration of martyrdom and triumphant will they might have found rather attractive. In Italy, the opera’s atonality – such as it is – seems not to have posed a problem. If critics consistently objected to a feature of the work, it was a different element taken over from the Second Viennese School: Dallapiccola’s frequent recourse to Sprechgesang and speech. As Gavazzeni complained (endorsing a point made by Luigi Colacicchi (1900–1976) in Bottai’s journal Primato), the ‘flat realism’ of the spoken dialogue disrupted the unity of stage action, text and music – an ideal unity he regarded as the sine qua non of successful musical theatre.228 The most thoughtful of the opera’s initial reviews (it appeared in the July/September 1940 issue of

225 226

227 228

Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola, 133–4. See Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 77. Archival research has revealed attempts to stage the opera in Breslau and Darmstadt as well as Brunswick, and that Goebbels intervened personally only to block a staging planned for 1941/2, not that planned for 1939. See Boris van Haken, ‘Volo di notte – ein verbotenes Werk’, in the programme book for the 2004/5 staging of Volo di notte and Il prigioniero at the Frankfurter Oper, 22–3. Erik Levi, ‘Atonality, 12-Tone Music and the Third Reich’, Tempo, 177 (1991), 18–19. Gianandrea Gavazzeni, La musica e il teatro (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1954), 221–2, 228, 232–3; see also Luigi Colacicchi, ‘Il Maggio Fiorentino. “Volo di notte” di Dallapiccola’, Primato, 1/7 (1940), 29–30; Lele d’Amico, ‘Lettera da Roma’, La rassegna musicale, 15/12 (1942), 338–9.

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Letteratura), Gavazzeni’s article expresses a notable loathing for Rivière. ‘Vain and cowardly’, Gavazzeni writes, the director transforms the individual and individualistic myth of the will into a collective sacrifice at the expense of absent beings who are indubitably more human than him, solely in order to preserve, at all costs, his existence and that of his vanity.229

It is tempting to find a critique of the regime here. Even if, as he told Harvey Sachs, he ‘never took a “heroic” stand’, Gavazzeni had an anti-fascist background.230 Care is needed, however. Bontempelli, reviewing the Maggio for the Milanese weekly Tempo, also disliked the airline director: ‘we don’t like Rivière one bit’. And he was no anti-fascist. Commenting on the gala opening night of that year’s festival, he is pleased to note the ‘sober and compact style’ of the audience, which he attributes, in a toadying allusion to Mussolini’s racial policies, to ‘the absence of foreigners’.231 If some elements in the Pergola audience were applauding because they recognized and approved the equation ‘Rivière: Mussolini = Aeroporto: Italia’ that so dismayed Sperenzi a quarter of a century later, these critics were not. Fascists or no, the idea that Dallapiccola’s opera carried a political significance would have struck them as inappropriate. In the wake of Gentile’s aesthetics, or of Croce’s later writings, critics certainly allowed themselves the kind of ‘ethical’ commentary found in the above extract from Gavazzeni.232 But the work of art, qua art, remained purely ideal. For Bontempelli, the modernity of Volo di notte has nothing to do with its subject matter. ‘What matters is the human soul and nothing else.’233 Gavazzeni regards the mise en scène of the work as irrelevant. Anticipating Nicolodi’s ‘artist opera’ reading by over forty years, he sees the airline director as a means for Dallapiccola himself ‘to appear on stage’. The composer is moving in this work towards ‘an autobiographical and musical idealism’; at its most successful, ‘the theatrical and sonic life of Volo di notte is . . . the life of Dallapiccola.’234 Gavazzeni’s interpretation has been explored in depth in this chapter. It helps to explain a good deal in the work. And yet his view of Rivière as an exclusively aesthetic self-portrait is only half the story. There is no doubt that Volo di notte is an opera deeply bound up in Italian neo-idealist thought of the first half of the century. Gavazzeni is right: the work is emphatically not about aeroplanes. As Dallapiccola put it, Saint-Exupéry ‘has found a lyrical expression of our time, an expression that, as art, attains universal significance’.235 But this statement, like so much about Volo 229 231

232 233 235

Gavazzeni, La musica e il teatro, 225. 230 Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 162. Massimo Bontempelli, Passione incompiuta. Scritti sulla musica 1910–1950 (Milan: Mondadori, 1958), 367, 361. See Gentile, The Philosophy of Art, 238–56; Croce, Philosophy Poetry History, 221–3. Bontempelli, Passione incompiuta, 373. 234 Gavazzeni, La musica e il teatro, 229, 232, 234. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 87.

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di notte, is ambiguous. The composer himself knew that if the work transcended its epoch, it also reflected it. The opera’s politics may be distasteful, but they cannot be swept under the carpet. If Volo di notte is a study in creative self-overcoming, it is also a study in the exercise of total power. Modernism, the opera wants to proclaim, is inherently a political business. And the social structure served by this art, or rather, engendered by it, and on which it is ultimately dependent for its survival, is that of fascism.

4 Protest music?

On 29 September 1935, the town of Venosa hosted a celebration for the 2000th anniversary of the birth of its most famous son: not the composer and murderer Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613), but the poet Horace (65–8 bc). The climax of the spectacle arrived with a new setting for chorus and orchestra of the poet’s Carmen saeculare (Hymn for a New Age), a propagandistic text in celebration of Roman glory, commissioned by the Emperor Augustus in 17 bc. Eminently suited to fascist tastes, in 1935 Horace’s words were also set to music by Malipiero at the conclusion of his Giulio Cesare, and by the Riemann pupil Carlo Jachino (1887–1971). But neither of these versions had the success of the one heard in Venosa, the work of the little-known Milanese music teacher Edgardo Corio (1890–1948). His composition had the power – so Roberto Zanetti tells us – to ‘bring hierarchs and people alike to attention as a single man’.1 As Zanetti points out, one of fascism’s first acts on assuming power was to institute compulsory choral singing in primary schools.2 Moving along the spectrum of musical performance from the inni taught to schoolchildren to the latest works of the country’s leading young composers, it is notable how, at this elite level too, the period was marked by a burst of choral enthusiasm. By 1937 it was clear – to a modernistically minded critic like Ferdinando Ballo – that Italy had three young composers ‘in whom critics and public alike could have confidence’: Dallapiccola, Petrassi and Giovanni Salviucci (1907–1937). It was not just the shock of the latter’s early death that led Petrassi to suggest, in a letter to Casella, that Salviucci was ‘the best of all of us’.3 His final completed work, Alcesti (1936–7), a half-hour setting of Euripides for chorus and orchestra, is as impressive as anything composed by Dallapiccola or Petrassi before the age of thirty. But most significant in the present context is Salviucci’s choice to work in a subgenre that, before the 1930s, had scarcely existed. There are few well-known nineteenth- or early twentieth-century works for chorus and orchestra without vocal soloists; those that continue to be performed are typically short. When Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms appeared in 1930, its lack of soloists was a novelty, one whose significance seems not to have been lost on the composer’s Italian admirers. 1 2 3

Roberto Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, 3 vols. (Busto Arsizio: Bramante, 1985), I, 586. Ibid., 500. See Ferdinando Ballo, ‘Giovanni Salviucci’, in Luigi Pestalozza (ed.), La rassegna musicale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966), 309; Alfredo Casella, ‘Giovanni Salviucci (Roma, 1907–1937)’, Rivista musicale italiana, 41/6 (1937), 612.

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David Osmond-Smith has drawn attention to the ‘iconic’ role of conductor and orchestra under fascism, according to which the anti-democratic image of a single leader controlling a uniformed body of men became an ‘idealized symbol’ of totalitarian politics.4 To add a mixed chorus to the orchestra was to broaden the dominion of the conductor to include women as well as men, so that the performance became symbolic of society submitting to discipline as a whole. The strikingly impersonal character of the Symphony of Psalms lies not just in the hieratic and quasi-academic elements of its musical language, but also in its eschewal of the focus for subjective identification that can be provided by a vocal soloist. It is hardly surprising that the work should have created a vogue in fascist Italy. Dallapiccola had composed for chorus and orchestra from the late 1920s onwards. But prior to the Italian première of the Symphony of Psalms, under Bernardino Molinari in Rome in December 1931, his compositions for these forces had always included at least one vocal soloist. The Terza serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane does not. Nor does Alcesti. Nor does the largest choral and orchestral work by a member of Ballo’s triumvirate, Petrassi’s Salmo IX (Psalm 9) of 1934–6.

I It makes sense to compare Salmo IX with Dallapiccola’s work of the period. Not that the two composers’ music sounds alike. Heard next to the Terza serie, Petrassi’s music quickly demonstrates a rhythmic vitality and fluency of invention missing from Dallapiccola’s music at all periods. Petrassi has none of his colleague’s qualms about debts to the neoclassical Stravinsky. As he himself pointed out, the gestures at the opening of Part II of Salmo IX are lifted directly from the opening of Stravinsky’s Capriccio; likewise, the ‘French Overture’ music at [31] in Part I is clearly modelled on the opening of Apollon musagète.5 More important here is the content of Petrassi’s work. In interviews held towards the end of his long life, Petrassi insisted that the composition of Salmo IX was a personal affair: an exorcism of childhood ghosts. But he also acknowledged a political element. The last verse of the psalm set by Petrassi runs as follows: Constitue, Domine, legislatorem super eos, ut sciant gentes quoniam homines sunt [Establish, O Lord, a legislator over them, that the people may know what men are].6 4

5

6

David Osmond-Smith, ‘Masculine Semiotics: The Music of Goffredo Petrassi and the Figurative Arts in Italy During the 1930s’, ed. Ben Earle, Twentieth-Century Music, 9/1–2 (2012), 19. See Luca Lombardi, Conversazioni con Petrassi (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1980), 107; for a list of Stravinskyisms in Salmo IX, see Mario Bortolotto, ‘Il cammino di Goffredo Petrassi’, in L’opera di Goffredo Petrassi. Quaderni della Rassegna musicale, 1 (1964), 22–3. While Petrassi uses the Vulgate, he treats Psalm 9 as ending at verse 21, as in the Jewish and Protestant traditions (except that, for them, this is verse 20).

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As the composer suggests, it would not be incorrect to think of Mussolini at this juncture. And yet the idea was not to glorify the Duce qua dictator. The business of the legislator is ‘to give men a conscience’. As Petrassi explained to Harvey Sachs, ‘there was also the idea of personal human responsibility – an idea I always continued to pursue in successive works, during and after the war’.7 Petrassi apparently wanted to make a distinction between fascism and existentialism, even though (as we saw in Chapter 3) the notion of ethical engagement – which might well be described as ‘existential’ – was part and parcel of fascist modernism.8 In contrast to the popular image of totalitarianism as a crushing force, the regime prided itself on the protection it offered to the individual.9 Admiration for Mussolini and the maintenance of ‘personal human responsibility’ were not meant to be mutually exclusive. In any case, Petrassi’s music leaves little room for ambiguity. Example 4.1 shows part of the closing section of Salmo IX. As Osmond-Smith suggests, the ‘measured certainty and implacable step’ of the ‘aesthetic legislator’ portrayed here can belong to one man alone.10 The chorus’s peremptory demands, in the section preceding Example 4.1 (from [33]), Exurge Domine, non confortetur homo, judicentur gentes in conspectu tuo [Rise up, O Lord, let man not be strengthened, let the people be judged in your sight],

summon up an Adagio coda not all that distant in manner from that of the Symphony of Psalms.11 Petrassi’s orchestra bears down on the singers in a musical analogue to the dominating gestures of a conductor. Catholicism and fascism here join hands. In Petrassi’s setting, the psalm becomes a prayer on behalf of the Italian people that God should give them Mussolini. Or rather, it amounts to a self-congratulation that He has already seen fit to do so. As Pius XI put it, the Duce was the ‘Man whom providence has sent us’.12 In Volo di notte we saw a similar blurring of religion and politics, as music originally set to a medieval Marian text was employed in the expression of a fascist spirituality. This mélange of Catholicism and Mussolini-worship should not be surprising. The historian Roger Griffin has argued that Italian fascism’s character as a distinctively modernist political movement lay in its attempt to establish a secular 7

8

9

10 11

12

Lombardi, Conversazioni con Petrassi, 108, 106; Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 146. In 1964, Luigi Rognoni went so far as to dress Volo di notte up as Sartrean avant la lettre. See his ‘Dallapiccola e “Volo di notte”, oggi’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola. Saggi, testimonianze, carteggio, biografia e bibliografia (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1975), 1–5. See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001), 8. Osmond-Smith, ‘Masculine Semiotics’, 36. The motif in the horns at [36], taken up by the trumpets two bars later, has been compared to the fugue subject of Stravinsky’s second movement. See Bortolotto, ‘Il cammino di Goffredo Petrassi’, 23. See R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), 238.

Protest music?

Ex. 4.1 Goffredo Petrassi, Salmo IX (1934–6), Part II, bars 293–301.

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Ex. 4.1 (cont.)

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transcendence.13 Religion was an obvious target for enlistment to the cause. As Emilio Gentile puts it, fascism sought ‘to associate Catholicism with its own totalitarian project’.14 Late in life, Dallapiccola lacked Petrassi’s candour. The Tre laudi, he maintained, were ‘a protest in the form of religious belief’. Such disingenuousness may be dismissed, as Jürg Stenzl has suggested.15 Catholicism and fascism were by no means inherently opposed. As Gentile explains, ‘each in its own way being totalitarian and Italian religions’, they appeared capable of ‘a symbiotic relationship’. Petrassi recalls how Salmo IX was rapturously received at its Roman première in 1938. ‘[P]erhaps the audience had unconsciously confused the legislator with the dictator’, he suggests.16 In the case of Dallapiccola’s major religious and choral project of the later 1930s and early 1940s, the assumption has long been that prayer does indeed equate to protest. Here is the composer writing for an American audience in 1953: I was working on my first opera, Volo di notte . . . when curious rumours began to circulate at first very discreetly, later in more obvious fashion. Could Fascism have unleashed a race campaign after the model of that of the dastardly Adolf Hitler? In an issue of the Corrispondenza Politico-Diplomatica, in the middle of February 1938, such rumours were hastily denied. However, knowing from experience what interpretation to give to official denials, we all had the impression that the Fascist government was lying once more. Five months later, on July 15th to be exact, there appeared in the papers the grotesque ‘race manifesto’; this was even more shocking because it was tainted by pseudo-science. On the afternoon of September 1st, the race campaign was officially inaugurated. ... If I had suffered so much as an adolescent from the internment at Graz, when I saw the injustice visited upon my father, how should I describe my state of mind when I learned from the radio of the decision of the Fascist Government on that fatal September afternoon? I should have liked to protest; but at the same time, I was aware that any gesture of mine would have been futile. Only through music could I express my indignation . . . 13

14

15

16

See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 191–249. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 70. See Everett Helm, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola in einem unveröffentlichten Gespräch’, Melos/NZ, 43/6 (1976), 471; Jürg Stenzl, ‘Luigi Dallapiccolas “neuer Weg”? Von den Tre laudi zur Oper Volo di notte’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola nel suo secolo. Atti del Convegno internazionale Firenze, 10–12 dicembre 2004 (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 270. See Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 72; Goffredo Petrassi, Autoritratto, ed. Carla Vasio (Bari: Laterza, 1991), 48–9.

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I had just finished reading Mary Stuart by Stefan Zweig. Through this book, I became acquainted with a short prayer written by the Queen of Scots during the last years of her imprisonment: O Domine Deus! speravi in Te. O care mi Jesu! nunc libera me. . . . All of a sudden, the music took shape. I sketched the piece very quickly, after which I worked long months on the orchestration of Volo di notte.17

Commentators usually add further details concerning Dallapiccola’s wife: they were married on 30 April 1938. Laura had been working as a librarian at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence since August 1933. But in February 1939 she was removed from her post (with effect from 1 March) on the grounds of her Jewish descent.18

II The Canti di prigionia (Songs of Imprisonment), ‘for chorus and an instrumental ensemble without strings, wind or brass’, as Dallapiccola put it,19 of which the ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’ (‘Prayer of Mary Stuart’) forms the opening movement, have gained a legendary status in twentieth-century Italian music for the courage of their anti-fascist resistance. ‘Amid all the nonsense and all the shabby acquiescence, one musical protest stands out’ – Sachs’s words can stand for those of dozens of writers.20 Dallapiccola’s 1953 account of ‘The Genesis’ of this work has been endlessly cited to explain its significance. Yet on the basis of what we have seen of the post-war composer’s relationship to his past, one has to wonder how far this account can be trusted. Christoph Flamm draws attention to the text of the ‘Preghiera’, which according to Zweig was written by Mary Stuart (1542–1587) ‘on the morning of her execution’.21 In full it runs as follows: O Domine Deus! speravi in Te. O care mi Jesu! nunc libera me. In dura catena, in misera poena, desidero Te. Languendo, gemendo et genu flectendo, Adoro, imploro ut liberes me.

17

18

19 20 21

Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis of the Canti di prigionia and Il prigioniero: An Autobiographical Fragment’, trans. Jonathan Schiller, Musical Quarterly, 39/3 (1953), 362–3. See Mila De Santis (ed.), Ricercare. Parole, musica e immagini dalla vita e dall’opera di Luigi Dallapiccola (Florence: Polistampa, 2005), 68. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Credo nel teatro moderno’, Il Resto del Carlino (2 February 1941), 3. Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 190. Stefan Zweig, The Queen of Scots, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Cassell, 1950), 366.

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[O Lord God! I have hoped in You. / O my dear Jesus! now set me free. / In hard chains, in wretched punishment, I yearn for You. / Languishing, groaning and bending the knee, / I worship, I beg You to set me free.]

There is nothing anti-fascist here. Inasmuch as this is an expression of Catholic faith, ‘it would be grotesque to interpret it as a sign of solidarity towards the Jews’.22 Flamm might have pointed out that Zweig was Jewish, and also that by 1938 he was living in exile, particularly since the recognition of these facts does not weaken his argument. There is no trace of Zweig’s name in either the published vocal or full scores of the Canti di prigionia; nor is he mentioned in the 1941 article ‘Credo nel teatro moderno’, in which Dallapiccola discusses the Canti di prigionia as a work in progress.23 Like Volo di notte, the Canti di prigionia are autobiographical: ‘He who suffers here is the composer himself’, Flamm declares. The work’s reputation as ‘protest music’ was created by Dallapiccola’s 1953 article and blindly followed ever since.24 The three movements of the Canti di prigionia were given their première as a complete cycle under Fernando Previtali in Rome on 11 December 1941. ‘After the Rome performance’, Dallapiccola averred, ‘[n]ot a single journal granted space’ to the work.25 On the contrary, as Flamm notes, the Canti were reviewed – very positively – by Fedele d’Amico in La rassegna musicale. More pointedly, as Flamm further observes, in neither this 1942 article, nor a longer one devoted specifically to the Canti di prigionia from 1945, does D’Amico regard the work as political.26 For Luigi Pestalozza, Dallapiccola ‘had to interrupt the composition’ of Volo di notte ‘in order to sketch the twelve-note series of the Canti di prigionia, conceived in that moment’. For the composer, dodecaphony is a symbol of anti-fascism.27 But Flamm pours cold water on this idea too. Indeed, the case is more clear cut than Flamm supposes. A look at the surviving preparatory materials indicates that the ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’ was not originally intended as twelve-note work at all. A neat short score, dated ‘18 maggio 1939; festa dell’Ascensione’, begins (unaccompanied) at what is now the upbeat to bar 26.28 This main body of the movement – the ‘Preghiera’ itself – contains a couple of dodecaphonic structures in the instruments 22

23 25 26

27

28

Christoph Flamm, ‘Alcune domande sul significato dei “Canti di prigionia” di Luigi Dallapiccola’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 43–5 (2008–10), 388. Dallapiccola, ‘Credo nel teatro moderno’, 3. 24 Flamm, ‘Alcune domande’, 388, 384–6. Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis’, 365. See Fedele d’Amico, ‘Lettera da Roma’, La rassegna musicale, 15/1 (1942), 23–6; Fedele d’Amico, ‘Canti di prigionia’, Società, 1/1 (1945), 95–100; Flamm, ‘Alcune domande’, 391–2. Luigi Pestalozza, ‘Liberazione e prigionia nelle opere di Dallapiccola’, in Mila De Santis (ed.), Dallapiccola. Letture e prospettive. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Empoli–Firenze, 16– 19 febbraio 1995) (Milan/Lucca: Ricordi/Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1997), 110, 112. See Mila De Santis (ed.), Fondo Luigi Dallapiccola. Autografi, scritti a stampa, bibliografia critica con un elenco dei corrispondenti (Florence: Polistampa, 1995), 48.

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at bars 53–8 (a prime and a retrograde),29 but is otherwise not a twelve-note composition. Twelve-note technique and ‘protest’ (if that is indeed the content of this music) have no inherent relationship here.

III It is worth taking a closer look at the ‘Preghiera’. The Canti di prigionia may be one of Dallapiccola’s most celebrated compositions; they have been neglected by analysts. Examples 4.2 and 4.3 together give bars 244–50: the final sounds of the ‘Introduzione’, together with the first and longest section of the following ternary form. Bars 26–50 themselves fall into three sections, of which the first (bars 26–37) contain two strophes, each of which is bipartite. In bars 26–9 and 32–6 (the first part of each strophe), Dallapiccola sets the first phrase of line 1 of Mary Stuart’s text, in an imitative texture somewhat reminiscent of a Palestrina exercise. The harmony is scarcely sixteenth century. At bars 26–9, Dallapiccola emphasizes the whole-tone component of the tetrachord that is his head motive. In the opening alto entry, three of the four pitch classes (G, D♭ and A) are members of the collection D♭, E♭, F, G, A, B. Since each successive vocal entry is a major third away from the last, these pitch classes are consistently emphasized. Dallapiccola makes sure that the harmonies formed by the opening and closing pitches of the rising tetrachords, together with the chromatically falling lines in the upper voices, have a ‘contextual’ resonance. Thus at the tenor’s e♯1 in bar 28, the harmony (d1, e♯1, g♯1, c♯2) is that of the tetrachord struck by the piano at the end of bar 24. This ‘contextual’ procedure contrasts with that of part 1 of strophe 2 (bars 32–6), where the imitative voices are joined by an ethereal first soprano line moving chromatically through a minor third. Here the focus of attention is the B major triad first formed by the upper voices at bar 334 (spelled b1, e♭2, g♭2). Prepared by its minor subdominant at bar 332 (spelled f♭1, b1, g2), this triad is crushed to a dissonance at the end of bar 34, before the voices relax (the first sopranos no longer humming) to form a B major triad again at the end of bar 36, now with added sixth (spelled e♭, f♯, b1, e♭2, g♯2). The suddenly homophonic textures and forte dynamics of the second parts of the two strophes bring the text to the fore. At bars 30–1, Dallapiccola sets the whole of Mary Stuart’s first line; at bar 37, the first phrase of her second. Striking at the end of strophe 1 is the leap to the fortissimo white-note sonority at bar 313. Phrygian dissonances of this kind (note the clash between f and e2) are a recurring feature of Dallapiccola’s music of the later 1930s (see Example 3.3, for example). The harmony returns, transposed down a tone, at bar 37, where it alternates with the B major added sixth harmony established at the end of bar 36. 29

See Bruno Zanolini, Luigi Dallapiccola. La conquista di un linguaggio (1928–1941) (2nd edn, Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1997), 87.

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Ex. 4.2 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’, from Canti di prigionia (1938–41), bars 25–43.

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Ex. 4.2 (cont.)

Bars 26–37 emphasize the repetitive rhythms of the Queen of Scots’ phrases: typically, anacrusis–dactyl–iamb. At bars 38–43, the melodic lines become melismatic. The harmony moves from an Aeolian G minor at bar 38 to an Aeolian D (bar 39), sustained without chromaticism until bar 43. The conjunct vocal lines, in their somewhat Gregorian character and alternation between duple and triple time, could be the work of Pizzetti (compare Example 1.5). As for the instrumental music, it is not only the scoring that is Stravinskian (the ensemble is that of Les noces, with harps replacing the third and fourth pianos). Bars 40–3 present an apotheosis of the layered, ostinato-based constructions that are such a telling feature of Dallapiccola’s ‘Tuscan’ manner. There are four pitched strata, each repeating a three-note motive at various transposition levels. The tam-tam attacks accelerate in frequency towards the climax. Bars 44–50 (Example 4.3) attempt a synthesis. At bar 44, the instruments continue their repetitions of fragments; the bass register is dramatically opened up. The voices

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Ex. 4.2 (cont.)

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Ex. 4.3 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’, from Canti di prigionia (1938–41), bars 44–50.

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Ex. 4.3 (cont.)

207

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return to the climactic Phrygian harmony of bar 313 and to the rhythmic character of bars 26–37. Then in bar 45, beneath the first sopranos’ sustained b2, roles are reversed. The voices have the repeating fragments, while the instruments present a mixture of materials: an augmented version of the three-note motive, Phrygian harmony in the harps, and most notably, the tetrachord on timpani and pianos. Finally, at bar 46, the moment of maximum intensity, the texture of bar 44 returns, but the harmony is now whole-tone: from the same collection emphasized in bars 26–37. Dallapiccola’s 1953 account needs to be read carefully alongside the surviving evidence. His recollection of how he recognized that ‘a series of twelve tones could serve as the principal theme’ of the Canti di prigionia rightly follows the account of the sketching of the ‘Preghiera’. The problem was that of linking a projected cycle of choruses. ‘[O]ne day an idea occurred to me to link the individual pieces not only by a twelve-tone row . . ., but by a fragment of the liturgical Dies irae, dies illa as well.’ The twelve-note row and fragments of the liturgical melody appear only in the ‘Introduzione’ (bars 1–25), completed in short score on 15 June 1939, a month after the completion of the ‘Preghiera’.30 Example 4.4 shows the opening of the work. At bars 1–5, the first phrase of the Dies irae (entering on F, then on C, then on F again) is combined with two statements of Dallapiccola’s twelve-note row: the only two statements in the movement. The row – the ‘Preghiera’ row – is heard first in bars 1–4 at P4: E–G–B♭– F♯; A–C–E♭–B♮; D♮–F–A♭–D♭. Orders numbers 1–4 and 5–8 are both statements of the tetrachord, while order numbers 9–12 are arranged as . The tetrachords follow the circle of fifths: their initial pitch classes are E, A and D. So it is logical that the second statement of the row should be I7 (on G), which enters in bar 4. This statement is slightly more complex. The second tetrachord (D–B♮–G♯–C♮) appears as expected in bar 5, but so does the third (A–F♯–D♯–B♭), its order scrambled. The larger coherence of these bars is rhythmic: Dallapiccola composes an accelerando towards the choral entry. Bars 6–7 then present a ghostly pre-echo of the climax at bars 44–6. But what is most remarkable here is the harmony, which at bars 6–7 is neither ‘white-note’ modal, nor whole-tone, but octatonic. Every pitch falls into Pieter C. van den Toorn’s Collection I (E, F, G, A♭, B♭, B♮, D♭, D♮).31 This is a deliberate employment of a harmonic colour, not an accident. As well as being a teacher, composer and fascist bureaucrat (he was the Union of Composers’ Interprovincial Secretary for Florence, ascending in time to the National Directorate), Vito Frazzi was an early octatonic theorist, though not the very first, 30 31

Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis’, 363; De Santis (ed.), Fondo Luigi Dallapiccola, 48. See Pieter C. van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 50.

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Ex. 4.4 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’, from Canti di prigionia (1938–41), bars 1–7.

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as one commentator has suggested.32 Frazzi’s 1930 pamphlet Scale alternate was praised by Dallapiccola as ‘an ethical document of great importance’.33 In it, Frazzi analysed octatonic harmonies on the basis of the dominant minor ninth. He would have treated three tetrachords of the Preghiera row, each of which is octatonic (at P4 they belong to Collections III, II and I respectively), as appoggiatura chords. The highest pitch in each tetrachord will resolve to a pitch one tone below it. In particular, the tetrachord in bar 4 of Example 4.4 is founded on the basic chord g, b, d1, f1, a♭1, of which the two lowest pitches are absent (though the b is briefly provided by the Dies irae). The d♭2 would resolve to b1.34 But as Frazzi would have been quick to observe, these appoggiatura chords were hardly his (or Dallapiccola’s) invention. Such harmonies are commonplace in French and Russian music of the early twentieth century: Frazzi gives a particularly appoggiatura-rich example (also in Collection I) from Debussy’s Iberia.35

IV The final page of the full score of the ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’ is inscribed: ‘finita la partitura a Firenze, la notte del 22 luglio 1939–XVII’. Beneath his signature Dallapiccola has written ‘DEO GRATIAS’. The combination of Catholic tag and fascist numeral already appears in 1936 at the end of the Terza serie. As far as Dallapiccola’s ideological commitments are concerned, nothing would seem to have changed in the intervening three years. That is the conclusion towards which Flamm’s reading points. As he sees it, the anti-Semitic decree of September 1938 ‘evoked in Dallapiccola not an anti-fascist conviction, but an increased consciousness of his own vulnerability and impotence before society and power, and on the other hand an increasing desire to find comfort in Christian faith’.36 In a short article for the Strapaese journal Il selvaggio, the art critic and historian Cesare Brandi (1906–1988) reported a conversation with Dallapiccola that took place immediately after the première of the Canti. The composer gave an account of the genesis of the work, quite different from the one familiar from 1953: It was during an argument – he told me – and all of a sudden, while I was getting increasingly cross, four notes popped up, like little bubbles in water. They stayed still, distinct from one another, yet bound together, like the stars of a sign of the zodiac. 32

33 34 35 36

See Giorgio Sanguinetti, ‘Il primo studio teorico sulle scale octatoniche: le “Scale alternate” di Vito Frazzi’, Studi musicali, 22/3 (1993), 411–46. The palm would seem instead to go to Edmond de Polignac (1834–1901). See Sylvia Kahan, In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octatonic Explorer (University of Rochester Press, 2009). Luigi Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1980), 261. See Vito Frazzi, Scale alternate per pianoforte (Florence: Otos, n.d.), 3–4. Ibid., 9. The passage is that beginning at the ‘Meno mosso poco a poco’ one bar after [12]. Flamm, ‘Alcune domande’, 388.

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These four notes did not break up, and it is they that form the basis of the Canti di prigionia, not as a basso continuo, or as a theme, but as an aggregate of sounds, radiant, continuously varied. They form the basis of the first [movement], which was the first to come, and then of the other two, after I had had a miserable search for texts. In fact I am accustomed to carry texts on me like a blessed image or a talisman, in the hope that they will cross over from the paper on which they are written to my heart; but cross over and arrive there warmed by my blood. But this time no: for they [the texts] had to adapt themselves to what, born without words, searched for them. And I could not fail the notes, so it had to be others who gave them words.37

This goes further even than Flamm: the starting point of the Canti di prigionia was not political, nor even religious, but purely aesthetic. A response is easy to imagine. Of course Dallapiccola could not tell the truth in public about the Canti di prigionia in 1941, any more than D’Amico could in 1942. Indeed, Flamm surely goes too far when he suggests that, without Dallapiccola’s 1953 article, we might still be listening to the Canti di prigionia in purely aesthetic or moral terms.38 In the programme for the 1946 London festival of the ISCM, where the latter two movements of the work were given to great success, the audience read that, ‘The original idea of the work occurred to the composer in September 1938, when the “racial laws” were first introduced into Italy.’ In the programme for the Roman première, the audience read simply that, ‘Conceived in the autumn of 1938, the Canti di prigionia were brought to completion in the autumn of 1941.’39 What is remarkable in the immediate post-war reception of the Canti is not the extent to which critics failed to grasp the work’s political connotations but that to which they actively resisted them. Gianandrea Gavazzeni opens his 1947 account by insisting that the confusion of art and politics amounts to a propagandistic negation of ‘the autonomy of artistic languages and values’. He can see that the Canti di prigionia respond to the historical conditions of their creation, when ‘imperialistic delirium reached its height’. Yet the value of the work lies in its faithfulness to Dallapiccola’s ‘own history’.40 This idealism, which will broach morality but not politics, is typically Crocean: Gavazzeni invokes the Neapolitan philosopher more than once. But an apolitical attitude was not confined to Italy. Contrary to what Peter Roderick has suggested, 37 38 39

40

Cesare Brandi, ‘Dalla Piccola [sic] e le note’, Il selvaggio, 18/1–3 (1942), 2. Flamm, ‘Alcune domande’, 392. See International Society for Contemporary Music, Programme of The 20th Festival, London 1946, sponsored by the News Chronicle ([London]: Fleet Street Press, [1946]), 20. This document is catalogued in the Dallapiccola archive at LD.XVI.1.8; the programme for the Roman première is at LD.XVI.1.5. Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Musicisti d’Europa. Studi sui contemporanei (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1954), 202, 207.

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early reviews by Henry Boys (1910–1992) and Richard F. Goldman (1910–1980) either treat the Canti di prigionia as of purely aesthetic interest (Boys: who had the 1946 programme in front of him) or point out that the work contains ‘no allusions to circumstance’ (Goldman).41 As for D’Amico, it seems fair to suggest that Dallapiccola’s obviously political reference to ‘racial laws’ in the 1946 London programme note was a response to this critic’s 1945 article. D’Amico had spent part of the war working as editor of Voce operaia (Workers’ Voice), the clandestine newspaper of the Catholic Communists. His article on the Canti di prigionia, while full of praise, also provides the basis for a political critique. It is not just that Dallapiccola’s chosen texts make ‘no political or social reference’. In his failure to grasp the ‘appeal to solidarity and action’ that drove the Resistance, the alienated composer demonstrates that ‘he has not fully understood the reasons for his exile’. But Dallapiccola cannot be blamed if his work looks only for ‘an interior, religious redemption’. It is the product of a tyrannical society that reduced artists to isolation.42 Is it the case that the Canti di prigionia contain ‘no allusions to circumstance’? If such references are lacking in the texts, they may be found in the score. Knowing what we do of Dallapiccola’s practice, it is telling that the ‘Invocazione di Boezio’ (‘Invocation of Boethius’), the second movement, should be dated ‘Covigliaio, il 14 luglio’, with no indication of the year (which was 1940).43 It is as if the composer felt unable to write the year at all if it were not to be followed by the fascist numeral. Fifteen months later, Dallapiccola silently declared his break with the regime. The score of the final ‘Congedo di Girolamo Savonarola’ (‘Farewell of Girolamo Savonarola’) is marked simply ‘Firenze, 13 ottobre 1941’. Nor is this the only reason to believe that 1940 and 1941 were the crisis years for the composer, rather than 1938 or 1939. The letter of October 1941 to Cornelio Di Marzio was discussed in Chapter 2; from the same year there dates a bad-tempered exchange with Casella. After the war, in May 1946, Dallapiccola tried to explain his conduct, referring to the hell that was my life from 1938 onwards. What could I do? I saw the world closing its doors to me, little by little, but inexorably. And so I shut myself up even more than ever, seeking in my work and family alone that which I seemed not to be able to find elsewhere. The conclusion was the only one possible: it is well known that a man forced to live in solitude, over the long run and without him noticing it – becomes something of a self-harmer [autolesionisti].44 41

42 43

44

See Peter Roderick, ‘The “Day of Wrath” as Musico-Political Statement in Dallapiccola’s Canti di prigionia’, Contemporary Music Review, 29/3 (2010), 234; and compare Henry Boys, ‘London Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music’, Tempo, 1 (1946), 19; and Richard F. Goldman, ‘Current Chronicle’, Music Quarterly, 37/3 (1951), 406. D’Amico, ‘Canti di prigionia’, 96–7. Covigliaio is a village in the mountains between Florence and Bologna where the Dallapiccolas were spending the summer. See Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola, 72.

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In February 1941 Dallapiccola wrote to explain why he had distanced himself from the older man. In the face of a series of humiliations, he could no longer bear Casella’s optimism: his ‘Leibnitzianism’.45 Dallapiccola’s list of grievances includes hostile reviews by the conservative critics Matteo Incagliati (Tre laudi) and Bruno Barilli (Volo di notte), but above all his ‘indecent treatment’ at the hands of the jury (which included Casella, Pizzetti and Zandonai) of the 1939 San Remo composition competition.46 The winner, announced in 1940, was Petrassi with his Salmo IX; Dallapiccola had to make do with a runners-up prize. A letter from March 1941 makes a further complaint. Dallapiccola thanks Casella for praising Volo di notte in public.47 As he puts it: I see the scene: you on the podium, impassive, the room calm. Everyone knows that there is someone dying of cancer. You know it too; but you prefer to think that the dying man only has a cold and offer him a few drops of Endrina.

What Dallapiccola means is that – to his fury – Italian radio had decided not to include Volo di notte in its summer season. That Casella played illustrations on the piano from the opera to an audience including Nicola De Pirro was no consolation. Talk of ‘cancer’ seems extraordinary, particularly in the light of the genuine illness that would strike Casella down the following year. But in June 1941 Dallapiccola’s ‘self-harming’ advanced to new levels. It seems that he had originally been given to understand that the première of the ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’ would take place at the Venice Festival in September 1939.48 But the festival was cancelled that year: the première of the ‘Preghiera’ was given in Brussels on 18 April 1940 by Dallapiccola’s staunch supporter Paul Collaer (1891–1989). In May 1940, from another letter to Casella, we learn that Dallapiccola was expecting a further performance at the Venice Festival in September 1940, along with the ‘Invocazione di Boezio’ and the final movement of the Canti too (if he finished it in time).49 But the 1940 festival was also cancelled. Then in May 1941, Mario Corti (1882–1957), artistic director of the Venice Festival (which in 1941 finally went ahead), asked not for the complete 45

46

47

48

49

This and other unpublished letters cited in the following paragraphs are held in the Dallapiccola archive in Florence, and are cited here by permission of Anna Dallapiccola. For Incagliati’s review, see Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 288–9; for Barilli’s, see Leonardo Pinzauti, Storia del Maggio. Dalla nascita della ‘Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentina’ (1928) al festival del 1993 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1994), 61. The occasion appears to have been Casella’s paper ‘L’evoluzione del linguaggio musicale e i problemi della musica contemporanea’, delivered at the Academia di Santa Cecilia in Rome on 15 February 1941. See Anna Rita Colajanni, Francesca Romani Conti and Mila De Santis (eds.), Scritti, musiche, concerti. Catalogo critico del Fondo Alfredo Casella, 3 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1992), II, 280. See Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, trans. Madeleine M. Smith, in Robert Stephan Hines (ed.), The Composer’s Point of View: Essays on Twentieth-Century Choral Music by Those Who Wrote It (Norman, OK; University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 163. There had been an official invitation. See Roderick, ‘The “Day of Wrath”’, 236, 248n10.

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Canti di prigionia but for Dallapiccola to repeat his performance as soloist in the Piccolo concerto per Muriel Couvreux. Eventually the composer agreed. He played the Piccolo concerto in Venice on 25 September; as we have seen, the Canti were given in Rome in December. But his initial reaction was to refuse, following which Casella wrote to reprove him. In Dallapiccola’s lengthy response (dated 6 June 1941), he explained his concern that if the Canti were not to be given at Venice, they might not be given at all, with the result that the ‘Congedo di Girolamo Savonarola’ would remain unpublished: for no publisher would take on a work without a performance in view. For all that Casella had accused him of ‘persecution mania’, Dallapiccola once again lists his humiliations. As he puts it, ‘there is an unbridgeable divide between us: you are accommodating, I am intransigent’. And the insult ‘which your great friend Nicola has so gratuitously seen fit to hurl . . . at my wife’, Dallapiccola writes, ‘has definitively removed any possibility of my cohabitation with the “accommodating”’.50 For their composer, the Canti di prigionia had assumed the character of a testament. Already in a letter to Casella of 3 May 1940 – before the première of Volo di notte – he was speaking of them as a ‘farewell’, after which he would ‘retire to private life’. But most interesting in this correspondence, where the interpretation of the Canti di prigionia is concerned, is the way Dallapiccola groups the choral work together with his opera. Along with Volo di notte, Dallapiccola writes (on 6 June 1941), the Canti are his ‘principal work’: one ‘which probably, for those who can read, also contains a deep “moral significance”, to which I hold as much as to its musical meaning’. As we shall see, it is a mistake to suggest that Volo di notte and the Canti di prigionia stand in opposition to each other, in terms either of musical style or content.51 When we start to think about the Canti di prigionia, instead of continuing uncritically to label them as ‘protest music’, it quickly becomes clear that the ‘moral significance’ of the two works is largely the same. The Canti as a whole were designed as a simple narrative structure, as Dallapiccola himself recalled. After the ‘Preghiera’, he decided, there should be ‘a bridge [the ‘Invocazione di Boezio’] which should lead us to an affirming finale’.52

50

51

52

The reference is presumably to Laura’s dismissal in 1939. But to blame Nicola [De Pirro] is strange. At this period he was head of the General Directorate of Theatre and Music in the Ministry of Popular Culture. The official responsible for sacking ‘Dott. Laura Dalla Piccola Luzzatto Coen’, as she was named on the document in question, was the head of the General Directorate of Archives and Libraries Edoardo Scardamaglia (1888–1959), acting for the Minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai: the latter a notorious anti-Semite, for all his championship of artistic modernism. Perhaps Dallapiccola meant to refer to De Pirro’s reputation as Bottai’s ‘dauphin’. See Fedele d’ Amico, Un ragazzino all’Augusteo. Scritti musicali, ed. Franco Serpa (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 231. See Jürg Stenzl, Von Giacomo Puccini zu Luigi Nono. Italienische Musik 1922–1952: Fascismus– Resistenza–Republik (Buren: Frits Knuf, 1990), 161. Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 164.

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V The middle movement has a ternary form. In the outer sections, Dallapiccola makes his most determined attempt to combine twelve-note serialism with the modality of the Dies irae. In the purely instrumental bars 1–132 (the A section), statements of the ‘Preghiera’ row in prestissimo crotchets are placed against slower-moving versions of the first three phrases of the Dies irae, which when sung liturgically set the following words: Dies irae, dies illa. Solvet saeclum in favilla, Teste David cum Sybilla. [Day of anger, that day. / It will dissolve the world into ashes, / According to David and the Sybil.]

The melody does not need these words for its significance to be recognized. It remains well known today, and would have been all the more familiar in 1941, along with its words, given their role as the sequence of the Catholic Requiem Mass. So why did Dallapiccola choose to employ it? In 1953, he answered like this: Since the war had just begun, there was nothing out of the ordinary at that moment in thinking of the Last Judgement. Furthermore, in utilizing the fragment of the Dies irae, I saw the possibility of being more easily understood . . . for I had decided to address myself to a vast audience, speaking to all sufferers.53

Once again, his declarations are difficult to accept at face value. For one thing, the war had not ‘just begun’. As we saw, the ‘Introduzione’ to the ‘Preghiera’ (where the Dies irae first appears) is dated June 1939: Italy did not enter the war for another year. Moreover, if Dallapiccola’s aim in the summer of 1939 was genuinely mass communication, why did he use a vibraphone in his ensemble, at a time when, outside Rome, ‘no city of Italy had both a vibraphone and a vibraphonist’? Why did he compose a choral part that was the most ‘difficult’ that had ever ‘been given in Italy’?54 As for the Dies irae, it is not so ‘easily understood’ how this is meant to mediate between Dallapiccola’s medieval and Renaissance texts, on the one hand, and the Second World War on the other. In view of the liturgical status of the sequence melody, one might simply view it as indicating the imminent deaths of the prisoners Mary Stuart, Boethius and Savonarola, all of whom were executed soon after completing the texts that Dallapiccola chose to set. As work on the Canti progressed, the composer was thinking of his own death too. As he put it to Casella in the long letter of June 1941, ‘I

53

Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis’, 363.

54

Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 165.

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understand the wind that is blowing, and I don’t want to snuff it [crepare] before I’ve published the third of the Canti di prigionia as well.’ The B section of the ‘Invocazione di Boezio’ (bars 133–83) sets the following quatrain from Boethius’ sixth-century Consolatio philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy): Felix qui potuit boni fontem visere lucidum, felix qui potuit gravis terrae solvere vincula. [Happy is he who can see / the shining fount of good, / happy is he who can loosen / Earth’s heavy chains.]

Dallapiccola reduces his chorus to women’s voices and lays out his setting as ‘a series of five brief episodes’,55 arranged symmetrically as a b c b1 a1. Example 4.5 gives the start of section c, the core of the movement, which falls into two halves, of which the second begins at bar 158. The Dies irae is heard at bars 148–53 on tubular bells, but the ‘Preghiera’ row is absent. It appears in the B section of the ‘Invocazione’ only in the shape of the tetrachord. As at bars 40–2 of the ‘Preghiera’, the modal, imitative vocal writing in Example 4.5, with its alternations of duplets and triplets, looks back to the sixteenth century via Pizzetti, while the instrumental writing has the hallmarks of Dallapiccola’s ‘Tuscan’ manner. The sixteen-note piano entry at bar 1483, in its purely diatonic character and in its hammering flat of metrical differentiation, could have been taken directly from the third movement of the Musica per tre pianoforti. Most significant at bars 148–57 is the harmonic progression. The ii7 harmony in C major at bars 148–52 moves to v7 at bars 152–3.56 But the resolution to I at bar 154 is thwarted by the flattened seventh in the bass. In bars 154–6, while the voices sustain the fifth C, G, and the ‘Tuscan’ crotchets return in stretto, the bass descends diatonically through octave displacements to F. On the final two minim beats of bars 156, the parts unite to form a IV–v7 progression in C major, which leads at bar 157 to a pure tonic triad. Dallapiccola has taken trouble over the placing of this harmony. The symmetrically disposed B section of the ‘Invocazione’ consists of fifty-one bars. Its centre thus lies 25½ bars after the start of bar 133, at the mid-point of bar 157. As the central point of the ‘Invocazione’, this C major triad is also the central point of the Canti as a whole. The significance of the triad is clear. As in Volo di notte, it stands for the Absolute: the ‘shining fount of good’ in Boethius’ neo-Platonic language. Given the importance of the triad, it is tempting to look back at the ‘Preghiera’ for further symbols of divine presence. And triads are certainly to be found there: not just in semi-concealed locations, such as the B major of bars 33–7 (see Example 4.2), but 55 56

Ibid., 164. In his quasi-Schenkerian reduction of bars 133–57, Roderick labels bars 148 as tonic harmony, misreading the bass. See his ‘The “Day of Wrath”’, 240.

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Ex. 4.5 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Invocazione di Boezio’, from Canti di prigionia (1938–41), bars 148–61.

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Ex. 4.5 (cont.)

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openly, as in the A major at bar 12 of the ‘Introduzione’. Particularly telling are the closing bars of Example 4.3, where the whole-tone harmony of bars 46–8 resolves via bar 49 to the G major triad (in the voices, at least) of bar 50. In Example 4.5, the arrival on C major ushers in a transcendent vision: the happiness of one ‘who can loosen / Earth’s heavy chains’. It is conveyed by a slowmoving modal canon, or rather, two canons: one vocal, the other instrumental. Again there is a clear parallel with Fabien’s flight above the storm, which (at bars 813–22 of Volo di notte) features a similarly slow-moving modal canon (also in 4/2). The end of section c (bars 167–8) presents a C♯ major triad, sustained by the voices. Like the C♯ major of Volo di notte (bars 19–20 and 823–4), it is distorted, in this case overlaid with statements of the tetrachord to produce a mainly octatonic sonority (Collection I with the addition of A♮). This prefaces the return of the rhythmically and harmonically disruptive (and much louder) a and b sections, in reverse order, followed (at bar 184) by the return of the A section. In the instruments, bars 1–132 reappear largely unchanged, but they are now overlaid by choral contributions, including statements of the melodic material of the B section. The final pitch of the last of these coincides with the start of a coda (bars 302–30), in which Dallapiccola brings back his C major triad. This time, the effect is scarcely that of resolution. Juddering repetitions fade to silence over dissonant ‘black-note’ pitches: A♭ and then octatonic F♯s and A♯s (Collection III: F♯, G, A, B♭, C, D♭, E♭, E♮). For D’Amico in 1945, it was as if the central vision were ‘disappearing . . . from sight’.57 The ‘Invocazione di Boezio’ was intended merely as a ‘bridge’. It was the finale that was to be ‘an affirmation of faith’. Finding an appropriate text was hard. In a revised version of the 1953 essay published in Italian in 1970, Dallapiccola recalls that he ‘devoted much time’ to setting a poem by the philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). If he finally rejected this text, it was on account, first, of ‘the incongruity of following two Latin texts with one in Italian’, and second, of the difficulty of Campanella’s thought.58 In the end, Dallapiccola chose words from a meditation on Psalm 51 left unfinished by Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) at his execution: Premat mundus, insurgant hostes, nihil timeo Quoniam in Te Domine speravi, Quoniam Tu es spes mea, Quoniam Tu altissimum posuisti refugium tuum. [Let the world press upon me and my enemies attack, I fear nothing / Because I have placed my hope in You, O Lord, / Because You are my hope, / Because You have placed Your refuge very high.] 57 58

D’Amico, ‘Canti di prigionia’, 99. Rudy Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera (London: Toccata, 1987), 48. The text was ‘Madrigal I’ from the first of four canzoni on the theme ‘Dispregio della morte’ (‘Scorn for Death’). See Tommaso Campanella, Poesie, ed. Giovanni Gentile (Bari: Laterza, 1915), 139.

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The composer strove also to link this text to the events of the early 1940s. The thought of Savonarola, he explains, was sparked by the response of the appeasement politician Samuel Hoare (1880–1959) to Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 19 July 1940. Hoare, Dallapiccola says, ‘was confined to exhorting the nation to pray’.59 Interpretation cannot stop there. While the post-war Dallapiccola clearly wished audiences to associate the Canti di prigionia with other examples of ‘protest music’, the relation of his ‘Congedo’ to at least two of the works he lists, Milhaud’s La mort d’un tyran (1932) and Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1942), is ambiguous. In the final movement of the Canti, we are not invited to gloat over the downfall of a dictator (as in the Byron set by Schoenberg), nor indeed to call for bloody vengeance (as in the text from the Scriptores Historiae Augustae – in a translation by Diderot – set by Milhaud), but to commiserate with him as he is brought down by his enemies. The figure of Savonarola was not unattractive to the fascist authorities. At the Maggio Musicale of 1935, the Piazza della Signoria in the centre of Florence was the backdrop to a spectacular outdoor staging by Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) of the three-act Savonarola by the journalist Rino Alessi (1885–1970). The performance was given on the orders Mussolini (Alessi had been a school friend); the play does not waste time in drawing parallels between its eponymous hero and the Duce. At the end of Scene 1 of Act I, Alessi has an allegorical figure, ‘The Spirit of the Age’, declare how, ‘The people, gathered in the square to make its vote, is tired now and calls for a law, a discipline, a MAN!’60 In the context of Dallapiccola’s work, the obvious parallel is between Savonarola and Rivière. We can map the narrative of the choral work on to that of the opera. Thus anguish in the ‘Preghiera’ (corresponding to Rivière’s panic in Scene 5) is followed by a vision of the good in the ‘Invocazione’ (comparable, as we saw, to Fabien’s transfiguration). If it is this ecstatic episode that gives Rivière strength to defend himself against the mob in Scene 6, it is similarly trust in the good – or rather, God – that gives Savonarola strength to defend himself against his enemies in the ‘Congedo’. What would seem to be missing in the Canti, as D’Amico suggests, is the political element. Yet Dallapiccola’s own words suggest that here too he pictured himself as a Kunstführer. ‘Had not Savonarola preached and prophesied the horrors that took place shortly after his death? Had he not urged the populace to penitence?’61 Just as Dallapiccola identified with the airline director, so now he identifies with the Dominican. Already at the climax of the opening section of the ‘Preghiera’ (Example 4.3), his music has a startlingly aggressive tone. The heavy four-in-the-bar relates closely to that of the ‘Mussolini Coda’ in Petrassi’s Salmo IX. 59 60

61

Dallapiccola, ‘My Choral Music’, 165. Rino Alessi, Savonarola. Azione in tre atti. Edizione per il Maggio Fiorentino (Udine: Istituto delle Edizioni Accademiche, 1935), 29. Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis’, 365.

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In Dallapiccola’s comments on the Canti di prigionia, there remains an ambivalence towards ‘the masses’. If he wants ‘the word “libera” . . . to be shouted by everyone’ (not just the choir), at the same time he is anxious not to be ‘appreciated’ or ‘applauded’.62 We have seen how he ensured that the Canti would rarely be performed in the Italy of the 1940s. Flamm is right: as in Volo di notte, the principal issue at stake in the Canti di prigionia is the state of mind of the composer himself. It matters little whether the transcendent realm or force appealed to in his work of 1937–41 is that of Christianity, capitalism, fascism or technological development, since the role of transcendence is always to justify the actions of Luigi Dallapiccola. As he put it at the close of the long letter to Casella of 2 June 1941, ‘I will never be able to alter a line of conduct, which has been dictated by necessities stronger than me, and which forms an integral part of my existence.’ .

V At the start of the ‘Congedo’, Dallapiccola presents this defiance in musical terms. After a bar of rapidly accelerating crescendo, Savonarola’s first line is set fortissimo in unison and octaves to a new twelve-note row – the ‘Congedo’ row – at P7: G–D–F– A–C–E–E♭–B♭–D♭–C♭–A♭–G♭. This is followed by a chorale-like treatment of the first phrase of the Dies irae. Example 4.6 follows directly. At bars 6–11, the ‘Congedo’ row is heard in the chorus, split into its constituent tetrachords; meanwhile Dallapiccola continues the chorale-like presentation of the sequence melody. At bars 7–8, phrase 2 of the melody is placed in C; at bars 10–11, phrase 3 is heard in B: transposition levels are chosen to suit the choral entries. And in bars 6 and 8, in evident illustration of the hostile assaults of Savonarola’s enemies, Dallapiccola employs tetrachords, hexachords and octads of the ‘Preghiera’ row to create accelerating, rhythmically disruptive fragments. The tetrachord also appears as the bass line to the Dies irae: at P5 in bar 7 and I6 in bar 8. At the same time, the first phrase of the Dies irae is treated as an inner part (beginning in the right-hand thumb at bar 71). The harmony in bars 7–8 is another example of Schoenbergian ‘fluctuating tonality’. Dallapiccola employs third-related minor and major triads (bar 73–4), half-diminished sevenths (bars 71–2 and 82 – on the latter occasion the appoggiatura B♭ does not resolve), and a whole-tone pentad (bar 84). On beats 1 and 3 of bar 8, the Dies irae is harmonized with octatonic appoggiatura chords. But the most significant feature of Example 4.6 is its transformation of material from the opening of the first movement. Bars 10–14 of Example 4.6 correspond to bars 1–6 of Example 4.4. The complete statement of the ‘Preghiera’ row at P4 in bars 1–4 of Example 4.4 reappears at bars 10–12 of Example 4.6 at P3. At bar 121–2 of the ‘Congedo’, the 62

Ibid., 363.

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Ex. 4.6 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Congedo di Girolamo Savonarola’, from Canti di prigionia (1938–41), bars 6–14.

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Ex. 4.6 (cont.)

tetrachord at bar 4 of the ‘Introduzione’ has become a pentachord: the b provided by the Dies irae at bar 41 of Example 4.4 has become order number 8 (b♭) of the ‘Preghiera’ row (P3). The transposition down a semitone enables Dallapiccola to compose a transition (at bars 12–13) to the reappearance of the tetrachord at its original pitch (compare the ‘Congedo’ at bar 14 with bar 6 of the ‘Introduzione’). The ascent in the voices, beginning at bar 121 of Example 4.6, moves from c2 through c♯2 and d2, and the instrumental e♭2, to an f2 in bar 14, which the voices then take to g2. In this climactic bar, the Dies irae returns on tubular bells, as does the three-note motive B–C♯–G from bar 6–7 of the ‘Introduzione’, now spread over three octaves. The harmony is exclusively octatonic (Collection I). With the aid of fortissimo dynamics and a seemingly inexorable march-like tread, what was hesitant in expression at the start of the Canti has become not so much defiant as overpoweringly dominant. There is another means by which Dallapiccola seeks to unify the work. Those who have looked at the published scores of the ‘Congedo’ will have noticed how the introductory bar is not labelled as bar 1, even though it is a full length. It is a sign that Dallapiccola wants the reader to attend to proportions. We saw above how the B section of the ‘Invocazione’ follows a symmetrical scheme. The two A sections, however, are uneven in length, at bars 132 and 137 respectively. In the ‘Preghiera’,

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the first part of the ternary form (shown in Examples 4.2 and 4.3) is twenty-five bars long, as are the ‘Introduzione’ and the middle section and recapitulation combined: the final climax is at bar 75. But the symmetry is disrupted by the seven-bar coda. As if to make good these slight lopsidednesses, the 98 numbered bars of the ‘Congedo’ are fully symmetrical. Like the other two Canti, this finale has a ternary form: the outer sections (bars 1–32 and 67–98) have 32 bars, while the middle section (bars 33– 66) has 33. Bars 1–32 divide into sections of 21 and 11 bars: while bars 1–21 set the first line of Savonarola’s text to music that (among other things) loudly recapitulates material from the Introduzione, bars 22–32 set ‘nihil timeo’ in a more restrained style. The opening 21 bars divide proportionally into sections of 14 and 7 bars: the section at bar 15 begins with a return to the material first heard at bar 17 of the ‘Introduzione’. The central section of the ‘Congedo’ divides into equal sections of 16½ bars. As shown in Example 4.7, Dallapiccola marks the instrumental parts in the middle of bar 49 with a dotted double bar line. This is also the centre of a palindrome. Following the many examples in Berg (in Lulu, the most obvious one is the ‘Ostinato’ in Act II, mentioned in Chapter 3), or that of Schoenberg’s ‘Mondfleck’ from Pierrot lunaire, Dallapiccola creates a large-scale retrograde. The mostly dodecaphonic instrumental lines at bars 33–492 of the ‘Congedo’ are played backwards at bars 493–66. On to these, a chamber choir (four voices per part) superimposes a non-palindromic double canon: one each for the women and the men. At the centre of the palindrome, the rest of the choir also enters, contributing to the instrumental symmetry – or rather, the women do, while the men recall in whispers the very beginning of the ‘Preghiera’. Palindromes in Berg’s scores have frequently been taken as symbolic. Douglas Jarman has argued strongly that they have negative connotations.63 In Dallapiccola’s case, the quotation from John 1:15 over the palindromic central section of the third movement of Tartiniana (at [33]), ‘Qui post me venturus est, ante me factus est’ (‘He who comes after me was made before me’), suggests something more positive. The solution to John the Baptist’s paradox is that Christ, the Word, is eternally present: human ideas of time do not apply in His case. Similarly, at the centre of the ‘Congedo di Savonarola’, Dallapiccola uses a palindrome to evoke God’s extra-temporal status. But what is crucial here is the distinction between this and previous evocations of the numinous in Dallapiccola’s work. As we saw at the start of the ‘Congedo’, twelve-note technique – more specifically, the ‘Preghiera’ row and its attendant tetrachord – is associated in this movement with negativity. The tetrachord is also a disruptive presence in 63

See Douglas Jarman, ‘“Remembrance of things that are to come”: Some Reflections on Berg’s Palindromes’, in Christopher Hailey (ed.), Alban Berg and His World (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 195–221.

Protest music?

Ex. 4.7 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Congedo di Girolamo Savonarola’, from Canti di prigionia (1938–41), bars 47–51.

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Ex. 4.7 (cont.)

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the b and b1 sections of the B section of the ‘Invocazione’ (bars 139–47 and 169–76). Again at bar 45 in the ‘Preghiera’ (see Example 4.3), the tetrachord belongs to the ‘menacing destructive forces’ that John C. G. Waterhouse finds symbolized in Dallapiccola’s instrumental writing.64 In both the ‘Preghiera’ and the ‘Invocazione’, this negativity is countered by ‘white-note’ modality, and above all, by the major triads whose significance has been discussed. In Example 4.7 too, a major triad is the cornerstone of the texture, in this case D major (bars 48–50), with F♯ spelled as G♭. But unlike the tonic C major triad in the ‘Invocazione’, the D major at the centre of the ‘Congedo’ appears in a texture that is largely dodecaphonic, in which – by definition – it is hard to create a feeling of tonal centricity. Dallapiccola’s solution is to find a compromise between ‘white-note’ modality and dodecaphony in the form of octatonicism. At bars 48–50, all the pitches in voices and instruments fall within Collection II: F, F♯, A♭, A♮, B, C, D, E♭. The D major triad is enveloped in a texture that is at once shimmering, mysterious and harmonically rich. Yet what the music gains in aural ‘magic’ it loses in harmonic stability. The recapitulation (bars 67–98), like bars 1–32, is divided into units of 21 and 11 bars: this time the 21 is divided into threes rather than sevens. There are two strophes in the first section, each prefaced by an introductory build-up (six bars at 67–72, three at 79–81). In the two strophes themselves (bars 73–8 and 82–7), Dallapiccola brings together the principal materials of the movement in six-bar climactic bursts of contrapuntal ingenuity. The two three-bar units of strophe 1 combine the ‘Congedo’ row first (at P5) with the Dies irae, then (at R7) with the ‘Preghiera’ row (at P2). In strophe 2, the melody of the Dies irae is heard in the voices for the first and last time. More precisely: at bars 82–3, the voices have the first phrase of the melody, in diminution and in both prime and inverted forms, against the first phrase of an instrumental statement of its phrases 1–3. Bars 82–7 also feature statements of the ‘Congedo’ row, at P6 and R7. For all its peroratory character, strophe 2 does not end in resolution. The final eleven-bar section of the Canti di prigionia opens with a sudden hush (see Example 4.8). At bars 88–90, the imitative vocal entries refer motivically to the parallel passage in the opening section of the ‘Congedo’ (bars 22–5). A B♭ minor modality in the earlier passage has been replaced by octatonicism (Collection I). Then starting in bar 91, material is drawn from bars 54–60 in the central section of the movement. The upper dyads of the sustained harmonies in bar 91 (c♭2, d♭2 and a♭1, e♭2) combine with the first piano line in bar 93 (pitch classes E–F–D–C–A–F♯–B♭–[G]) to complete the chromatic; likewise the first piano’s octad in the bass in bar 91 is the complement of the first harp’s tetrachord in bar 93. The lower dyads in bar 91 (the fifths d♭1, a♭1 and c1, g1) combine with the second piano’s fifths in bar 93 to produce an eleven-note set. 64

See John C. G. Waterhouse, ‘Dallapiccola, Luigi’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols. (2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 2001), VI, 856.

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Ex. 4.8 Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Congedo di Girolamo Savonarola’, from Canti di prigionia (1938–41), bars 88–99.

Protest music?

Ex. 4.8 (cont.)

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As in the two strophes preceding Example 4.8, the composer’s aim is evidently to revisit as much of the previously heard material as possible. But the powerfully unificatory effect of bars 73–8 and 82–7 no longer prevails. There is textural and voice-leading continuity in the vocal parts between bars 91 and 92. But in bar 92 Dallapiccola inserts a memory of the closing bars of the ‘Preghiera’. The unexpected reappearance of the three-note motive in the bass, followed by bar 93 – which, although bound to bar 91 in the ways described above, makes for a complete motivic and textural contrast with bar 92 – tends to promote fragmentation. Bar 94 then brings yet another change in material and texture, involving imitative treatment of the first piano’s octad from bar 91. Another parallel can be found here with Volo di notte. At bar 972 of the opera, immediately following Rivière’s choral (self-) affirmation, there is a musical collapse that leads to reminiscences of earlier music: from Scene 1 (at bars 976–85) and from Scene 4 (at bars 986–7). Following these, as we saw, the final bars of the opera sound a triadic benediction. Bars 94–8 of the ‘Congedo’ attempt a similar conclusion in miniature. The underlying harmonic movement is from a G♭/F♯ major triad at bars 94–62 to D major at bar 963 onwards: the triads are linked by the sopranos’ f♯1 at bars 953–96. The movement’s central palindrome was focused on a D major triad. And as there, so in the closing bars of the Canti di prigionia, we should surely be thinking about transcendence. Yet just as bars 91–3 in Example 4.8 suggest fragmentation rather than unification, so the D major at bars 963–8 has a more hesitant than affirmative character. At bar 963–4 we hear the root and the third: the fifth is obscured by the tubular bells’ final reference to the Dies irae. At bar 971–2 we hear the root and fifth. The full triad is presented at bar 973 and then only fleetingly. The first piano’s descent through the ‘Preghiera’ row (at R4) touches f♯1 just as the fifth d, a is sounded beneath it. Apart from its metrical position, the f♯1 is given no special emphasis, and is not sustained: the final pitches of the work are a bare fifth. In other words: the transcendent realm, in which Savonarola/Dallapiccola has faith, continues to make its presence felt. But it no longer shines with the force manifested just a few minutes earlier, at the centre of the ‘Invocazione di Boezio’.

VI Inasmuch as it undercuts the defiance of the movement’s climaxes, the close of the ‘Congedo’ may seem to anticipate Dallapiccola’s concerns of the later 1940s. But the Canti di prigionia, in general, are not the work in which the composer breaks with his heroic self-image. If Griffin can link artistic modernism and fascism – in his work on Modernism and Fascism, cited earlier – this is because he identifies in both a yearning for a breakthrough into a transcendentally meaningful new world. Yet the idea that heroic individuality and cosmic necessity might be inherently linked

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is a D’Annunzianism. On the terms argued in this study, where modernism is defined in terms of a negation that makes no promises at all in respect of the future (except negatively), such puffed-up idealism must be regarded as modernism’s target, not its instantiation. In Dallapiccola too, as we shall see in Chapter 5, modernism equates finally to a disillusioned awareness that transcendent forces do not necessarily operate in the individual’s favour. Nor was he the only artist of the period to come to conclusions of such pessimism. In a seminar from 1976, Petrassi looked back on his compositions of the mid1930s with shame. The Concerto per orchestra, in particular, ‘demonstrates a mastery of means, an arrogance and a technical security of a kind that might even be called obscene’. The self-certainty of the music, Petrassi acknowledges, was nourished by fascism.65 With Italy’s entry into the war, the character of his work changed. In the ‘dramatic madrigal’ Coro di morti (Chorus of the Dead) for male voices and ensemble, composed in 1940–1, Petrassi made his earlier idiom into an object of parody. For Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), as the final words of the Coro di morti have it, ‘to be blessed / Is denied by fate to both the living and the dead’. In the work’s two instrumental interludes, Petrassi represents the vision of life held by Leopardi’s chorus: ‘abstract, cold, without feeling, without participation’. The ‘formal arrogance’ of works such as the Concerto per orchestra, with all its display of contrapuntal virtuosity, is held up as ‘ridiculous’.66 It was not until 1942–3 that Dallapiccola would find himself at work on subject matter expressing a similar disillusion. In the meantime, far from falling silent (as suggested in the correspondence with Casella), he was busy. Over the winter of 1941–2, he prepared his orchestration of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. And between April and July 1942, he composed the Cinque frammenti di Saffo, settings of translations by Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968) for voice and chamber orchestra. Celebrated in the literature as the composer’s first entirely twelve-note work, this set of miniatures relates technically – and often expressively – to the central section of the ‘Congedo’. In the first fragment, there is continued emphasis on octatonic harmony. Lyrical melodic lines treated in canon find support in accompaniments that veer between ‘rooted’ (fifth-based) and ‘floating’ harmonies, the latter often involving Frazzi’s appoggiatura chords.67 Dallapiccola refined his twelve-note idiom in the obsessively canonic Sex carmina Alcaei for voice and eleven instruments (again setting translations by Quasimodo), which he completed in October 1943. Here the entire work – or almost – is derived from a single 65 66 67

Goffredo Petrassi, Scritti e interviste, ed. Raffaele Pozzi (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 2008), 132. Ibid., 134. See Ben Earle, ‘Dallapiccola’s Early Synthesis: No. 1, “Vespro, tutto riporti”, from Cinque frammenti di Saffo’, Music Analysis, 25/1–2 (2006), 3–38. Discussion of the fourth fragment may be found in Brian Alegant, ‘Cross-Partitions as Harmony and Voice Leading in Twelve-Tone Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, 23/1 (2001), 24–36.

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twelve-note series.68 But more important for the composer’s development is the ballet Marsia, composed between August 1942 and February 1943. Written off by those in hoc to the teleological notion of the ‘twelve-note road’ as stylistically retrogressive, this is one of Dallapiccola’s least performed works, whose full score (like that of the even more neglected Monteverdi transcription) has never been published. Yet Dallapiccola himself thought well enough of his music to produce both a set of Frammenti sinfonici for orchestra (1947) and a transcription of Tre episodi for piano (1949). In the present context, it is the scenario of Marsia that is most interesting: the work of the choreographer Aurel M. Milloss (1906–1988). Pierluigi Petrobelli notes that this is the only occasion on which Dallapiccola consented to work with subject matter proposed by somebody else (apart from Laura, it might be pointed out).69 That the composer was so enthusiastic about Milloss’s scenario, Petrobelli suggests, was because its action tallies with his concerns in other works. In Marsia, the eponymous hero learns to play the flute, and believing himself ‘to be endowed with divine powers’, challenges the god Apollo to a musical duel.70 Marsyas plays well, but Apollo raises the stakes. At the exact mid-point of the ballet (an arithmetical relationship Dallapiccola claims he did not plan),71 Apollo reverses his lyre to demonstrate himself capable of playing ‘without touching the strings’. In his effort to do likewise with his flute, Marsyas expresses ‘the tremendous effort of man to bring himself up to the level of God’. But inevitably he fails. His punishment, handed down by Apollo and the Muses, is to be ‘mercilessly punished with a dreadful death’: he is flayed alive. Marsyas is Fabien – or the Prisoner, Job or Ulisse. Dallapiccola’s protagonists are characters who ‘struggle against a force stronger than them, which defeats them’. Apollo, meanwhile, is one of Dallapiccola’s typical ‘deuteragonists’, the embodiment of cruel power: equivalent to Rivière, the Jailer/Grand Inquisitor in Il prigioniero or God in Job.72 At the back of his mind, Petrobelli surely has Dallapiccola’s late declaration that ‘the central idea of all my works is the same: the struggle of man against some force much stronger than he’.73 But in Chapter 3 we saw that Fabien cannot be taken as the

68

69

70 71

72

See Brian Alegant, The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola (University of Rochester Press, 2010), 14–20. Pierluigi Petrobelli, ‘La genesi e lo stile di “Marsia”’, in Giovanni Morelli (ed.), Creature di Prometeo. Il ballo teatrale: dal divertimento al dramma. Studi offerti a Aurel M. Miloss (Florence: Olschki, 1996), 400. See the ‘Argomento’ printed at the front of the piano reduction (Milan: Carisch, 1943). See Hans Nathan (ed.), ‘Luigi Dallapiccola: Fragments from Conversations’, Music Review, 28/4 (1966), 299. Petrobelli, ‘La genesi’, 405. 73 Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 239.

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protagonist of Volo di notte. And indeed, for the composer it is not Fabien to whom Marsyas should be compared but Rivière. As he puts it, Although Rivière attains a partial victory – only partial, because he clearly feels he is ‘bearing his heavy load of victory’ – Marsyas is completely vanquished for having dared challenge Apollo.74

Evidently Dallapiccola wants to draw these two characters together: that is why he emphasizes the sense in which Rivière may be said to attain only ‘a partial victory’. But as Petrobelli’s alignment of Rivière with Apollo attests, Dallapiccola’s argument does not work. The ‘central idea’ of Dallapiccola’s dramatic works is not always ‘the same’. Between Volo di notte and Il prigioniero, as Arnold Jacobshagen has pointed out, there is a reversal.75 Marsia is the point at which it occurs. At issue here again is the role of transcendence. In Volo di notte, the noumenal is on Rivière’s side; likewise in the Canti di prigionia the assumption is that, despite their imminent executions, the faiths of Mary Queen of Scots, Boethius and Savonarola are well placed. In Volo di notte, the divine is offstage; similarly in the Canti di prigionia, the three prisoners call upon an unseen force. But in Marsia, divinity is made manifest. And rather than support Marsyas, Apollo crushes him. The contrast with Volo di notte is striking. Like Marsyas, Rivière strives ‘to bring himself up to the level of God’. And at the climax of Scene 6 he achieves godlike power. We can now see why, in July 1942, a month before he started work on Marsia, Dallapiccola might have wanted to portray Rivière, at the end of the opera, as a ‘wretched creature’. There is no hint of such a judgement in his 1940 article, nor yet in the account that appeared (in the guise of a piece by Andrea Della Corte) in 1938. Nor, contra Stenzl, should the 1942 judgement be taken as a criticism of the protagonist.76 The point is that Dallapiccola’s self-image had changed. As the 1941 correspondence with Casella makes clear, he no longer thought of himself as a Kunstführer, but as a victim. If Rivière’s efforts to achieve superhuman status leave him ‘wretched’, we are to pity him, just as we are to pity Marsyas, challenged by Apollo to achieve the impossible and punished for his failure.

74 75

76

Ibid. See Arnold Jacobshagen, ‘Verflogene Träume: Darstellungen des Illusionären in Luigi Dallapiccolas Volo di notte und Il prigioniero’, in Peter Csobádi, Gernot Gruber, Jürgen Kühnel, Ulrich Müller, Oswald Panagl and Franz Viktor Spechtler (eds.), Traum und Wirklichkeit in Theater und Musiktheater. Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposiums 2004 (Anif: Mueller Speiser, 2006), 341. See Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 86; Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘“Volo di notte” di L. Dallapiccola’, Scenario, 9/4 (1940), 176–7; Andrea Della Corte, ‘Nuove opera italiane: “Volo di notte”’, La stampa (25 October 1938) (LD. XLVIII.1.1); Stenzl, ‘Luigi Dallapiccolas “neuer Weg?”’, 275.

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When Dallapiccola came to draft the libretto of Il prigioniero, at the very end of 1943, he and his wife had been forced to leave their home in order to hide in the countryside outside Florence. With Italy overrun by the German army as far south as Naples, Laura was under threat of deportation to the camps. As Dallapiccola’s second opera makes clear, to trust in Providence – to be sure that the gods are on your side – is to lay yourself open to the most terrible deception. Not only is transcendence by no means necessarily benign: its self-appointed interpreters (among whom Dallapiccola had so recently counted himself) can be thoroughly evil.

5 The politics of commitment

Well over half a century since its première, Il prigioniero remains the only Italian opera since Puccini’s Turandot to have gained a footing in the international repertory. After a downturn in fortunes during the 1980s and 1990s, Dallapiccola’s bestknown work has recently recovered something of the success of its early 1960s heyday – when, as the composer Riccardo Malipiero (1914–2003) put it, the word was that, ‘in the future, Il prigioniero will be the Cavalleria rusticana of our time’.1 Malipiero’s notion may seem absurd. But the statistics of fifty years ago can be startling: ‘The publisher records that in the first dozen years after its première, there were no fewer than 186 performances of this modern opera on radio, concert platforms and stage.’2 One wonders why the latter decades of the century should have proved the prediction reported by Malipiero so wrong – and also: what has happened to bring the work once again into favour. Some suggestions will be put forward in due course. In an initial approach to Il prigioniero, it is more appropriate to ask how the success came about in the first place. Though immediate – the artists received seven curtain calls, the composer four3 – it was hardly self-evident. As critics have complained ever since the stage première on 20 May 1950, as part of the XIII Maggio Musicale (Il prigioniero had previously been heard in a broadcast from Turin, on 1 December 1949), the opera is theatrically problematic. Hans Keller was characteristically outspoken. ‘The greatest part of the work’, he wrote, is immensely expressive and impressive as long as you don’t look at the stage. For if you look you don’t see what you hear: the ‘action’ chiefly consists of the drama of the prisoner’s inner life. I have not met a musician who did not object to the untheatrical character of the piece.

For Massimo Mila, it was as if Dallapiccola ‘had in mind a form of oratorio-like theatre [teatro oratoriale], where the physical presence of the actors and stage ends

1

2

3

Riccardo Malipiero, ‘Il prigioniero’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola. Saggi, testimonianze, carteggio, biografia e bibliografia (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1975), 9. See the Earl of Harewood (ed.), Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book (9th edn, London: Putnam, 1976), 1244. Leonardo Pinzauti, Storia del Maggio. Dalla nascita della ‘Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentina’ (1928) al festival del 1993 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1994), 91.

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up as a cumbersome surplus, and all the dramatic substance of the action is transmitted through the music’.4 Il prigioniero was carried in the opera house by its vivid neo-expressionist score. For Mila, the work brought to light ‘a sense for the dramatic and theatrical use of music . . . no less powerful than what we are accustomed to appreciate in a Tosca’.5 The première was an instant music-historical event: Dallapiccola had written the first important twelve-note opera in Italian. ‘[E]ven at the time’, writes David OsmondSmith, it ‘was seen as marking a crucial step forward . . . after the war years.’6 But the rapid progress of the work through the opera houses of all the major cities of Western Europe (and beyond) cannot be explained solely by reference to its music’s aesthetic charge or technical novelty. As Malipiero put it, ‘the springboard, the first gear that set in motion the mechanism of the interest of the whole world’, was ‘the subject matter’.7 Il prigioniero is ‘one of the great political operas’, declares Anthony Arblaster: ‘a direct and manifestly deeply felt response to the experience of fascism’.8 Like most commentators, Arblaster follows the composer, who considered his work an autobiographically informed instance of ‘protest music’, ‘a protest against tyranny and oppression’.9 This is not the only well-established reading that treats the opera above all as political. Another critical commonplace – but a more interesting guide to the significance of Il prigioniero – is the characterization of Dallapiccola’s work as musica impegnata: ‘committed music’. The composer Camillo Togni (1922–1993) tries harder than most to explain what this means. Appropriately, given the provenance of ‘commitment’, he quotes Sartre. ‘By taking part in the singularity of our era, we ultimately make contact with the eternal, and it is our task . . . to allow the eternal values implicit in our debates to be perceived.’10 These words are carefully chosen for their ambiguity vis-à-vis the philosopher’s atheism: Togni refers to Dallapiccola’s ‘religious humanism’. But in the case of Il prigioniero such care is unnecessary. Religion brings little comfort here. Dallapiccola is indeed

4

5 6 7 8

9

10

Hans Keller, ‘XIII Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. VII Congresso Internazionale di Musica’, Music Review, 11/3 (1950), 211; Massimo Mila, ‘“Il prigioniero” di Luigi Dallapiccola’, La rassegna musicale, 20/4 (1950), 311. Mila, ‘“Il prigioniero”’, 311. David Osmond-Smith, Berio (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6. Malipiero, ‘Il prigioniero’, 9. Anthony Arblaster, Viva la Libertà! Politics in Opera (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 282, 281. See Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis of the Canti di prigionia and Il prigioniero: An Autobiographical Fragment’, trans. Jonathan Schiller, Musical Quarterly, 39/3 (1953), 355–72; Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola, 92. Camillo Togni, Carteggio e scritti di Camillo Togni sul novecento italiano (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 199; citing Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations II (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 15. See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘What is Literature?’ and Other Essays, trans. Bernard Frechtman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 254 (translation slightly modified).

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close to Sartre, for whom man is ‘absolute’ only ‘in his time, in his surroundings, on his parcel of earth’.11 To put it another way: in so far as Dallapiccola’s work is ‘committed’, it aspires to the quality of the dialectic. Unmistakably Hegelian in its metaphysical ambition, Sartre’s argument is also Hegelian in structure. The conditions he presents as interdependent – ‘the eternal’ and ‘the singularity of our era’; man as ‘absolute’ and man ‘on his parcel of earth’ – are also dialectically opposed. Unlike ‘analytic’ or ‘static’ binaries, in which, as Fredric Jameson has explained, ‘both poles . . . are positive, both are existants, equally present to the naked eye’, dialectical oppositions involve ‘differential perception’. They are a ‘dynamic’ combination of positive and negative terms.12 How could man’s activities be simultaneously unconditioned (‘absolute’) and conditioned (grounded ‘in his time, in his surroundings’)? To common sense, the poles simply cancel each other out. Nor is this a digression of merely logical interest. Sartre’s words are taken from a discussion of literature. Following Hegel, his aesthetics too are thoroughly dialectical. The ‘committed’ work of art is a mode – the result of a process – of knowledge. Il prigioniero, in this view, is seen as negating its autonomy, as going out into its sociopolitical other (‘taking part in the singularity of [its] era’). It experiences the latter, moreover, not from any pre-ordained perspective, but so that it loses itself in the historical condition of spirit, grasps it from the inside. Returning to itself, the work displays its other as the content of its musical-dramatic form, striving by artistic means to make the truth of the age – what there is in it of ‘eternal value’ – transparent to all. It is a report on the state of human freedom, the manifestation of a desire (this is the specifically Sartrean political element) ‘to change simultaneously the social condition of man and the concept he has of himself’ in line with the ‘distant goal’ of ‘liberation’.13 In simpler terms: the opera confronts audiences with an image of the world as they have made it. By this unpalatable reminder, it urges them to positive action. The dialectical impulse in Il prigioniero is not hard to locate. It emerges, for example, from a consideration of the striking contrast – often noted – between Dallapiccola’s libretto (which, like that of Volo di notte, he put together himself) and its principal source. Prompted by Laura, he fashioned a text from a short story, ‘La torture par l’espérance’ (‘Torture through Hope’), by the early symbolist writer, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889). Many of the details of this sinister narrative of imaginary events during the Spanish Inquisition found their way into the opera. And yet Dallapiccola deleted the identity of the protagonist, named in the story as the Rabbi Aser Abarbanel. In the opera, he is simply ‘The Prisoner’.14 11 12

13 14

Sartre, ‘What is Literature?’, 254. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton University Press, 1972), 119–20. Sartre, ‘What is Literature?’, 255, 261. Rudy Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera (London: Toccata, 1987), 50, 52.

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We should doubtless be relieved that the work is not so ‘topical’ that – as Adorno felt with regard to Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) – it runs the risk of aestheticizing real suffering, of making ‘the unthinkable appear to have some meaning’.15 Nevertheless, given Dallapiccola’s intention to write ‘an opera that could be at once moving and contemporary despite its historical setting’,16 the removal of the Jewish name seems odd. But this is to miss the dialectical point. De L’Isle-Adam presents a fictional episode of the sixteenth century, comprehensible only in terms of a particular set of politico-religious circumstances. His story resonates with particular events of the mid-twentieth century. And yet Dallapiccola removes the link that most encourages the resonance. The period of his opera’s composition saw many forms of persecution, and Il prigioniero is intended to protest on behalf of those who suffered under all of them. It will not merely link two particular instances of persecution but speak, dialectically, of the particular and the general at once. To keep the name, the composer explains, would have placed limits on the opera’s scope. ‘[T]he tragedy of our time’, he writes, is ‘the tragedy of the persecution felt and suffered by the millions and tens of millions.’ The ‘problem’ is ‘now universal’.17 The aim is lofty. And signs of trouble were quick to appear. In 1953, Dallapiccola was annoyed that it was apparently no longer the name Hitler that audiences associated with the figure of Philip II of Spain (present in Il prigioniero as an unseen source of malevolence), but ‘some other character’.18 In a short piece published in London in 1960, he was less guarded. At the première of his opera, the Italian Communist Party, ‘whose attentions had been lavished on me in the past . . . pretended to believe my barbs were aimed at the Soviet dictator of 1950’.19 The accusation of bad faith echoes an accusation made in 1953: that ‘many people refused to understand the libretto’.20 But if Dallapiccola had wanted to restrict the work to an allegory of Nazi barbarism – to ensure that its audiences saw only the malign influence of Hitler behind his opera’s cruel outcome – then the name of the protagonist should not have been deleted. If the work was to have universal contemporary significance, then it is difficult to see why its ‘protest against tyranny and oppression’, even if not aimed specifically at the Soviet Union, should not have the show trials and the Gulag in its sights just as much as it might have the Gestapo and Auschwitz. Dallapiccola’s insistence that in 1942–3, when he wrote the libretto, he ‘was combating only one kind of dictator’,21 may be enough to clear him 15

16 18 19

20

Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–2), II, 88. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 51–2. 17 Ibid., 52. Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis’, 369. See Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘The Birth-Pangs of “Job”’, Musical Events, 15/5 (1960), 26, as cited in Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 62n4. Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis’, 369. 21 Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 62n4.

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of anti-Stalinism (at least at this stage of his career), but the meaning of the text that emerged at the end of the decade could not be circumscribed according to his wishes. From the vehemence with which the composer Mario Zafred (1922–1987) denounced Il prigioniero, in his capacity as music critic on the communist daily, L’Unità, it is clear that something more than aesthetic judgement was at stake. In a review entitled ‘Loudspeakers and Confusion in Opera by Dallapiccola’ – the echo of the 1936 Pravda denunciation of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, ‘Chaos instead of Music’, may not have been unintentional – the work was defined as ‘sonorous filth’ (melma sonora): a ‘muddle of sounds which not even the most educated and refined ear would succeed in disentangling’.22 Dallapiccola continued until his death to refer to communist hostility towards the opera, in a manner that suggests he was deeply wounded by this attack.23 But it cannot have been entirely surprising. The failure of audiences correctly to identify the referent of Il prigioniero – if the work was indeed intended to have a single contemporary referent – is only half the story. As Dallapiccola explained in 1960, opposition to the opera sprang not so much from the work as from an article he had published in January 1950 under the title ‘Musica pianificata’ (‘Planned Music’).24 An account of Dallapiccola’s post-war aesthetic stance, as revealed in this and other essays of the period, will place under considerable pressure the ‘dialectical’, ‘truth-telling’ image of the composer’s work sketched above. To then situate Il prigioniero in the context of its original reception, at the height of the ‘cultural Cold War’ – a climate marked by widespread instrumentalization of artists and their work – will be to view the success of this ‘political’ opera in a new and equivocal light. Leaving aside what we know about Dallapiccola’s work of the 1930s, the confidence of a Hans Werner Henze, that ‘[a]s a good Italian intellectual, [Dallapiccola] belonged of course to the Italian left’, is difficult to sustain.25 But the aim of this final chapter is not to produce a critique of Il prigioniero. Instead, the latter stages will endeavour to rise to what Adorno, in a commentary on his own book on Wagner, calls a Rettung,26 a ‘rescue’ or ‘salvation’ of the opera: even (or especially) at the expense of Dallapiccola’s own thoughts on contemporary music and its relation to history and society. Adorno’s theorization of these issues will continue to be a crucial 22

23 24 25

26

Mario Zafred, ‘Altoparlanti e confusione nell’opera di Dallapiccola’, L’Unità (Milan edition, 21 May 1950), 3. See Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola, 125. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 62n4. Elisabeth Lutyens, Hans Werner Henze and Hugh Wood, ‘Tributes to Dallapiccola’, Tempo, 108 (1974), 16. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–86), XIII, 506.

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resource. But in a concluding attempt to go beyond critique, we shall turn to the politically charged Lacanianism of Slavoj Žižek. This new intellectual framework will help us to recover a sense of Il prigioniero as a ‘committed’ work: one that, even today, may deliver an authentically modernist shock.

I ‘Musica pianificata’ is a review, hostile and sarcastic in tone, of a classic document of the early Cold War, an ‘Outline for a Five-Year Plan for the Composers and Musicians of Czechoslovakia’, issued in April 1949. In the face of plans for musical collectivization, Dallapiccola insists on the indissolubly personal, necessarily solitary, nature of artistic creation. He reads condemnation of the artist who would remain sitting at his desk, instead of throwing himself into the life of the people and their struggle for liberation, as a product of fear: The solitary man, enclosed within four walls, can become a dangerous person. The solitary man, enclosed within himself, thinks. The saints had their greatest revelations alone. And the man who thinks is an individual, no longer a number in a collectivity: an individual with his joy and his sorrow. Care [Sorge] can slip through the keyhole and ‘critique’ too can be born in solitude.27

The nod to Goethe is clear.28 And yet to place Dallapiccola adequately amid his contemporaries and predecessors in aesthetics is no easy task. The association of ‘solitude’ and ‘critique’ is one hint. Dallapiccola would have had to be quick, but he would not have had to read far in Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik (also published in 1949) to come across the section entitled ‘Dialectic of Loneliness’, which seems to describe the very relationship between artist and world he has in mind.29 Isolation is no bar to dialectics. As Adorno puts it, ‘“Lonely speech” says more of society’s own tendency than does communicative discourse’ (38). The expressionist compositions of Schoenberg and Webern, which strip music of conventions, destroy the self-sufficient appearance of the work of art. If dramatic music from Monteverdi to Verdi presented images of emotions, the unmediated subjectivity of expressionism registers ‘undisguised, corporeal impulses of the unconscious, shocks, and traumas’ (35). This radical music tends towards knowledge. Powerless to maintain any distance between itself and reality, it ‘knows . . . the untransfigured suffering of mankind’ (37). For Dallapiccola, too, ‘lonely speech’ stands in relation to truth. As he put it in 1949, ‘solitude . . . does not by any means imply lack of contact with the 27 28

29

Luigi Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1980), 149–50. See J. W. von Goethe, Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz et al., 14 vols. (Hamburg: Wegner, 1948–64), III, 343. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 37–40.

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souls of men’.30 And yet one should not rush to identify his thought with that of Adorno. In Philosophie der neuen Musik, music’s preservation of ‘social truth’ causes it to ‘wither’. If art is to retain its authenticity in an inhuman society, it must withhold its ability to communicate (20). Dallapiccola thinks the reverse. As he declares, great art is recognized as such because it ‘fully realizes the expression of an inner truth, of a universal truth, which grips the whole of humanity’.31 In making such pronouncements, Dallapiccola had no need to appeal directly to the German philosophical tradition. In Italy, such ‘cosmic’ discourse about music goes back at least to Bastianelli and Torrefranca. Croce declares that [e]very genuine artistic representation is itself and is the universe, the universe in that individual form and that individual form as the universe. In every utterance, every fanciful creation, of the poet, there lies the whole of human destiny, all human hopes, illusions, griefs, joys, human grandeurs and miseries, the whole drama of reality perpetually evolving and growing out of itself in suffering and joy.32

But as we know, Dallapiccola was no Crocean. If the composer declares that the ‘beauty of the work of art is guaranteed by the complete correspondence of truth and representation’, he also insists that truthful representation ‘can only be achieved in artistic terms by means of a new “technique”’. ‘[I]ncluded in any work of art’, he writes, citing Leonardo da Vinci, ‘is the thought of the new.’33 To a Crocean, such emphasis on technical novelty would contradict Dallapiccola’s equally strong conviction that the source of the work of art, indeed, of all human activity and knowledge, is ‘intuition’ and ‘intense emotion’ [Erschütterung]. And indeed, technique does not stand at the centre of his argument. ‘The impulse which compels us to write, paint and so forth’, Dallapiccola writes, ‘is the inner necessity we experience to grant an inner movement of feeling perceptible expression.’34 In Chapter 3, we ‘resolved’ the technique/feeling contradiction by way of the aesthetics of Giovanni Gentile. For his part, Dallapiccola cites Proust: So I had already come to the conclusion that we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, that we cannot shape it according to our wishes, but that as it pre-exists us, and both because it is necessary and hidden, and because it is, as it were, a law of nature, we have to discover it.35

30 31

32

33 35

Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 145. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Die moderne Musik und ihre Beziehung zu den übrigen Künsten’, trans. Gottfried Beutel, in Die neue Weltschau. Zweite internationale Aussprache über den Anbruch eines neuen aperspektivischen Zeitalters (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), 44. Benedetto Croce, Philosophy Poetry History: An Anthology of Essays, trans. Cecil Sprigge (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 263. Dallapiccola, ‘Die moderne Musik’, 46, 47. 34 Ibid., 43–4. Ibid., 43. See Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2002), 189.

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This is a crucial sentence for the composer: ‘much quoted’, he writes in another place, ‘yet never quoted enough!’36 At first sight, it seems to go over completely to the side of feeling. The roots of the idea lie in Schopenhauer, above all, in the declaration, from the third book of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, that the true artist ‘anticipates the beautiful prior to experience’. As Schopenhauer explains, the artist can do this to the extent that he is ‘the “in-itself” of nature’: part of the will in its selfobjectification. The sculptor of genius loses his individuality in the contemplation of the human form and comes to objective knowledge of its Platonic Idea. He finds himself ‘dimly aware a priori’ of the beautiful shape his sculpture will take: he ‘so to speak, understands nature’s half-spoken words’.37 Proust is far from loyal to his source. As Duncan Large has argued, the novelist’s evident familiarity with Schopenhauer formed the basis for a Nietzschean ‘overcoming’ of the older philosopher’s position.38 And it is in these terms that we can link Proust with the Schoenberg of the Harmonielehre, the ‘strong Nietzschean resonances’ of which were noted in Chapter 3. For Schopenhauer, the composer is able to bypass the contemplation of Ideas (which are the will’s ‘most adequate objectivity’), in favour of self-sacrifice to instinct. For ‘music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is’.39 Schoenberg often goes along with this kind of thinking. But in the narrative of the birth of the ‘new man’, the ‘young artist’ who has the ‘courage’ to submit ‘wholly to his inclinations’, a different note is sounded. In an instance of what the author of Also sprach Zarathustra termed amor fati, the artist’s involuntary tastes are affirmed as his own.40 As Large makes clear, the active contrast with Schopenhauer’s passivity is just as typically Proustian. In another of Dallapiccola’s favourite passages, the narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu speaks of reading his ‘inner book of unknown signs’. This is a process for which none but the reader can provide rules: it is ‘one of those acts of creation in which nobody can take our place or even collaborate with us’.41 No longer is the artist subject to a pre-existent ‘law of nature’. As Large observes, the explication of involuntary memories – the starting point of Proust’s discussion of aesthetics – is here ‘figured as a dynamic process of “reading” a self-text’.42

36 37

38

39 40

41 42

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 192. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1969), I, 221–3. Duncan Large, Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 12–13, 25, 31. Schopenhauer, The World as Will, I, 175, 257. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (London: Faber, 1978), 400; Large, Nietzsche and Proust, 194–202. Proust, Finding Time Again, 187–8; see Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 144–5. Large, Nietzsche and Proust, 203.

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Neither Proust nor Schoenberg manages a complete overcoming of Schopenhauer. They tend to hesitate between the two poles: loss of individuality in the contemplation of Ideas (or self-sacrifice to instinct) on the one hand, affirmation of individuality on the other. There is one place in the Harmonielehre where Schoenberg attempts a synthesis. If he argues for Nietzschean individualism with respect to composers’ styles, he also notes that this is an effect of proximity. With historical distance, individualities are sublated, reappearing as expressive of ‘the spirit of mankind’. Thus Schoenberg can speak of ‘what is most important about the individual, that most profound introspection into an absorption with his own nature, that which leads him to express: the nature of mankind’ (411–12). This notion might have been Dallapiccola’s source, but he does not cite it. Nor (as we saw in Chapter 3) does he pay attention to Schoenberg’s warnings about fulfilment. ‘Integrity, truthfulness never turns into truth’, writes the author of the Harmonielehre, ‘for it would hardly be bearable if we knew truth’ (326). For Dallapiccola, it is precisely truth – the ‘deep inner truth of humanity’ – that the solitary, self-reading artist may reveal. This essence does not require historical distance to be grasped. As Dallapiccola sees it, the Idea of humanity is revealed in the art of today just as much as in that of eight hundred years ago: in the work of Cézanne, the Douanier Rousseau and Van Gogh just as much as in that of the thirteenth-century artists Duccio, Cimabue and Margaritone d’Arezzo. ‘Faced with artistic success’, Dallapiccola declares, ‘we always find ourselves outside time.’43 That sounds like Proust at his most Schopenhauerian. But once again Dallapiccola asserts his independence. For the narrator of À la recherche, the extra-temporal contemplation of essences gives pleasure: the only pleasure that is ‘both real and fertile’.44 For Dallapiccola, what the artist or spectator learns in the extra-temporal sphere is disturbing: It is angst, probably, that is the primary emotion that governs humanity today; an angst that springs from a radical alteration of our civilization, an angst that has come about from the way the world seems constantly to be on the eve of its destruction, that arises from our lack of certainty that we will find solutions for our thoroughly complicated problems, an angst, finally, that springs from the search for God, who seems to be keeping himself hidden.45

At this point, the argument seems to be spiralling out of control. These are not eternal problems: they belong to modernity. But this is, in fact, the crux of the issue. In contrast to Proust and Schoenberg, Dallapiccola makes a concerted effort to think particular and universal together, on the grandest scale. Drawing on an essay, Expressionism, by the same Hermann Bahr encountered in Chapter 1, he sketches

43 45

Dallapiccola, ‘Die moderne Musik’, 49. Dallapiccola, ‘Die moderne Musik’, 46.

44

Proust, Finding Time Again, 179–80, 183–4.

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an all-encompassing philosophy of art history. If, in impressionism, the deindividualized artist sees ‘with his bodily eyes’, in expressionism, the passionately individual creator sees with ‘the eye of the spirit’. While impressionism – ‘the completion, the climax of classic art’ – increased ‘the outer vision to its highest possibilities’, striving to make man ‘a complete passivum of his senses’, expressionism ‘seeks to dominate the outer world by the powers inherent in man’. The result is a recovery of ‘the oldest Art expression of mankind’: that of ‘all primitive and all Oriental art’.46 Bahr does not grant the spiritual eye ‘truth’. But, for Dallapiccola, this is precisely what ‘inner hearing’ – ‘the ear of the spirit’ – can reveal. In art that is faithful to the conventions of classical beauty (the ‘physical’, or ‘bodily’, variety), truth is covered up. When creators strip aside the veil, they are suddenly our contemporaries. The most notable case is Mozart. Plumbing the truth he carried ‘in the depths of his consciousness’, in the finale of Don Giovanni, Act 2, he found himself impelled to break with the conventions of his age and glimpse the future. Not only do the Commendatore’s tenths (at ‘Risolvi: Verrai?’) anticipate the wide intervals of expressionism; the governing rhythm following his entrance (dotted crotchet, quaver) adumbrates the Bergian Hauptrhythmus.47

II We have come a long way from Croce and Gentile, neither of whom would have countenanced this positing of angst as the transhistorical essence of humanity. Adorno too would have been critical. In Philosophie der neuen Musik, as for Dallapiccola, Schoenberg’s music lays bare the tormented soul of mankind. Expressionism’s rending of the veil of convention, furthermore, reveals the culminating stage in a despairing narrative of human destiny – the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ – whose roots lie in prehistory. And yet Adorno advances the idea of the universality of expressionism only to criticize it. In its ‘critique of semblance and play’ (Philosophy of New Music, 34–6), Schoenberg’s music of the period immediately preceding the First World War is hostile to the autonomous work. At the same time, in its characteristic polarization between frenzy and glacial stillness, the ‘seismographic record of traumatic shock’ becomes a principle for the creation of the very autonomous compositions – by extension, for the safeguarding of the very bourgeois subjectivity – that expressionism sought to shun (37, 42). In Scene 3 of the ‘drama with music’, Die glückliche Hand (1910–13), the ‘secret of loneliness’ is 46

47

Hermann Bahr, Expressionism, trans. R. T. Gribble (London: Frank Henderson, 1925), 56, 19, 69–70, 49, 5. Dallapiccola, ‘Die moderne Musik’, 47, 58–9.

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revealed. Its anxiety is real, but only as the fear of those separated from material production that they might be ‘compelled to awaken’ to reality (38, 39). Dallapiccola may raise the topics of ‘solitude’ and ‘critique’, but such candour with respect to the social meaning of his work stands outside his mode of thought. As the Don Giovanni examples show, his conception is what Adorno calls ‘loneliness as style’ (40–1). The authenticity of autonomous subjectivity remains above suspicion. Not even twelve-note technique can touch it. Dallapiccola does concede that serialism ‘has given us laws that expressionism lacked’. It offers composers an alternative to ‘being utterly individual’. But in their twelve-note music, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were all successful in developing ‘their own special personality that was unique to their art’. Future generations will recognize that, ‘for the most part’ all three wrote music ‘for inner listening’.48 As he puts it, ‘[p]ersonally, I have adopted this method because it is the only one, up till now, that has allowed me to express what I feel I have to express’.49 To return to our starting point: a greater contrast with the ideals of socialist realism would be hard to imagine. In Proust, the Dallapiccola of ‘Musica pianificata’ evidently thought, the commissars had met their match. Rejecting demands for an art that would take its subject matter directly from current problems, he cites the narrator’s insistence that the artist’s only duty is to his ‘inner book’. He can serve his country only in his capacity as artist, in his concentration on the ‘truth that lies before him’. Questions of patriotism, of law, morality and so on, have no place in his work.50 Such insistence on the autonomy of the aesthetic might be read as a Crocean commonplace, typical of Italian intellectuals of Dallapiccola’s generation. But the composer’s aristocratism drives him to a position that the liberal Croce would have found intolerable. Against the Czech musicians’ demand that composers should aim for success with the public, he invokes Cocteau: ‘Cultivate what the public holds against you: it’s you.’51 This is an important moment. If the critique of Dallapiccola’s aesthetic stance in terms of ‘loneliness as style’ appeared somewhat abstract, now the ideological presuppositions of his argument unravel before our eyes. Great art, we recall, is recognized because it ‘fully realizes the expression of an inner truth, of a universal truth, which grips the whole of humanity’. But for all expressionism’s insight into ‘the souls of men’, Dallapiccola does not suppose that angst-ridden truth will be universally comprehensible. Not everyone can enjoy a work of art. Enjoyment presupposes ‘a minimum of preparation’, a certain ‘habituation to a given language’.52 48 49

50 51

Ibid., 61, 69–70. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, trans. Deryck Cooke, Music Survey, 4/1 (1951), 330 (translation modified). Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 150; Proust, Finding Time Again, 187–90, 196–7. Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 153. 52 Ibid., 151.

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There need be no prima facie objection to this statement. At its core is a matter of fact – albeit one that, within what has been called the ‘ideology of natural taste’, is typically overlooked or rejected.53 The problem with Dallapiccola’s position, and the root of his incompatibility with both the liberal Croce and the Marxist Adorno, lies in the way this evidence of what the author of Philosophie der neuen Musik calls ‘the guilt of privilege’ (20) – the separation of mental and manual labour – is shrugged off. As Dallapiccola put it in 1948, ‘I don’t think I have ever believed in the fable – I don’t know whether it is romantic or demagogical – of “art for everyone”. I am, by nature, more disposed to think of an art for the “happy few”.’ As for the masses, he suggests, let them have Beethoven Nine.54 The issue of ‘commitment’ is once more close to hand. In the first paragraph of ‘Musica pianificata’, Dallapiccola refers to an ‘exhaustive and . . . drastic’ review of the so-called ‘Prague Manifesto’ of 1948 – the forerunner of the Czech five-year plan – by René Leibowitz.55 Given the equivalent positions then occupied by Dallapiccola and Leibowitz in their respective countries, as leading exponents of and apologists for twelve-note technique, one might assume that the composer of Il prigioniero was inspired to his diatribe by a sense of dodecaphonic solidarity. The socialist realists had, after all, criticized the way ‘so-called serious music’ was becoming ‘ever more individualistic and subjective in terms of its content, more complicated and artificial in terms of its form’.56 On reading Leibowitz’s text, however, one is struck how, following the lead of Sartre, this French disciple of Schoenberg shows sympathy for the egalitarianism of the socialist realist proposals. To be sure, Leibowitz pours scorn on the idea that music could return to the simplicity that socialist realism has in mind. And yet he is primarily concerned to lament the lack of clarity among communist musicians as to how to put their plans into practice. If he commends dodecaphony, it is because, in a manner apparently influenced by Adorno (with whom, according to Sabine Meine, he had made contact in 1946),57 he sees musical technique as the locus of the mediation between music and society that the communist intellectuals had failed to define. In contrast to Adorno, Leibowitz puts forward an optimistic vision. Musical innovation is tied to social innovation: ‘The committed musician is he who, defying the established order

53

54

55 57

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1986), 68. Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Notes sur mon opéra’, Polyphonie, 1 (1947–8), 140; Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 151. René Leibowitz, ‘Le musicien engagé’, Les temps modernes, 4/40 (1949), 322–39. 56 Ibid., 327. See Sabine Meine, ‘Leibowitz, René’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols. (2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 2001), XIV, 501.

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on the musical level, thereby defies the established order on the social level, and thus participates in his way in the establishment of a free society.’58 One might begin to wonder how the slogan of impegno ever came to be attached to Dallapiccola. In his anti-egalitarianism and insistence on the apolitical nature of creative activity, he occupies a position a good way to Leibowitz’s right. Indeed, it seems the Italian was taking the opportunity in ‘Musica pianificata’ to distance himself not just from socialist realism but – against everything asserted at the start of this chapter – from Sartrean existentialism as well. The situation is complex: a careful look at the circumstances surrounding the première of Il prigioniero will be necessary to untangle it. But it is high time we started to look at the opera ‘itself’, beginning with the chilling vision of its libretto.

III Dallapiccola’s observation that, up until the première, communist critics had lavished attention on him, appears especially significant when one starts to look at this text. Any communist intellectual chancing upon it in the late 1940s would surely have assumed its author was a comrade. Most tendentiously, the libretto can be read as a condemnation not just of fascism but of the Catholic Church as well. Set, as we have noted, during the Spanish Inquisition, it depicts priests as politically reactionary and inhuman torturers. In what Massimo Venuti calls his ‘inexplicable’, ‘irrational’ wickedness, Dallapiccola’s Grand Inquisitor exemplifies nothing less than the Kantian ‘diabolical evil’, carrying out ‘a cruel aesthetic joke’ (in Žižek’s definition) ‘just for the sake of it, not for any external goal like power’.59 Encouraged by his Jailer, who addresses him as ‘fratello’ (‘brother’), and tells him to ‘hope fervently’ – ‘you must hope to the point of agony’ – the Prisoner slips out of his cell (the door has been left open) and, after a terrifying journey along a seemingly endless passage in the Official in Zaragoza (the Inquisitorial prison in which he is being kept), emerges into a starlit spring night. He is allowed only a few moments to rejoice in his freedom. At ‘the height of ecstasy’, as the Prisoner ‘spreads out his arms in a gesture of love for all humanity’, he finds his embrace returned by that of the Grand Inquisitor. From his greeting, ‘fratello’, the Prisoner learns that it was him posing as the Jailer all along. ‘On the eve of your salvation’, the Grand Inquisitor asks, ‘why ever did you want to leave us?’ Taking his victim by the hand, ‘with great tenderness’, he leads him towards the rear of the stage, where a ‘ruddy light’ has begun flicker. ‘Il rogo!’, the Prisoner cries out: ‘The stake!’ 58 59

Leibowitz, ‘Le musicien engagé’, 339. Massimo Venuti, Il teatro di Dallapiccola (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1985), 45; Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 64.

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The temptation to link the action of Il prigioniero to concrete events is strong. ‘The fundamental argument against the “sincerity” of Nazi belief’, writes Žižek, is their treatment of the Jews before their physical annihilation: in a torturous process of physical and mental humiliation, they first deprived them of their human dignity, reducing them to a subhuman level, and only then killed them. In this way, they implicitly acknowledged the humanity of the Jews: while they claimed that the Jews were in fact like rats or vermin, they first had to reduce them brutally to that status.60

The Grand Inquisitor is similarly hard to accept at face value. If he is so dismayed by the Prisoner’s desire ‘to leave us’, if he genuinely believes the starlit night of the opera’s conclusion to be ‘the eve of your salvation’ (as he tells his captive in ‘a tone of the most sincere compassion’), then why does he find it necessary to reduce him to such a state of abjection? ‘“Hope . . .” the final torture . . . Of all I have suffered, the worst . . .’, the Prisoner cries out, finally recognizing his deception. As the Prisoner tells his mother during her visit to his cell in Scene 1, since the Jailer first spoke his ‘friendly word’, ‘fratello’, he has begun to pray again. He prays in Scene 1 and twice in Scene 3. His first word on escaping is ‘Alleluja!’ The Prisoner’s hope is intertwined with his faith: if the one perishes, the other must also. Experienced as crushingly hollow, the Grand Inquisitor’s question becomes a version of the inscription, ‘Arbeit macht frei!’, above the entrance to Auschwitz: confirmation that the Inquisition, like the ‘final solution’ – in Žižek’s words – ‘was carried out as a gigantic joke which submitted the victims to a supplementary act of gratuitous, cruel and ironic humiliation’.61 For Hannah Arendt, whose study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, appeared the year after Il prigioniero, the most shocking aspect of the concentration camps was precisely this ‘open anti-utility’.62 The business of ‘transforming the human personality into a mere thing’ amounted to ‘an unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil’ (438, 459). Arendt’s invocation of Kant, for whom ‘diabolical evil’ is something that cannot even be conceived, is explicit. In the way they ‘simply surpass our powers of understanding’ (441), the camps are its realization. The meaningless cruelty of Dallapiccola’s Grand Inquisitor, we might say, serves to keep this unfathomable evil before audiences’ eyes, as a terrible reminder. But the opera has a subtler message. As Il prigioniero helps us to see, the Nazis had a ghastly rationale. Arendt herself points out that the mass destruction of individuality produced a situation where ‘millions of human beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into the gas chambers’ (445). One notes how, at the close, the Prisoner needs only the gentlest of encouragement to move towards the stake. More to the point, far from testifying to a lack of Kant’s ‘pathological’ – which is to 60 62

Žižek, Totalitarianism?, 62–3. 61 Ibid., 63. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt, 1994), 445.

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say, all-too-human – motives (Arendt lists ‘self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice’ (459)), the Grand Inquisitor’s inhuman behaviour points to the Nazis’ thoroughly ‘pathological’ intentions. The Prisoner is being put to death, not for the sake of it, but because he is a heretic: a Protestant. That much can be gleaned from the conversation between two priests he interrupts in Scene 3: ‘The Communion sub utraque specie. . . They deny the real Presence. . .’.63 As far as these priests – and the Grand Inquisitor – are concerned, the Prisoner’s execution is in accordance with divine will: just as the extermination of millions of Jews, far from being impossible to deduce from ‘humanly comprehensible motives’ (as Arendt would have it (ix)), was held to be in accordance with the infallible will of the Führer. ‘Sacerdotes tui induantur justitiam’, sings the offstage chorus – of monks, according to the composer64 – in the first of the opera’s two choral intermezzi: ‘May thy priests be clothed with justice’. We still have no explanation as to why the Grand Inquisitor resorts to pointless torture. Here the opera responds to a psychoanalytic approach. In Žižek’s account, the totalitarian Leader is a ‘sadist pervert’. This is not ‘the pre-theoretical, commonsense notion of a “sadist” as a person who fully wills and enjoys the suffering he inflicts upon others’. The Leader ‘works for the enjoyment of the Other, not for his own: he becomes a sole instrument of the Other’s Will’.65 Nor is the notion of ‘enjoyment’ the standard one. It is Lacan’s jouissance, ‘usually identifiable’ in Žižek’s usage, as Sarah Kay points out, with ‘surplus enjoyment’: an unconscious pleasure in transgression that, urged on by the superego, accompanies the desiring subject at all times.66 In the ‘perverse’ case of totalitarianism, both desire and enjoyment are aligned with the Law. The Leader is the executant both of this Law – in Il prigioniero, the divine will – and its shadowy double. ‘Sadism’, writes Žižek, ‘relies on the splitting of the field of the Law into Law qua “Ego-Ideal” – a symbolic order which regulates social life and maintains social peace – and its obscene, superegotistical inverse’.67 For Arendt, Nazi power is cynical. It is only ‘sympathizers’ who believe. ‘The party members’, she writes, ‘never believe public statements and are not supposed to’ (383). As for the elite, they have a ‘supreme contempt for all facts and all reality’: ‘freedom from the content of their own ideologies’ (385, 387). A reading of Il

63

64 65

66 67

These are references to Luther’s denunciation of the Catholic practice of withholding the chalice from the laity and to Zwingli’s denial of transubstantiation. See Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 117–30. Dallapiccola, ‘Notes sur mon opéra’, 141. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 232; Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 234. See Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 163. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Enjoyment (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 55.

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prigioniero along these lines might run as follows: ‘The Grand Inquisitor knows very well that the Inquisition is nothing more than a cloak for pointless torture in which he is fully implicated, nevertheless he carries on with its external rituals, to the point of promising salvation to those who will be meaninglessly killed.’ The problem is that, as Žižek insists, this situation describes the normal functioning of ideology in a totalitarian state. The case of the elite involves a ‘much more radical type of selfdistance’. ‘[N]otwithstanding his awareness of manipulation’, Žižek claims, ‘Hitler basically believed in its results.’ The Nazi inner circle maintained a ‘simultaneous coexistence of the ultimate cynicism and the ultimate fanaticism’: a ‘psychotic split’.68 It cannot be taken for granted that the Jailer and the Grand Inquisitor are one and the same. Dallapiccola may insist that the two parts are to be played by a single singer; he thus indicates that they are two parts. Their relationship is ambiguous. Better: the Grand Inquisitor is psychotically split in the way Žižek describes. There is a sense in which his question, ‘On the eve of your salvation, why ever did you want to leave us?’, is utterly cynical. At the same time, as the composer directs, it is ‘most sincere’. But it is not so much the Grand Inquisitor who is ‘split’ as the Law he embodies. The ‘pointless’ torture of the Prisoner is the unspeakable truth of divine will: its necessary support. ‘Power . . . relies on an obscene supplement’, which ‘is operative only in so far as it remains unacknowledged, hidden from the public eye.’69 This is why the Grand Inquisitor initiates the Prisoner’s ‘torture through hope’ in disguise: in the form of a character who has only a shadowy existence. For Žižek, ‘identification with community is ultimately always based upon some shared guilt or, more precisely, upon the fetishistic disavowal of this guilt’.70 As he explains, despite the public character of Nazi anti-Semitism, the relationship between the two levels, the text of the public ideology and its ‘obscene’ superego supplement, remained fully operative: Nazis themselves treated the Holocaust as a kind of collective ‘dirty secret’. This fact not only posed no obstacle to the execution of the Holocaust – it precisely served as its libidinal support, since the very awareness that ‘we are all together in it’, that we participate in a common transgression, served as a cement to the Nazi collective coherence.

The ‘pointless’ torture perpetrated in the camps follows the same logic. Its very excess bears witness to the ‘surplus-enjoyment provided by executing orders’: it too was experienced as ‘transgressive’.71 Consider how, in Scene 3 of Il prigioniero, one of Dallapiccola’s priests ‘lets his eyes rest for a long time on the spot where the Prisoner is crouching’. It seems clear that the priest sees the Prisoner, and yet nothing happens. The alarm is not raised, the victim is not recaptured and led back to his 68 70

Žižek, For They Know Not, 243–5. 69 Žižek, Plague, 73; Žižek, Metastases, 55, 71. Žižek, Metastases, 57. 71 Žižek, Plague, 57.

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cell; indeed, he is left in desperate confusion. ‘Did they see me, those terrible eyes?’, he cries out. Fully aware of the trap into which the Prisoner has fallen, one might suggest (following Žižek), the priest is ‘enjoying’ the whole transgressive business.72 As for the chorus, its ‘invocation of God’s mercy in a place where torture and burning at the stake are part of the daily routine’ amounts to a blasphemous perversion, according to one commentator.73 The behaviour of the Inquisition, as portrayed in this opera, confirms Žižek’s general thesis: maintenance of community – all community – requires a ‘primordial lie’.74

IV Introducing the psychoanalytic dimension allows us to resolve the ambiguity over the opera’s contemporaneous referent: as a study in the very mechanism of tyranny, it can be particular and universal all at once. This is a reading to which we shall return. But one can imagine how, in the Italy of the late 1940s, such theoretical finessing might not have been the order of the day. For the notional communist intellectual summoned up earlier, Dallapiccola’s Inquisition would have laid itself open to interpretation not as a universally applicable allegory so much as a specific condemnation of the conduct of the Catholic Church under fascism. Evidence of collaboration with the regime was ready to hand. A reference to the Lateran Pacts of 1929 would have been sufficient; the reluctance of Pius XII to protest against Hitler’s policies – in particular, his failure to intervene more forcefully on behalf of Rome’s Jewish population during the German occupation – could also have been invoked. The Jailer’s celebration of the ‘Beggars’ revolt’ of the late 1560s and early 1570s against Spanish rule in the Netherlands, in the jubilant ‘Aria in tre strofe’ he sings to the Prisoner in Scene 2, appears to confirm the opera’s left-wing credentials. A key element in the Don Carlos story, and thus well known to operatic audiences familiar with the treatment by Verdi, this historical material echoes down the centuries as one of the great monuments to popular liberation (thanks, above all, to the play by Schiller on which Verdi’s opera is based). The Prisoner does not only hold the ‘wrong’ religious views. As Arblaster puts it, he is ‘a partisan of the revolt, who rejoices when his jailer tells him of the success of the . . . Beggars against the Spanish’.75 In the late 1940s, the contemporary resonance of such an uprising against a cruel foreign oppressor would have been unmistakable. Dallapiccola 72

73

74

Perhaps this priest, like the Jailer, is the Grand Inquisitor in disguise. See Massimo Mila, ‘Il prigioniero di Luigi Dallapiccola’, in Luigi Dallapiccola and Massimo Mila, Tempus aedificandi. Carteggio 1933–1975, ed. Livio Aragona (San Giuliano Milanese: Ricordi, 2005), 369–70. Jacques Wildberger, ‘Luigi Dallapiccolas musikgeschichtliche Sternstunde’, Schweizerische Musikzeitung, 115/4 (1975), 178. Žižek, Metastases, 57. 75 Arblaster, Viva la Libertà!, 281.

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himself makes the connection when, immediately following a description of his visit to the estuary of the Scheldt (a major scene of the Flemish revolt), he notes that the first draft of the opera was completed on 25 April 1947: ‘two years after the Partisan uprising in northern Italy’.76 The insurrection was precipitated by the communists.77 This is not to suggest that Dallapiccola was secretly pro-Soviet. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his opposition to socialist realism. On the other hand, one cannot help wondering whether, had the Italian general election of spring 1948 not delivered its crushing defeat to the left, he would have felt the need to take the strident anti-communist stance displayed in ‘Musica pianificata’. The polarization of Italian politics at this time should not be underestimated. Paul Ginsborg writes of ‘two vast opposing fronts: the one having its focal point in the employing classes, the Christian Democrats and the United States; the other centred on the working-class movement, the Communists and Russia’. By the time of the election, the ‘conflict of interests and ideologies’ was reaching ‘dramatic and decisive heights’.78 ‘Musica pianificata’ was a provocation, appearing in Il ponte, a leading left-wing monthly journal in which Dallapiccola had never previously published and never would again. It would also be wrong, though, to view the composer as a standard-bearer for Christian Democracy. The technical innovations of Il prigioniero caused just as much controversy on the right as they did among proponents of socialist realism.79 Significantly, Dallapiccola’s one brief period of regular journalistic activity, in 1945–7, had been in the service of the fortnightly Il mondo (later Mondo europeo), which combined high cultural internationalism with ‘democratic’ political nonalignment.80 In the mid-1940s, there were even gestures towards an alliance between left-wing politics and artistic modernism. Nevertheless, as Andrea Estero has explained, this characteristic post-war Italian formation would not begin to solidify for another fifteen years.81 Stephen Gundle notes how the 1946 ‘dispute’ over Il politecnico, the short-lived left-wing journal edited by the novelist Elio Vittorini (1908–1966), ‘had revealed that many of the intellectuals who had adhered to the PCI [Partito Comunista Italiano] 76 77

78 79

80

81

Dallapiccola, ‘The Genesis’, 372. See Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1980 (London: Penguin, 1990), 65–8. Ibid., 72. The hostile review by Franco Abbiati (1898–1981) in the establishment daily Corriere della sera was entitled ‘Sussurri e cataclismi nelle dodecafonie del “Prigioniero”’. See Andrea Estero, ‘Il dibattito musicale nella pubblicistica’, in Guido Salvetti and Bianca Maria Antolini (eds.), Italia millenovecentocinquanta (Milan: Garzanti, 1999), 383n59. See Mila De Santis, ‘Dallapiccola per “Il Mondo”’, in Daniele Spini (ed.), Studi e fantasie. Saggi, versi, musica e testimonianze in onore di Leonardo Pinzauti (Antella: Passigli, 1996), 83–102. Estero, ‘Il dibattito musicale’, 378.

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remained individualistic and aristocratic in their outlook’. In the clampdown that followed, under the dogmatic Emilio Sereni (1907–77), ‘the PCI’s alignment with the USSR was more or less total’. ‘[N]o open criticism whatsoever was brooked of Soviet positions.’82 Zafred’s attack on Il prigioniero was part of a concerted ‘anti-formalist’ offensive aimed at Schoenbergians by the music critics of both L’Unità and Avanti!: Zafred and Rubens Tedeschi on the one; Diego Carpitella and Luigi Pestalozza on the other.83 By putting himself at loggerheads with the Stalinists, Dallapiccola was emphasizing that, for all the endorsement he might have received in the past from communist intellectuals, and for all that his opera was apparently philorevolutionary and anti-clerical in the extreme, he was no hard-line leftist, indeed no leftist at all. In the circumstances, such political manoeuvring was scarcely to be avoided. In October 1949, in a tortured confessional letter (he asked the recipient to destroy it), Dallapiccola showed his concern at the negative image of the Inquisition that audiences would find – and that the conductor of the première, Hermann Scherchen was already finding – in the work.84 It seems the Florentine première only went ahead as a result of a chance conversation between an acquaintance of Dallapiccola’s and ‘a ministerial big-shot’ (un grosso personaggio ministeriale). According to the composer, his acquaintance was asked ‘whether it was true that I was a rabid anticlerical [un mangiapreti]’. ‘“I don’t know him all that well”, the acquaintance replied, “but I meet him every Sunday at Mass with his little girl”.’ Letters arrived at the Ministero dello Spettacolo, protesting against the performance of an opera ‘which showed the Spanish Inquisition in a dim light, and, what is more during the Holy Year 1950’.85 ‘Of all the insults hurled at me during the first half of 1950’, Dallapiccola wrote, the implication that the work was ‘essentially an attack on the Catholic Church . . . was the only one that deeply wounded me’.86 But this ‘implication’ would not go away. In an ironic reversal, Dallapiccola soon found himself defending the work not against, but from, the Church’s enemies. If Italian communists objected to Il prigioniero, the authorities in Moscow seem to have appreciated the opera’s anti-clerical flavour. Anticipating the possibility of a performance in the Soviet capital, Dallapiccola insisted that the following text was to be inserted into the programme book: ‘As a believer I want to emphasize that there is nothing against the Catholic Church in Il prigioniero, but only a protest against tyranny and oppression.’87 The performance did not take place.

82

83 84 86

Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 48, 52, 50–1. Estero, ‘Il dibattito musicale’, 378–9, 385–6. Dallapiccola and Mila, Tempus aedificandi, 141–2. 85 Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola, 125. Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 62. 87 Nicolodi (ed.), Luigi Dallapiccola, 91–2.

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V In an article of June 1950, in the thick of the controversy, Dallapiccola declared that without the political experiences of the previous dozen years (first the ‘legalized persecution’ of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign, then the Nazi occupation), he would have written neither the Canti di prigionia nor Il prigioniero. But his main concern was to show how his obsession with the themes of freedom and imprisonment had its origins in experiences of his childhood and adolescence. As far as Il prigioniero was concerned, he wanted to stress ‘how, in the opera, there is no reference that might be interpreted as directed towards this or that current political tendency’.88 By tracing the source of his work, in self-consciously Proustian style, to distant events conjured up in memory – his ‘inner book’ – Dallapiccola was upholding his central aesthetic claim. The way to truth lies in solitary meditation, not in preoccupation with current events. As Mila explained, if Dallapiccola’s work is ‘engagé’, it is ‘engagé malgré lui’.89 But what of the composer’s audience? No aesthetic stance, not even one so declaredly self-sufficient as Dallapiccola’s inward-turning aristocratism, can subsist in a vacuum. His opera has to have listeners, must receive some form of ideological – not to say financial – backing, if it is not to collapse into solipsism, if its ‘dialectical’ aspiration to universal recognition is not to prove vain. Let us look at ‘Musica pianificata’ one more time. The starting point of this attack on socialist realism is a direct identification of the Czech five-year plan with the cultural policies of Italian fascism. The ‘Prague Manifesto’ is immediately compared to Alceo Toni’s ‘Manifesto musicale’ of 1932. Dallapiccola proceeds twice more to relate the proposals for the five-year plan to his memories of the fascist ventennio.90 He employs what would become a typical Cold War ploy: perhaps the quintessential ideological weapon as far as the West was concerned. It is the notion of ‘totalitarianism’, Arendt’s notion (most famously), according to which ‘the Nazi and the Bolshevik systems’ are ‘variations on the same model’.91 For all that fascist Italy coined the term, Arendt does not consider Mussolini’s regime to have been ‘totalitarian’.92 The very example Dallapiccola draws on, in sarcastic reference to having ‘enjoyed totalitarianism for twenty years’, backfires. He wants to demonstrate the obtuseness of those – Stalinist commissars and fascist hierarchs alike – who imagine that ‘works of art can be written to order’.93 But the season of contemporary stage works held in Rome and Milan in 1942 involved a celebration of musical modernism impossible under either Hitler or Stalin. 88 89 91 93

Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Qualche cenno sulla genesi del “Prigioniero”’, Paragone, 1/6 (1950), 54. Mila, ‘“Il prigioniero”’, 303. 90 Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 147, 148, 152. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, xxxn5. 92 Ibid., 308–9. Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 148.

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Dallapiccola’s notion of an ‘apolitical’ art is difficult to defend under any circumstances. To abstain from politics, as Sartre explains, is also to take up a position.94 And this is particularly evident in the case of the twelve-note composer. As Sartre points out in his response to the article by Leibowitz cited earlier, dodecaphonic music does not merely require an elite audience for its appreciation. By its very difficulty it tends to exclude the majority of listeners, actively shoring up the elite’s distinctive status.95 To assert that such music may be truth-telling and yet ‘apolitical’, that the path to universal humanity must bypass what Sartre would call the contemporary ‘situation’, is to ignore the social inequality of which the music is both product and support. But there is a specific historical reason to be suspicious of the label ‘apolitical’ in the present case. For these were the years of the early Cold War, when promotion of the individual creative freedom Dallapiccola defended so fiercely became a CIA priority. That the composer – like so many others – was surely unaware of his work’s potential for politicized exploitation was no bar to its ideological entanglement. ‘The aesthetic modernism of post-war Europe and the US cannot be viewed as apolitical’, so Anne C. Shreffler has argued, because its main concepts developed in the context of, and specifically in opposition to, the diametrically different notion of freedom advocated by Communist governments. The oft-proclaimed aesthetic autonomy grew out of an intentionally oppositional stance, even in cases where the art was unrelated to the CCF [the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom] or any specific program.96

This is painting with a broad brush. But the political character of Dallapiccola’s apoliticism is plain to see. And it is not only in his prose that the composer found himself lending support to the US cause. Consider the fact that, despite the hostility of its organizer, the Russian-American composer Nicolas Nabokov (1903–1978), towards twelve-note technique, the Canti di prigionia found their way on to the programme for what Mark Carroll describes as the ‘blatant anti-communist posturing’ of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s 1952 Paris Festival, L’Œuvre du XXe siècle.97 But it is the frequency of performances of Il prigioniero in the opera houses of the German Federal Republic – the very front line in the ‘cultural Cold War’ – that is most impressive.98 94 95 96

97 98

Sartre, ‘What is Literature?’, 252. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965), 210–11. Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, in Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (eds.), Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 238. Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19, 69. As Dietrich Kämper puts it, Il prigioniero ‘became one of the most frequently performed works of the new music theatre in post-war [West] German musical life’. See his Gefangenschaft und Freiheit. Leben und Werk des Komponisten Luigi Dallapiccola (Cologne: Gitarre + Laute, 1984), 78.

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Attempts to explain the opera’s success in Dallapiccola’s own terms could tell only a partial story. One would argue that the deletion of the Prisoner’s Jewish identity and the location of the opera’s action in the remote past, in their twin universalizing functions, help to grant the work its ‘truth’, a quality that further manifests itself in the work’s technical progressiveness, or rather, does so ‘necessarily’; the whole account sealed, no doubt, by an invocation of the ‘inner book’. In an article published in 1960, Dallapiccola placed Il prigioniero alongside Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Moses und Aron, Berg’s Wozzeck, Busoni’s Doktor Faust and Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Torneo notturno in a modernist pantheon. ‘There is no more certainty’, he declares: ‘Doubt has entered the opera house.’ Once again, he gestures at the universal. ‘Doubt’ is bound up with ‘solitude’, ‘this contemporary condition’.99 On this reading, Il prigioniero was a success because it communicated the angst of what it meant to be alive in the middle years of the twentieth century; if not the angst of the ‘human condition’, tout court. Engaged by the time of this article on Ulisse, Dallapiccola goes on to announce the impulse towards religious consolation that culminates in that work’s final moments. ‘I should like some day, after all the question marks – mine and others’, to succeed in expressing a “certainty”.’100 At the period of Il prigioniero, the artist’s inner quest leads to the recognition of universal Care. At the conclusion of Ulisse, it leads to the acknowledgement of divine presence. But the difference between the two positions should not be over-emphasized. The movement of thought in both is the same: solitary meditation leads to truth. And here one can start to seek out another explanation for the success of Il prigioniero. In its ‘protest against tyranny and oppression’, the opera places on stage the confrontation of the truth-telling individual and the lying collective. As such, it plays into one of the great political myths of the period. Dallapiccola’s opera is one of this myth’s most prominent musical realizations; it is not alone. Take the Piano Concerto (1963–5) by Elliott Carter (1908–2012), and even more significantly, the discourse that has tended to surround it. Commissioned by the Ford Foundation (‘an integral component of America’s Cold War machinery’, according to Frances Stonor Saunders an organization with the closest of links to the Congress for Cultural Freedom), much of it composed in West Berlin at the invitation of the Berlin Senate (for whom Carter’s friend, the thoroughly compromised Nicolas Nabokov, had been employed as ‘Adviser on International Cultural Affairs’ in 1962), the work is described by David Schiff as featuring a ‘fundamental opposition between the soloist’s freedom and the orchestra’s tyranny’.101 The

99 101

Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 102–3. 100 Ibid., 104. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), 139–44, 351; David Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter (London: Eulenburg, 1983), 236.

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polarization of protagonist and mass, Schiff declares (following Michael Steinberg), breaks ‘completely’ with romantic precedents. While the orchestra is ‘a machine, insistent and brutal’, which represses ‘[i]ndividual instrumental colours . . . in favour of dark, mysterious, heterophonic mixtures’, the solo piano, along with its accompanying concertino, ‘redefine[s] virtuosity as freedom, vision and imagination’. The two forces ‘inevitably become locked in battle’, with the orchestra increasingly taking on the character of ‘a suffocating blanket of sound’. But against all the odds, the piano wins out. ‘It is victorious’, Carter wrote at the time of the première, ‘by being an individual.’102 Eloquent philosophical justification for this ethic of heroic solo resistance could be found in the anti-communist polemic L’homme révolté (1951) by Albert Camus (1913–1960). ‘For the first time in history’, Camus declares, ‘a doctrine and a movement supported by an empire in arms has, as its purpose, definitive revolution and the unification of the world.’ In their nihilism and murderous power-hungry cynicism, the Soviets have deprived man of ‘the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention – in a word, of his greatness’.103 Also worth mentioning is Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1938–40), not so much for its exposé of the show trials, as for the way it depicts the old Bolshevik, Rubashov, discovering what, as a good Party man, he christens the ‘grammatical fiction’ of his individual subjectivity: his ‘I’, the unlocalizable yet tangible interior voice that, unbidden, speaks a visceral truth that is non-logical and humane.104 But the key text is, of course, Nineteen Eighty-Four: Winston Smith’s struggle to maintain what ‘Newspeak’ calls ‘ownlife’.105 The relationship between Orwell’s ‘Last Man’ and his nemesis, the Inner Party member O’Brien, can be mapped on to that between the Prisoner and the Jailer/Grand Inquisitor with a neatness that is almost uncanny. In both opera and novel (both completed in 1948) the prospect of proletarian revolt against totalitarian oppression gives the victim cause to hope; in both cases the victim is permitted a brief moment (or moments) of delusory freedom before capture. In a coup de théâtre, parallel to that in the opera, the supposed ally then reveals himself as having been duplicitous all along. Just like the Grand Inquisitor, O’Brien finds it necessary to reduce his victim to abjection before killing him. Il prigioniero even has its ‘Big Brother’ moment: ‘There’s someone watching over you’, the Jailer tells the Prisoner as he leaves. Looking at Il prigioniero in terms of its libretto alone, one cannot help wondering whether the opera’s success was not merely the product of a particular set of historical and geopolitical circumstances. Nor is Dallapiccola’s music immune 102 103 104

105

Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 228–37. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 155, 207. See Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (London: Vintage, 1994), 90–2, 102, 116–17, 121–2, 124–33, 201–7. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 2000), 85.

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from these kinds of considerations. It cannot have hurt the work’s growing international reputation that, as Carroll puts it, the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s 1954 Rome festival, La musica nel XX secolo (for which Dallapiccola sat on the music advisory board), marked the moment when the liberal establishment achieved ‘reconciliation’ with the ideology of neo-modernism. The festival played a major role in helping to carry out for twelve-note composers that process of assimilation which, a few years earlier, had addressed itself to abstract expressionism: the case of New York’s celebrated ‘theft’ of ‘The Idea of Modern Art’.106 Deradicalized, twelvenote music moved into the mainstream of cultural products acceptable to what Carroll, following Alexander Ringer, calls the ‘power elite’.107 In the face of the ‘the yea-saying bromides of socialist realism’ (Richard Taruskin), dodecaphony’s capacity for ‘authentic’ expressions of anguished humanity fitted the propaganda needs of the West to perfection. The point, Carroll suggests, was that serial music could ‘typify a creative individualism and risk-taking that only the West could sanction’.108 For leading West German critics of the period, such as the Schoenbergians Josef Rufer (1893–1985) and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (1901–1988), Dallapiccola’s opera entirely fulfilled its composer’s universalizing ambitions. Il prigioniero, according to Stuckenschmidt, is not only ‘the most impassioned and authentic [gültigste] musical reaction to the European torment of Fascism and National Socialism’. It is the work of a composer who can only be described as heimatlos – stateless, without nation – so deeply does he register the suffering cry of humanity ‘from all corners of the globe [auf allen Breitengraden]’.109 Rufer writes of a ‘portent’ that ‘ought to hang over humanity for all time’. As a searing ‘reminder’ to audiences of the ‘nature and value of freedom’, the ‘epitome of human dignity’, Il prigioniero addresses ‘a matter of eternally relevant concern for the whole of humanity’.110 This kind of interpretation is not confined to commentators of the 1950s.111 But it cannot be taken at face value. To the extent that the threat posed to individual freedom by inhuman power is construed as the essential contemporary – or eternal – problem of humanity, the work is inscribed within the key trope of anti-communist 106

107 108

109

110

111

Carroll, Music and Ideology, 169, 4, in the latter case citing Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 189. Carroll, Music and Ideology, 140. Richard Taruskin, ‘Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology’, 19th-Century Music, 16/3 (1993), 301; Carroll, Music and Ideology, 169. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Schöpfer der Neuen Musik (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1958), 240, 228. Josef Rufer, ‘Luigi Dallapiccola “Il prigioniero”’, in Oper im XX. Jahrhundert. Musik der Zeit: Eine Schriftenreihe zur zeitgenössischen Musik, 6 (1954), 58, 60. See, for example, Antonio Trudu, ‘“Il prigioniero”: alla ricerca della libertà’, in De Santis (ed.), Dallapiccola. Letture e prospettive, 298–9.

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Cold War propaganda we have observed in musicological, philosophical and literary discourse. As a counter-balance to Rufer’s or Stuckenschmidt’s Il prigioniero, it is worth imagining an opera that, rather than – as Bayan Northcott has it – ‘asserting individual worth against the forces of oppression’,112 would condemn the subjective freedom fostered by modernity for the damage it inflicts on traditional collectives – on working-class solidarity, for example. One cannot begin to envisage Dallapiccola composing such a work. And yet the idea is not inherently ridiculous, especially not in the context of the Italian cinematic neo-realism of the immediate post-war period. Claims for the universality of Il prigioniero can all too easily slip into ideology, whose ground is not so much geopolitics as social prejudice. The argument is not that Dallapiccola’s opera was fully instrumentalized as a ‘weapon’ in the ‘cultural Cold War’. Without a detailed study of the political economy of programming practice in West German opera houses, concert halls and radio stations during the 1950s and 1960s (a book in itself), the issue of instrumentalization must remain moot.113 But two further observations may lend weight to the idea that the success of Il prigioniero owed at least something to its capacity to resonate with the propaganda imperatives of the period. First is the fact that, during the opera’s first dozen years, when it was being taken up all over the West, in Italy – after the initial hullabaloo – it disappeared almost without trace. Following the Florentine première, the work was not seen again until a production by La Scala in 1962: a solitary concert performance was broadcast from in Milan in 1953. In 1950, as we saw, the work was unacceptable to both left and right. That following the lead of La Scala, stagings of Il prigioniero became yearly events in Italian opera houses, may be taken as confirmation that, particularly for the liberal left (increasingly influential by the mid-1960s), musical modernism was no longer to be dismissed as cacophony (or bourgeois decadence). In retrospect we can see that the links established at this period between artistic and political ‘progressives’ merely brought Italy into line with the rest of Western Europe, where modernistically inclined non-communist left intellectuals had, for a decade, been the targets of clandestine US generosity. Newly de-Stalinized but still resolutely anticapitalist (or anti-consumerist) Italian theorists began unknowingly to do the CIA’s bidding. The second observation is the one with which this chapter began: that of the absence of Il prigioniero from the world’s operatic stages in the 1980s and 1990s. Northcott’s plaintive incomprehension, faced in the centenary year with the virtual disappearance of Dallapiccola’s entire work since the mid-1970s – ‘So what happened?’ – appears naive, particularly given the way his account leaves aside any 112 113

Bayan Northcott, ‘The Forgotten Modernist’, The Independent (26 January 2004), 52. The groundwork has been laid in Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 75–98.

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engagement with recent political history.114 The rapid decline in the frequency of performances of Il prigioniero in the late 1970s must be partly a result of the composer’s death: the fact that the great man was no longer available to be fêted. But the thawing of the Cold War was surely a factor too. If this answer appears too easy, one can point to works that have shared Il prigioniero’s fate. Two other markedly anti-totalitarian (or anti-tyrannical) operas, Gottfried von Einem’s Dantons Tod and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, both dating from the immediate post-war period (first produced in 1947 and 1950, respectively), and both internationally successful throughout the 1950s and 1960s in a manner that clearly distinguishes them from the ‘flash in the pan’ so characteristic of twentiethcentury operatic history, have similarly come to grief in more recent decades. To put the point the other way round: it is not clear, on purely aesthetic grounds, why the contemporary operas of Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes in particular (premièred in 1945), should have survived so much better. Dallapiccola would have been appalled to think that, at the end of the century, while his work languished on the sidelines, Grimes was a staple of the international repertory: an opera he judged ‘cynical, horrid, disjointed, bloody stupid [fregno], and badly made’.115 Il prigioniero is hampered by its length (it is not the only major twentieth-century one-acter that has been underperformed); Britten’s musical language is also a good deal more ‘accessible’. But perhaps most significantly, while Grimes is far from apolitical, it is famously open to reinterpretation, and certainly not available to be reduced (or not easily) to a particular situation (e.g. ‘protest against totalitarianism’), in the way Il prigioniero so often has been. And this is indicative of one of the great ironies of Dallapiccola’s career. For all that he insisted (following Schoenberg following Schopenhauer) that, in their dedication to ‘inner truth’ rather than success, great artists necessarily write for the future and are bound to be misunderstood by their contemporaries,116 it would seem that he and his work are bound to their time: that they transcend it only with difficulty.

VI What then of the recent upturn in the opera’s fortunes? To the extent that this revival has now continued well beyond the centenary celebrations, does it not demonstrate that the work possesses something of the ‘truth’ for which Dallapiccola was striving? Here too, we must question whether Il prigioniero’s success can be devoid of reference ‘towards this or that current political tendency’. In the present climate, the return to prominence of an opera that thematizes the struggle for liberty against religious fundamentalism, state oppression and torture is not, perhaps, altogether surprising. Nor should this return unequivocally be welcomed, any more than the 114 116

Northcott, ‘The Forgotten Modernist’, 52. 115 Dallapiccola and Mila, Tempus aedificandi, 112. See Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 152–3; Schopenhauer, The World as Will, I, 236; Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 325.

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opera’s success of the 1950s and 1960s should be recalled with nostalgia. It is clear by now that the slogan on which the fortunes of Il prigioniero turn – its ‘protest against tyranny and oppression’ – is far from ‘apolitical’. As Žižek sees it, the opposition, freedom versus totalitarianism, ‘actively prevents us from thinking’. ‘Throughout its entire career’, he declares (implicitly criticizing his own earlier work), ‘“totalitarianism” was an ideological notion that sustained the complex operation . . . of guaranteeing the liberal-democratic hegemony, dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the “twin”, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorship.’117 Returning to the ‘Cold War’ Il prigioniero, we can see that its critique of ‘tyranny and oppression’ is similarly problematic. More specifically, it is undialectical: it presents the enemy as entirely Other, his actions stemming from a set of beliefs for which the Prisoner can in no way be held responsible. Whether the Jailer/Grand Inquisitor stands for an officer in Mussolini’s OVRA, in the SS, in the KGB or – to bring matters up to date – an ‘Islamo-fascist’ terrorist, or indeed, an official at some venue of ‘extraordinary rendition’, the opera leaves liberal consciences shocked but confirmed in their own blamelessness. As Jacques Wildberger puts it, ‘Dallapiccola has no intention whatsoever of tracking down socio-political or even economic mechanisms as the real causes of terror’.118 In what appears to be its plea on behalf of individual freedom conceived as an absolute good, Il prigioniero stands, for all its ‘tragic’ finale, as an example of what Herbert Marcuse called ‘affirmative culture’: a work that does not, as it were, see beyond the bourgeois milieu within which it was produced, and thus fails to take account of the fact that the very freedom on behalf of which it proselytizes, far from being universalizable, is itself contingent – under present socio-economic conditions, just as under those of 1950 – on domination, exploitation, slavery.119 Such a judgement condemns Il prigioniero as mere bourgeois ideology. But is that fair? If the opera is to be ‘rescued’ as a work of modernism, one must hope not. And indeed, closer scrutiny of some ‘affirmative’ readings will suggest that they are scarcely adequate to Dallapiccola’s text. Mila in 1950 is particularly striking. The Jailer, he writes, is ‘the hero-saint who sacrifices himself, making others suffer for the salvation of the world’. He is ‘a martyr who . . . forgets and sacrifices himself, qua individual, on the altar of the good of humanity’. Jailer and Prisoner are equally unfree. And yet ‘the central theme of Dallapiccola’s inspiration’ is ‘the inextricable mystery whereby it so often happens that liberty celebrates its triumphs in the depths of a dungeon, and affirms itself and gains vitality precisely through the loss of the material liberty of the individual’. Freedom, Mila declares, is inviolable: it is man’s ‘sacred and intangible essence’.120 117 119

120

Žižek, Totalitarianism?, 3. 118 Wildberger, ‘Sternstunde’, 179. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Penguin, 1968), 88–133. Mila, ‘“Il prigioniero”’, 304–5.

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One should doubtless view these words in the context of Dallapiccola’s concern over the Catholic reception of the opera. In the confessional letter of October 1949 referred to earlier, he specifically asked Mila to ‘pass over’ the apparently anti-clerical elements in the work.121 But Mila is not the only critic to attempt a reconciliation between Il prigioniero and the Church. The Earl of Harewood’s account has the virtue of pointing to the opera’s final words. As the Grand Inquisitor leads his victim towards the stake, the Prisoner stops, whispers ‘La libertà . . .’ (‘Freedom . . .’), and ‘gazes upwards’. The striking image brings to the fore the political and philosophical concerns at the heart of Il prigioniero. But what do the words mean? The Prisoner has no idea: he speaks ‘con incoscienza’. For Harewood, though, the sense is unproblematic: ‘the Prisoner comes to see that his ultimate fate is to gain salvation at the stake, just as certainly as he knows that the ultimate torture was hope’.122 As a result of his sadistic treatment at the hands of the Inquisition, we are to understand, the victim has come to repent his heresy. Purification by fire, Mila suggests (in a revised version of his article from 1962), ‘is the only hope that remains’.123 The sense here is ‘desperately perverse’, as Mila himself admits.124 It is worth noting how, in 1947, in a letter to another critic who had insisted on the religious foundation of his work, Dallapiccola ‘asked whether this assertion ought not to be modified in the light of the “despairing” opera which he was just completing’.125 In 1946 Mila had written of Dallapiccola’s ‘deeply-felt pessimism which closes off all hope of victory’; his expressionistic lack of ‘idealism’s consoling faith in historical providence’.126 To turn his interpretation around by 180 degrees as he did four years later was not only to try to bring the work within the bounds of Catholic acceptability but also to make it amenable to the dominant liberal philosophy of the period. An educated Italian audience of 1950 would have recognized Mila’s hymn to man’s ‘sacred and intangible essence’ as a reference to Croce’s ‘religion of liberty’: the confidence that history – to quote the English title of one of the philosopher’s most important texts – is ‘the story of liberty’.127 History is not chaotic, but a cumulative process of human interaction that is rational and positive. No event can be entirely evil. Even the Grand Inquisitor can be comprehended. His aim – ‘the good of humanity’ – is the right one, even if his means are ‘perverse’. In a universe lacking transcendence (can one imagine the Prisoner coming to any other conclusion?), the opera’s final words nevertheless affirm a goal of timeless value.

121 123 124 125 126 127

Dallapiccola and Mila, Tempus aedificandi, 142. 122 Harewood (ed.), Kobbé’s Complete, 1248. Massimo Mila, I costumi della Traviata (Pordenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1984), 291. Mila, ‘“Il prigioniero”’, 305. See Roman Vlad, Luigi Dallapiccola, trans. Cynthia Jolly (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1957), 38. Massimo Mila, Breve storia della musica (Milan: Bianchi-Giovini, 1946), 338. See Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, trans. Sylvia Sprigge, rev. Folke Leander and Claes G. Ryn (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000).

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And yet a suspicion remains that Mila’s 1946 reading was closer to the truth. Consider Arblaster’s attempt to present the conclusion of Il prigioniero as not ‘as pessimistic as some commentators have suggested’. As he puts it, ‘[t]he revolt in the Netherlands was, after all, successful, just as Italian fascism was also defeated in the end. Individuals may be crushed by oppression, but oppression does not always triumph.’128 Arblaster has at least some of Croce’s faith in history; but does the Prisoner share it? For all he knows, the one example of ‘history as the story of liberty’ with which he has been presented, the rebellion in Flanders, may have been a lie: just another element in the elaborate torture prepared for him. Perhaps his final words do keep the quest alive. But perhaps they are ironic: an expression of disillusion. Commentators wishing to draw a positive moral from Il prigioniero might have done better to direct themselves towards existentialism rather than Catholicism or liberalism. Dallapiccola’s talk of the lonely angst of humanity in a world where God ‘seems to be keeping himself hidden’ is a good clue, as is his taste for the agonized theology of the Spanish philosopher and novelist, Miguel de Unamuno (1865–1936). As the composer observes, for Unamuno, ‘the man of flesh and blood’ cannot but yearn for immortality. The ‘essence . . . of every man who is a man’, writes ‘the great Spaniard’ (as Dallapiccola calls him), ‘is nothing but the endeavour, the effort which he makes to continue to be a man, not to die’.129 Dallapiccola’s Prisoner has no worldly hope of salvation. It seems he has no other-worldly hope either. And yet he lifts up his head and speaks his final words. The ‘great Spaniard’ would have understood. Out of the dialectic of despair and scepticism, he writes, comes ‘holy, sweet, saving uncertainty, our supreme consolation’. To believe in God is not to accept dogma: it is to create God, an act that requires anguish. Christianity is desperation; hope is torture. And yet, contra-rationally, it must return. Faith, whose form is hope, is nothing less than ‘the creative power in man’. It alone looks to the future, ‘the sole domain of liberty, where the imagination, the creative and liberating power, the flesh of faith, roams at will’.130 A similar reading, shorn of religious connotations, is suggested by the Camus of Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942) – rather than the later anti-communist.131 All longing for transcendence is ‘nostalgia for unity’. ‘The world itself . . . is but a vast irrational.’ Freedom lies in giving up hope, in not looking to the future: in ‘the divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except the pure flame 128 129

130 131

Arblaster, Viva la Libertà, 281–2. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton University Press, 1990), 9. See Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, 153, 300; also Dallapiccola, ‘Die moderne Musik’, 44; Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 225. Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 131, 211, 210, 217. See Jean-Michel Brèque, ‘Des textes du passé à la tragédie du présent’, in Dallapiccola: ‘Le Prisonnier’/ ‘Vol de nuit’. L’Avant-Scène Opéra, 212 (2003), 43.

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of life’.132 The model for the Prisoner’s whispered ‘la libertà’ might be Sisyphus himself. As in the opera, the ultimate moment of torture is the moment of consciousness: when hope is destroyed. But this moment of ‘lucidity’, where Sisyphus ‘knows the whole extent of his wretched condition . . . at the same time crowns his victory’.133 In full consciousness of futility, the Prisoner, like Sisyphus, affirms an ‘absurd’ freedom simply by clinging to it. Finally, there is Sartre. If, for Croce, evil cannot be absolute, the experience of occupation has taught the philosopher of ‘commitment’ the contrary. ‘Evil’, he writes, ‘can in no way be diverted, brought back, reduced, and incorporated into idealistic humanism.’ In the ‘Mass in which two freedoms have communed in the destruction of the human’, evil ‘blazes forth’ with ‘irreducible purity’. At the moment when the victim succumbs to torture and speaks, he ‘applies his will as a man to denying that he is a man, makes himself the accomplice of his executioners’. Refusing to speak, resistance members decided ‘in sovereign fashion’ that the world ‘would be . . . more than the reign of the animal’. Their heroism took place ‘without witness, without help, without hope, often even without faith’. They invented man ‘on the basis of nothing, for nothing, in absolute gratuitousness’.134 For the Prisoner, it is speech that signals refusal. He keeps his freedom alive by clinging to his goal in a situation beyond hope. It is proof of his humanity that he is able to.

VII In Unamuno, Camus or Sartre, we have the philosophical basis for a reading of Il prigioniero that is ‘affirmative’. But the very last moments of the opera put paid to such confidence. The Prisoner utters his final words not once, but twice: the second time as the curtain falls, and as a question. The conclusion is clearly meant to be ‘undecidable’. On its own, the Prisoner’s question merely suspends the affirmative readings; it does not negate them. But we have yet to take into account one rather important element: Dallapiccola’s music. Example 5.1 shows the Prisoner’s ‘moment of consciousness’, continuing to the first ‘La libertà’. It is a passage that clearly reveals the debt of the composer’s neo-expressionism of the 1940s to Berg. Bars 905–12 combine a number of details traceable to Wozzeck. The model at the start is the celebrated pair of unison crescendos at the end of Act 3, Scene 2. The written-out accelerando is a typical Bergian trait; Dallapiccola’s crotchets on double bass and bass drum sound like an allusion to the timpani strokes that accompany Marie’s murder (also Act 3, Scene 2). The harmony at bar 905 is a close relative of the hexachord of Berg’s Act 3, Scene 4, the ‘invention on a chord’. Finally, the dotted rhythm of the orchestral sforzandos punctuating the Prisoner’s vocal line at bars 132 133

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Penguin, 2000), 23, 31, 58. Ibid., 109. 134 Sartre, ‘What is Literature?’, 178–9, 180.

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Ex. 5.1 Luigi Dallapiccola, Il prigioniero (1944–8), Scene 4, bars 905–25.

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Ex. 5.1 (cont.)

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909–12 might be compared to the rhythmic motive introduced by Wozzeck at ‘Mörder! Mörder!’ (also Act 3, Scene 4). Yet Dallapiccola’s music has its own integrity. The sustained harmonies at bars 905–13 (middle stave) state one of the work’s principal twelve-note series (the composer called it the ‘freedom’ row).135 Meanwhile, the bass assembles one of Dallapiccola’s ‘“combinaisons” dodécaphoniques variés’: a derived set based on a (015) trichord, which is mirrored in the high treble.136 The vocal line is also dodecaphonic. At bars 908–16 and 917–19, the Prisoner has two statements of the complete chromatic, both of which open with versions of the three-note motive associated with the Jailer’s ‘friendly word’, ‘fratello’. In musico-dramatic terms, bars 905–14 are an ironic Leitsektion:137 the orchestral music recapitulates bars 473–7, where the Prisoner cries out his thanks to the Jailer for ‘making him hope’. More directly, the instruments present ‘the seismographic record of traumatic shock’, as Adorno might have put it: a series of ‘bodily convulsions’, which suddenly collapse, at bar 915, into ‘the brittle immobility of a person paralyzed by anxiety’.138 Note the grotesquely scored, stunned repetition of a pentatonic fragment (g–d–e), earlier associated with Roelandt, the great bell of Ghent. To cite Philosophie der neuen Musik here is disingenuous, however. Adorno’s harsh verdict on Il prigioniero, which he heard at its German première in 1951, reveals that he did not hear the score as neo-expressionistic, but as ‘traditionalpassionate operatic music’ of ‘drastic simplicity’, couched in a ‘traditional musicodramatic, very Italian-sounding language’.139 Dallapiccola’s recourse to a ‘more or less watered-down’ twelve-note technique is ‘external, a concession to so-called modernity’. The composer is too much concerned with his audience – a charge he would furiously have rejected – and the resulting ‘musical substance’ is so simplistic and easy to grasp that it does not need twelve-note technique at all for its organization. The latter is only justified where it is a question of subjecting very complex, polyphonically conceived musical layers to a compositional economy of means. But here twelve-note technique is superfluous, and at the same time, made so crude – under the constraints, partly of the stage, partly of the underlying musical material – that it loses its own meaning. 135 136

137

138 139

Dallapiccola, ‘Notes’, 142. The row is stated here at P7: G–A–C–E♭–F–A♭–B♭–D♭–E♮–F♯–B♮–D♮. Ibid. The bass trichords ascend: E♮1–B♭1–E♭ (as a succession, bars 909–12), then (as simultaneities, bars 913–14) A, d, g♯; d♭, g♮, c1 and g♭, c♭1, f1. The treble trichords descend: f3–c3–f♯2 (or g♭2) (heard twice, bars 909–13 and 913–14), c♯3–g♮2–d2 (bar 913), and a♭1–e♭1–a♮ (bar 914). (The final trichord – pitch classes B♭, E and B – is missing.) The term is George Perle’s. See his The Operas of Alban Berg. Vol. I: Wozzeck (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980), 95. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 37. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, XIX, 487; Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie et al., ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002), 158; Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, XVIII, 130.

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‘The difference between the sound of such constructions and the means employed is impossible to miss’, Adorno concludes,140 and a comparison of Example 5.1 with almost any few bars of Wozzeck will show what he means. In the Dallapiccola, we have a climactic episode so straightforward in design that its insistence on chromatic completion appears almost as a fetish; in the Berg, textures so thoroughgoing in their horizontal/vertical unification that, while they are generally not, in fact, twelve-note, they seem to cry out to become so. The broader point, picked up by Wildberger, is the conventionality of Dallapiccola’s achieved compositional goal: the ‘opus perfectum’ of aesthetic autonomy.141 In Adorno’s terms, gestures of anxiety that in Wozzeck, the ‘masterpiece . . . of traditional art’, were already domesticated with respect to their Schoenbergian models (Philosophy of New Music, 30), are returned to the untruth of illusion. Il prigioniero is ‘expressionism as style’. The opera’s well-made construction, we might say, transforms its content into a mere object of contemplation. But once again, the situation is not clear cut, as we can see by turning to what is most ‘conventional’ in this opera: its echoes of the Italian tradition. Adorno is scarcely alone in spotting these. As we saw earlier, Mila mentions Tosca; he also draws parallels with Il trovatore and Aïda. Such observations in fact constitute a topos in the literature.142 And yet the Verdi connection could be probed a little harder. Don Carlos not only anticipates the historical theme of the persecution of the revolt in Flanders by the Spanish Inquisition, but places on stage the figures of Philip II and the Grand Inquisitor. The crucial point of contact is the coup de théâtre at the close: where just as Carlos is to be handed over by Philip to the Inquisition, the deceased Emperor Charles V reappears and drags his grandson away. One should make no bones about identifying the climax of Il prigioniero as similarly melodramatic. It is not that ‘neo-expressionism’ is inappropriate as a label: the musical debt to Wozzeck is clear. Dallapiccola’s stage directions have expressionistic features, too. In the ‘Prologo’, the Mother appears in black against a black curtain, so that the audience is able to make out ‘only her very white face, pitilessly illuminated’. She represents the expressionistic Urschrei: an operatic version of one of Schoenberg’s Blicke. But the primary background to the libretto, as in many of Verdi’s best-known operas, is the popular stage of early nineteenth-century Paris. Dallapiccola may have spoken of months of historical research, but we are hardly dealing with the Inquisition of history in Il prigioniero, rather with what Edward Peters has termed ‘the myth of The Inquisition’. The image sustaining Dallapiccola’s libretto, in its derivation from Villiers (and from his model, Poe’s ‘The Pit and the 140 142

Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, XIX, 487. 141 Wildberger, ‘Sternstunde’, 179. Mila, ‘“Il prigioniero”’, 311, 309–10. See also Leonardo Pinzauti, ‘L’eredità di Verdi nella condotta vocale del “Prigioniero”’, in L’opera di Luigi Dallapiccola. Quaderni della Rassegna musicale, 2 (1965), 11–21; Vlad, Luigi Dallapiccola, 40; Malipiero, ‘Il prigioniero’, 16; Arblaster, Viva la Libertà!, 280.

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Pendulum’), is that popularized in Gothic novels of the turn of the nineteenth century.143 Peter Brooks has commented on the close relation of these contemporary genres. Melodrama and the Gothic novel are ‘equally preoccupied with nightmare states, with claustration . . . with innocence buried alive’. ‘We begin’, Brooks writes of the ‘thwarted escape’ plot (a melodramatic stand-by), ‘in a Gothic chamber . . . and within a few scenes the path for the virtuous prisoner appears open, only to be discovered by the villain-tyrant, and to lead . . . to a more frightful and subterranean dungeon, or even the death sentence.’144 Another Verdi opera with links to Il prigioniero, as Mila suggests, is Il trovatore. In Part 4 of that work, all of Dallapiccola’s elements are in place: cruel imprisonment; the mother–son relationship; dreams of escape; the cry, ‘Il rogo!’; execution; even an offstage chorus singing prayers. In the closing moments, Azucena reveals to Carlo that Manrico, whom he has just had executed, was his brother: a coup de théâtre, parallel to the Grand Inquisitor’s self-revelation, which changes the meaning of the entire action (and brings down the curtain). If Dallapiccola had learnt from Berg in Example 5.1, he had also – in the dramatic panache of his music – learnt from Verdi. At bars 903–13 of Il prigioniero, the maximally heightened recitative of Il trovatore’s final moments is transposed into twelve-note terms. All that is missing is the basso tremolando. Complaints about the ‘côté puccinien’ of Il prigioniero continue, in modified form, until today.145 One cannot deny the whiff of Grand Guignol. But to follow Brooks’s argument, this is all the more reason to pay the work serious attention. Melodrama holds up a mirror to society’s continuing need, in ‘a post-sacred era . . . to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be important even though we cannot derive them from any transcendental system of belief’. Its excess points to the existence of ‘cosmic ethical forces’: to a ‘conflict of good and evil as opposites not subject to compromise’.146 Il trovatore and Il prigioniero both stage just such a ‘manichaeistic’ contest. But the final catastrophe of Verdi’s opera bears witness to a third, fundamentally amoral, force (the deployment of which marks melodrama’s aspiration to the status of classical tragedy): that of destiny or fate. The efficacy of the supernatural is established immediately, in the stretta that concludes the opening ‘Ballata’. Ferrando and the chorus sing of the ghostly nocturnal appearances of Azucena’s mother in the forms of hoopoe, screech owl, crow and so forth. When Ferrando comes to the words, ‘Then just as midnight 143

144

145

146

See Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 1, 204–17; Shackelford (ed., trans.), Dallapiccola on Opera, 51. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 19–20, 30. See Vlad, Luigi Dallapiccola, 40; Arnold Whittall, ‘Berg and the Twentieth Century’, in Anthony Pople (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berg (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 254. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, viii, 11, 13, 36.

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sounded’, a ‘real’ bell unexpectedly sounds twelve offstage. As Carolyn Abbate might say, the narrative produces a vertigo-inducing moment of reflexivity.147 Onstage, the uncanny coincidence inspires panic. Turning to the ‘Prologo’ of Il prigioniero, we find a similar use of reflexivity to indicate supernatural presence, in the context of another ‘Ballata’. The case is unusual, in that the Mother sings alone, with no onstage audience. Moreover, Dallapiccola’s ‘Ballata’ is primarily descriptive, narrative being consigned to the B sections that surround it, within an overall arch form, A B C B A. The Mother recounts a recurring nightmare involving Philip II. In the first B section (bars 43–63), an unknown figure advances: the point at which the Mother recognizes him is where the ‘Ballata’ begins. In the second B section (beginning at bars 103 or 106: the division is ambiguous), the king’s appearance begins to change. ‘Suddenly it is no longer Philip staring at me’, the Mother sings: ‘it is Death!’ Operatic tradition alone assures us that the Prisoner is doomed. But the reflexive relationship between this narrative and the larger plot is sealed by the music. At the point where the Mother reaches the word ‘Morte!’ (bar 117), the orchestra, which has been at pianissimo or below for some time, breaks in, fortissimo, with the strident three-chord motive of the A section. In Abbate’s terminology, ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ regions collide.148 The three-chord motive becomes a harbinger of ‘fate’, returning at crucial points in the opera: most notably as the Prisoner is about to ‘escape’ (bars 794–801). The Verdian quality of Example 5.1 underlines the sense in which the Prisoner is a victim of the ‘force of destiny’. As such, the ‘apolitical’ character of Il prigioniero appears to stand confirmed. If Brooks would urge us to understand the climactic melodrama as an attempt to make sense of the mid-twentieth-century situation, one that holds to ‘the possibility of acceding to the latent through the signs of the world’,149 that would seem pure mystification. In so far as the Verdian moment of Dallapiccola’s opera suggests a state of affairs in which individuals are reduced to blaming obscure metaphysical forces for the straits in which they find themselves, Il prigioniero reflects – and contributes to – social alienation. Or is this, again, too simple? What is most ‘apolitical’ in the opera may turn out to be what is most ‘committed’. From Adorno’s perspective, at least, the world of late capitalism, in its instrumentalized rationality and domination of nature, is marked precisely by a return to the mythic inexorability of ‘fate’. Twelve-note technique is the ‘fate’ of music.150 It is worth returning to the ‘affirmative’ readings of Il prigioniero. Those that might reasonably be entertained, the Crocean and ‘existentialist’ positions (Sartre’s 147

148 150

See Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1991), 61–118. Ibid., 119–20. 149 Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 202. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 54.

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included), have a great deal in common. They share a basis in idealism: a commitment to the essential humanity of the identity of freedom and (self-)consciousness. For Dallapiccola, in his aesthetic pronouncements, this is also taken for granted. And yet his own opera speaks against him. ‘On the eve of your salvation’, asks the Grand Inquisitor, ‘why ever did you want to leave us?’ The depth of the irony here becomes apparent only when it is recognized that the Prisoner’s longing for freedom, indeed his very ability to conceive of escape, is not ‘authentically’ his at all, but implanted in him from without: by the Jailer’s ‘friendly word’. The Prisoner’s questions in Scene 1 – ‘How can we say where hope comes from? How it finds its way into our hearts?’ – are left unanswered, as if they pointed inward to a mystery. In fact, they are answered all too easily. (Self-)deception of this kind has the widest resonance. ‘Torture through hope’ could be adopted as a motto for the deadening circuit of Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘culture industry’, which ‘endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises’. ‘Escape’, they write, ‘is destined from the first to lead back to its starting point.’ In Jameson’s words, ‘the surviving remnant of the ego’ in late modernity ‘falls victim to the illusion of its own continuing centrality’. ‘[T]he subject wrongly assumes that there exists some correspondence between its inner monadic experience and that purely external network of circumstances . . . which determines and manipulates it.’151 Dallapiccola’s Prisoner is led to believe that the world is, after all, shaped in such a way that it will fulfil his aspirations. He is cruelly deceived. As Jameson explains, ‘what remains of the subjective . . . is no longer able to distinguish between external suggestion and internal desire . . . and therefore finds itself wholly handed over to objective manipulation.’ With the Grand Inquisitor’s question, we confront a ‘historical hour’ in which, as Adorno puts it, ‘the reconciliation of subject and object has been perverted to a satanic parody, to the liquidation of the subject in the objective order’.152 ‘May you be rewarded in better worlds’ sings Florestan in Act 2, Scene 1 of Beethoven’s Fidelio, responding to the kind gesture of his jailer; for Adorno, an enduring symbol of social hope from the dawn of the bourgeois era. With the despairing equation drawn by Dallapiccola’s Prisoner, a century and a half later, historical progress comes to its fatal end. ‘“La speranza”. . . l’ultima tortura. . .’ – ‘along with the idea of “better worlds”’, Adorno concludes, ‘that of humanity itself has lost its power over mankind.’153 If, at the point of death, the victim reaffirms his quest for liberty, he proclaims not his freedom, but its absence. As Marcuse puts it in his critique of Sartre, 151

152 153

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 113, 111; Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton University Press, 1971), 28. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 36; Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 25. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 19 (translation modified).

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‘The anti-fascist who is tortured to death may retain his moral and intellectual freedom to “transcend” this situation: he is still tortured to death.’154 But the conclusion of Il prigioniero paints a still more negative picture. And what is more, this anti-affirmative, essentially modernist moment arrives ‘immanently’: by means of Dallapiccola’s handling of musico-dramatic form. At a leitmotivic level, as Venuti has pointed out, the emptying out of subjectivity occurs at the moment of the Grand Inquisitor’s question. In his employment of the Prisoner’s ‘hope’ row (bars 903–5), the torturer ‘enters into the intimate realm of his victim’, taking over ‘that minimal autonomous (musical) and personal (conceptual) space that still remained to him’.155 But the process is not seen (or heard) to be complete until the first ‘La libertà’. Let us look again at Example 5.1. At bar 921, Dallapiccola introduces a new element: an offstage chamber choir singing music from the ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’. It is an autobiographical gesture: if the composer once was Rivière, now he is the Prisoner. But from the perspective of the character onstage, the effect is anything but one of identification. These quoted sounds stand apart – spatially as well as musically – from the main body of the work. The Prisoner is alienated from his own opera, a sense that is only heightened at bar 925, when the full-size offstage choir re-enters, with echoes of its ‘Secondo intermezzo’. The Prisoner’s relationship to these voices is radically altered with respect to the start of the scene. There, as he ‘escaped’, the choir did too. Individual and mass sang together in praise of God, nature and freedom. But now the Prisoner can no longer sing; scarcely even speak. The role of the orchestra has also changed. So vivid in its portrayal of the Prisoner’s ‘inner life’ at bars 905–19, it supports the two choirs at bar 921 onwards, but lends the victim no ‘voice’ at all. His ‘La libertà’ brings with it not an affirmation of autonomy, but silence. At the moment when, beyond hope, the subject is existentially ‘free’, the notion of its lonely, truth-telling interior is revealed as a sham.

VIII Some questions remain. Why does the Prisoner allow himself to be led so meekly to the stake? How does he come to be duped in the first place? Could he not have ‘seen through’ the Jailer and remained in his cell? From Adorno’s point of view, the fact that the victim hesitates only momentarily before rushing through the door left open for him would only heighten the opera’s dialectical insight. ‘[I]t is precisely where the masses act instinctively that they have been preformed by censorship and enjoy the blessing of the powers that be’, he writes. It is a mark of ‘the “totalitarian” nature of present society that . . . people . . . reinforce with the energy of their own ego the 154 155

Herbert Marcuse, From Luther to Popper, trans. Joris de Bres (London: Verso, 1983), 183. Venuti, Il teatro, 44.

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assimilation society imposes on them’.156 The authors of Dialektik der Aufklärung might also have drawn attention to the Prisoner’s ‘mad’ laughter at bar 919. This is the sound by which the victims of the culture industry ‘must take their . . . satisfaction’: a ‘wrong laughter’ that is a parody of reconciliation, an echo of ‘the inescapability of power’.157 Central to Adorno’s theory of fascist propaganda is the notion that the masses do not ‘completely believe in’ the leader, but ‘merely perform their enthusiasm’. It is not simply that ‘[t]he rationality operative in individual behaviour is . . . far from being lucidly self-aware’. ‘[I]n order to be capable of functioning at all’, Adorno writes, ‘it has to join forces with the unconscious.’158 The Prisoner is certainly a victim of psychological manipulation: the Jailer appeals to a narcissistic core of self-interest in much the way Adorno suggests.159 But Dallapiccola goes further. Standing at the centre of the starlit garden into which the Prisoner ‘escapes’ is a giant cedar. He moves towards the tree: at the moment when he ‘spreads out his arms in a gesture of love for all humanity’, he is standing before it. The gesture is that of crucifixion: the moment of fulfilment is simultaneously that of self-sacrifice. It is as if the Grand Inquisitor, who emerges at the same point, is conjured up by his victim. But who is redeemed here? The moment is not Christ-like at all. From the Prisoner’s point of view, this ‘crucifixion’ is not even a sacrifice: he and his cause gain nothing. Nevertheless, the gesture is far from empty. It calls for a final shift in critical perspective, in favour of the ‘sado-masochistic energies’ that Keller pointed to already in his review of the première, or what Mila referred to as the composer’s filippismo, his ‘fascinating and reluctant attraction to the grim majesty of tyrannical figures’.160 Adorno is less helpful now. ‘The thesis that in the totalitarian era the masses act against their own interests’, he declares, ‘comes true only ex post facto.’161 And yet the ‘crucifixion’ in Il prigioniero asks us to entertain the thought that the appearance of the Grand Inquisitor represents not just the destruction of everything the Prisoner is hoping for but also the consummation of his deepest urges. As Žižek explains (contra Adorno), the ‘de-psychologization’ of the post-liberal subject does not necessarily entail a fundamental insincerity in its obedience to the Leader. Loyalty is sustained via the obscenity of the superego. The novels of Kafka show the way (their affinity to Il prigioniero – the isolated individual’s doomed search for deliverance in a barely comprehensible world wherein every move appears to have been plotted in advance 156

157 158

159 160

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Society and Psychology’, trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review, 46 (1967), 80; ‘Society and Psychology II’, trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review, 47 (1968), 86. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 112. Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 152; Adorno, ‘Society and Psychology’, 79. Adorno, ‘Society and Psychology II’, 88–9. Keller, ‘XIII Maggio’, 211; Mila, ‘“Il prigioniero”’, 305. 161 Adorno, ‘Society and Psychology’, 80.

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by invisible hostile forces – is scarcely to be missed). In Der Proceß (1912–14), as Žižek notes, pursuit of the Law ‘is always accompanied by . . . an indeterminate . . . feeling of “abstract” guilt, a feeling that, in the eyes of Power, I am a priori terribly guilty of something, although it is not possible for me to know precisely what I am guilty of’.162 The Prisoner’s climactic gesture suggests that, beneath the desire for liberation, there lurks, parallel to Josef K.’s ‘guilt feelings’, a persistent, albeit unconscious, fantasy of entrapment. To take a psychoanalytic look at the opera from the standpoint of the victim rather than that of Power is to see the relationship of Jailer to Grand Inquisitor – previously understood as ‘underbelly’ to ‘Law’ – reversed. When the Prisoner is ‘interpellated’ by the Jailer’s expressions of brotherhood, liberty and hope, Žižek would argue, this ‘ideological recognition’ takes place only in relation to a ‘fundamental fantasy’: a repressed scene of masochistic passivity. It is not, as Adorno would have it, that our ‘very experience of subjective freedom is the form of appearance of subjection to disciplinary mechanisms’. Rather, post-liberal society needs the Adornian fantasy of total manipulation as the ‘obscene shadowy double’ of its ‘“official” public ideology (and practice) of individual autonomy’.163 A reading of the opera in these terms is not a psychoanalysis of Dallapiccola’s protagonist, as if he were somehow flesh and blood. It is, rather, Il prigioniero that analyses us. Scene 1 stages a ‘failed encounter’ between the Prisoner and his mother, in which he pays no attention to her increasingly desperate enquiries. To follow Žižek, the Prisoner’s alienation stands for the ‘primordial dis-attachment’ we experience from our surroundings as infants: the ‘gap or void in the order of being which “is” the subject itself’. The Prisoner’s account of torture at the hands of the Inquisition is then the ‘fundamental fantasy’, mobilized as a defence against the abyss. (This is not to question the ‘reality’ of his suffering. The point is the unacknowledgeable libidinal satisfaction he derives from staging the scene of his humiliation, illustrated by the way he dwells on the details, as he will again in Scene 3: ‘On my tormented flesh I feel again the bite of those pincers . . . I feel again the iron. . . the fire. . .’). The narrative of pain provides the Prisoner with ‘the minimum of being’. As Žižek puts it, ‘I suffer, therefore I am’.164 In the Prisoner’s subsequent interpellation, the loop of ‘drive’ (denoting his actively passive enjoyment of pain) is replaced by the arrow of desire. But the opera does not end there. As Žižek explains, it is constitutive of desire that it does not want to be satisfied, that it ‘desires its own unsatisfaction’. Desire maintains itself in this state by means of drive, which gains satisfaction from desire’s very efforts to suppress it. The superego urges us forward in terms of the guilt we feel at our pursuit 162 163 164

Žižek, Metastases, 59–61. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 95–6. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 289, 281.

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of a ‘socially determined symbolic role’: our betrayal of the fundamental fantasy.165 But what happens when desire is satisfied, and we gain a freedom without limits? The appearance of the Grand Inquisitor is inevitable. Desire flips back into drive: the Jailer’s exhortation, ‘you must hope to the point of agony’, is fully realized. As the Prisoner’s ‘suffocated’ gasp of enjoyment at the moment of capture indicates, his masochism is, for a moment, no longer ‘foreclosed’, but manifested directly. ‘Evil’s moment of spectacular power’, writes Brooks, ‘provides a simulacrum of the “primal scene” . . . a moment of intense, originary trauma.’166 To put it another way, the Prisoner’s ‘fate’ catches up with him. ‘[T]he Freudian “drive”’, Žižek explains, ‘is ultimately another name for “Destiny”.’167 Far from being ‘an external Master who can be duped, towards whom one can maintain a minimal distance and private space’, the Grand Inquisitor is ‘ex-timate’: the horrifying ‘Thing’ that stages the ‘phantasmic core’ of the Prisoner’s being.168 The Prisoner cannot remain in his cell: his choice is ‘forced’. Self-recognition, in the Jailer’s ‘fratello’, ‘La libertà’, and ‘Spera!’, is his only means to gain a symbolic identity, to awaken (the appearance of) self-consciousness. He goes to his death so meekly because, as Žižek has it, the encounter with the Thing ‘brings [him] too close to what . . . must remain at a distance if [he is] to sustain the consistency of his symbolic universe’. The Prisoner is necessarily reduced to the level of the ‘living dead’ of the Nazi camps, becoming a ‘shell of a person, emptied of the spark of spirit’, indifferent to his continued existence.169 But there remains the ultimate question: ‘La libertà?’ ‘Freedom’, writes Malipiero, ‘seems to become a mere empty word.’170 The critic is horrified by the suggestion. But this is surely the point. The Prisoner may be whispering, but his final utterance is enough to cut short the lure of chorus and orchestra in mid-phrase. At the last, the victim confronts us ‘free’ individuals of the audience with the very word that sustains our ideological self-image. Unlike us, the Prisoner knows what ‘freedom’ really means. In what is, paradoxically, the opera’s one true moment of liberty, he rejects it. 165 167 170

Ibid., 290–1, 268. 166 Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 34. Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 303. 168 Ibid., 280, 302. 169 Ibid., 302; Totalitarianism?, 73–81. Malipiero, ‘Il prigioniero’, 11.

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Index

Abbate, Carolyn, 184, 271 Abbiati, Franco, 252 Accademia di Santa Cecilia (Rome), 61, 213 Adamson, Walter L. on Florentine modernism, 40, 42, 45 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 22–5, 26, 95, 136, 181, 188, 239, 246, 269 Ästhetische Theorie, 24 on Berg, 269 on Casella, 9, 94 on fascist propaganda, 273–4 on Il prigioniero, 268–9 Philosophie der neuen Musik, 23–4, 25, 27–8, 104–5, 123, 179, 240–1, 244–5, 246, 268, 269, 271, 272 politicization of musical styles, 94 ‘Rückblickend auf den Surrealismus’, 22–3 on Schoenberg, 16, 238, 244–5 on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, 25, 104 on Stravinsky, 23–4, 104–5 on Stravinsky and Casella, 104 on Webern, 134 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (with Max Horkheimer) Dialektik der Aufklärung, 272, 274 aestheticism Adorno on, 32 in D’Annunzio, 30–1 in Malipiero, 39 in Pizzetti, 40, 53–4 in Verdi, 30 in Zandonai, 31 Alessi, Rino Savonarola, 220 Alfano, Franco, 97 Sinfonia seconda, 74 Ansermet, Ernest, 97 Antonello da Messina, 178 Arblaster, Anthony on Il prigioniero, 236, 251, 263 Archivio Contemporaneo ‘Alessandro Bonsanti’ (Florence), 76 Arendt, Hannah The Origins of Totalitarianism, 248–9, 254 Aristotle Poetics, 161 Ars nova (journal), 40 Augusteo (concert hall, Rome), 4, 39, 71, 73, 75 Augustine, 167 Confessions, 167

Augustus (Roman emperor), 194 Auschwitz, 248 avant-garde Adorno on, 22–3, 24–5 Peter Bürger on, 3–4, 22–5 in Casella, 25, 26 Florentine, 40 and modernism, 3, 22–5 in Russolo, 2–4 in Stravinsky, 23 Avanti! (newspaper), 253 Bacci, Baccio Maria backcloth for Volo di notte, 143 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 101, 131 Bahr, Hermann, 29 Expressionism, 243–4 Baldacci, Luigi, 45 Ballo, Ferdinando, 194 on Dallapiccola, 122, 124 Banfi, Antonio, 157 Barbaro, Umberto, 150 Bardi, Giovanni de’, 1 Il Bargello (newspaper), 188 Barilli, Bruno, 57, 213 Bartók, Béla, 95 The Miraculous Mandarin, 72 Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, 72 Bastianelli, Giannotto, 42–6, 55, 58, 82, 114, 241 collaboration with Pizzetti, 56–7 La crisi musicale europea, 42–7, 51, 56, 55–8 on Debussy, 54 on decadence, 44–7 on French music, 44, 82 on Mascagni, 43–4 on Pizzetti, 51, 82 on Scriabin, 44 on Strauss, 44 Terza sonata per pianoforte, 57 on Torrefranca, 42–3 Baudelaire, Charles Les fleurs du mal, 159 ‘Le Soleil’, 159 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 43 Fidelio, 272 Symphony No. 9, 246 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth on fascist appropriation of foreign cultural trends, 178–9 on fascist pluralism, 66–7

Index on fascist realism, 148–9, 150, 157 on Novecento (artistic movement), 148–9 Berg, Alban, 2, 95, 135–6, 144, 148, 224, 245, 270 Hauptrhythmus, 244 Kammerkonzert, 94 Lulu, 135, 141, 169 ‘Ostinato’, 144, 224 Symphonische Stücke, 135 Lyric Suite, 135 Violin Concerto, 72, 135 Der Wein, 135, 141 Wozzeck, 72, 135, 136, 141, 161, 256, 264–8, 269 Bergson, Henri, 21 Berio, Luciano, 3, 65 Nones, 65 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, 72 Berliner Tageblatt (newspaper), 131 Bernardoni, Virgilio on Casella, 9, 25–6 on Dallapiccola, 80–1 on Malipiero, 34, 116, 117 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 93 Biblioteca Nazionale (Florence), 83 Blanchot, Maurice, 151 Bloom, Harold anxiety of influence, 87 Boccioni, Umberto, 21 Boethius, 215, 216, 233 Consolatio philosophiae, 216 Bontempelli, Massimo, 148–9 Nembo, 148 on Volo di notte, 192 Borghetti, Vincenzo, 56 Borio, Gianmario, 177, 178 Borodin, Alexander In the Steppes of Central Asia, 14 Bosworth, Richard J. B., 166, 181 Bottai, Giuseppe, 178, 189, 191, 214 Boys, Henry, 212 Brahms, Johannes, 29 Brandi, Cesare, 210 Braque, Georges, 23 Braun, Emily on ‘cultural freedom’ under fascism, 67–8 on fascist art policy, 67 Brecht, Bertolt Der Lindberghflug, 149 Brinkman, Reinhold, 174 Brioschi, Giancarlo, 152, 161 Britten, Benjamin, 28 Peter Grimes, 260 Brooks, Peter on melodrama, 270, 271, 276 Buck-Morss, Susan, 181 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 63 Buonarroti, Michelangelo the Younger, 63, 126 Indovinelli ‘I balconi della rosa’, 126 La Tancia, 126 Le mascherate ‘Il coro degli zitti’, 137–40

295 Bürger, Peter, 26, 29 on Adorno, 22, 24–5 on Stravinsky, 23 Theorie der Avantgarde, 3, 4, 22, 23, 24–5, 40 Busoni, Ferruccio, 87 Berceuse élégiaque, 26 Doktor Faust, 181, 256 Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 183 Turandot, 188 Campanella, Tommaso, 219 Dispregio della morte ‘Madrigal I’, 219 Camus, Albert, 264 L’homme révolté, 257 Le mythe de Sisyphe, 263–4 Canudo, Ricciotto, 110 Caplin, William Classical Form, 79 Carducci, Giosuè, 10, 44, 45 Rime nuove ‘Notte di maggio’, 10–14, 16 Carisch (publishing house), 63, 75 Carpitella, Diego, 253 Carroll, Mark, 258 Carter, Elliott Piano Concerto, 256–7 Casella, Alfredo, 9–22, 32, 39, 40, 56, 58, 66, 67, 68–9, 70, 74, 76, 79, 93–111, 117, 124, 133, 173, 179, 194, 212–14, 231, 233 and D’Annunzio, 32 on Dallapiccola, 123 on ‘I tre’, 123 L’evoluzione della musica a traversa della cadenza perfetta, 16 ‘L’evoluzione del linguaggio musicale e i problemi della musica contemporanea’, 213 and the ISCM, 97 on music and fascism, 93, 94, 96 and Mussolini, 100 ‘Nell’ora di Roma’, 26 ‘Scarlattiana’ (article), 94–5 seconda maniera, 10, 22, 39, 96, 103, 144 and Stravinsky, 15, 83, 101, 103, 104, 105–9 terza maniera, 96, 110, 132 Casella, Alfredo, musical works L’adieu à la vie, 39 Cinque pezzi ‘Fox-trot’, 24 Concerto per due violini, viola e violoncello, 96–100, 101, 110 Concerto romano, 93, 109, 110 Le couvent sur l’eau Fragments symphoniques, 9 Il deserto tentato, 143, 148, 151–2, 165, 169–70 Elegia eroica, 4–9, 25–8, 36, 38, 39, 40, 65, 71, 76, 100 La giara, 125 Introduzione, aria e toccata, 74 Italia, 9

296

Index Casella, Alfredo, musical works (cont.) Notte di maggio, 10–15, 16, 20, 39 Nove pezzi ‘In modo funebre’, 16–20, 32, 39 Paganiniana, 87 Pupazzetti, 103 Scarlattiana, 87, 94 La sera fiesolana, 32, 96 Sonatina, 24, 25 Suite in C, 9 ‘Bourrée’, 101, 103, 110 Symphony No. 2, 10 Tre canzoni trecentesche ‘Giovane bella, luce del mio core. . .’, 111, 114, 124 Triple Concerto, 93 Casiraghi, Roberto, 78 Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario, 1 Cézanne, Paul, 243 Chabrier, Emmanuel Bourrée fantasque, 101 Chiarelli, Luigi, 115 Cilea, Francesco, 70 Cimabue, 243 Cino da Pistoia, 111 Clark, T. J. on Adorno, 39 on Jameson and Adorno, 133 Clemenceau, Georges, 58 Cocteau, Jean, 245 Colacicchi, Luigi, 191 Collaer, Paul, 213 Confederazione Fascista dei Professionisti e degli Artisti, 1, 69, 77, 189 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 255, 256 Festivals Paris (1952), 255 Rome (1954), 258 Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia (Rome), 74 Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini (Florence), 1, 46, 61, 62, 73, 74, 78, 172, 188, 189 Consolo, Ernesto, 62 Cook, Nicholas, 132 Copeau, Jacques, 220 Copertini, Spartaco, 57 Coppola, Piero, 57 Corio, Edgardo, 194 Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche, 83, 97 Il corriere della sera (newspaper), 59, 67, 121, 252 Cortese, Luigi, 122 Corti, Mario, 213 Coussemaker, Edmond de, 50 Croce, Benedetto, 42, 45, 157, 158, 159, 160, 192, 211, 244, 245, 246, 263, 264, 271 aesthetics, 42–3, 155–6, 158, 160, 182, 241 Estetica, 42, 155, 182 ‘religion of liberty’, 262 Dahlhaus, Carl, 31 on ‘die musikalische Moderne’, 29–30 on Wagner, 187

Dallapiccola, Laura, 59, 61, 67, 121–2, 141, 172, 200, 214, 232, 234, 237 Dallapiccola, Luigi and Adorno, 133, 134, 240–1, 244–5 on art and truth, 241–2, 243–4, 245–6, 256 and Baudelaire, 158–9 and Berg, 135–6, 141, 142, 144, 264–8, 269 on the Canti di prigionia, 199–200, 208, 210–11, 219–20 career under late fascism, 189–91 and Casella, 110–11, 115–16 and Roberto Casiraghi, 78 on the ‘central idea’ of all his works, 232–3 and ‘commitment’, 246–7 on the composer’s need for faith, 183–4 correspondence with Casella, 212–14, 215–16, 221 correspondence with Malipiero, 170–1, 173 ‘Credo nel teatro moderno’, 201 and D’Annunzio, 119–21 on Debussy, 183 diary, 78 on dodecaphony and Italianness, 178–9 early success, 74–5 on ‘experience’, 157–60 as fascist, 122 and Florence, 1, 62, 77–8 and Frazzi, 78–9, 127, 210 and Gentile, 159–60 on ‘internationalism’, 178 as Kunstführer, 172–4, 220–1, 233 and Malipiero, 89–90, 111–12, 117–16 on Massarani, 126 ‘Musica pianificata’, 239, 240, 245, 246, 252, 254–5 open letter to Guido M. Gatti, 75–6 and Alfredo Parente, 155–8, 182 and Petrassi, 195–9 and Pizzetti, 61 on Il prigioniero, 236, 238–9, 253–4, 260–2 and Proust, 241–2, 245 realization of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, 189, 231, 232 and Schoenberg, 135, 144, 158, 173–4, 177, 179–80 and the Sindacato Nazionale Fascista dei Musicisti, 76–8 and Stravinsky, 83–6, 110–11, 142 ‘Tuscan’ style, 125–31, 141, 144, 149, 204, 216 ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, 136, 142 on Volo di notte, 170–2, 176–7, 179, 181, 183, 186 and Webern, 133–4, 135 Dallapiccola, Luigi, musical works Caligo, 60 Canti di prigionia, 110, 189, 190, 199–230, 233, 254, 255 ‘Congedo di Girolamo Savonarola’, 212, 219–30, 231 central palindrome, 224 recomposition of opening of ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’, 221–3 ‘Invocazione di Boezio’, 212, 213, 214–19, 223, 224–7, 230

Index ‘Preghiera di Maria Stuarda’, 190, 200, 201–10, 213, 215, 216–19, 220, 223–4, 227, 230, 273 proportions, 223–4 La canzone del Quarnaro, 60–1, 176 Cinque canti, 87 Cinque frammenti di Saffo, 231 Dalla mia terra, 60, 85 ‘Per la sera della Befana’, 60 Divertimento in quattro esercizi, 75, 76, 121, 190 Due canzoni di Grado, 60, 75 Due liriche dal Kalewala, 75 Estate, 73, 74, 77, 78 Fuiri da tapo, 60 Goethe-Lieder, 63, 136 Job, 232 Marsia, 136, 189, 232–3 Frammenti sinfonici, 232 Tre episodi, 232 Musica per tre pianoforti (Inni), 117–23, 124, 131, 135, 140, 190, 216 Partita, 75, 124, 189 ‘Burlesca’, 190 ‘Passacaglia’, 140, 190 Piccolo concerto per Muriel Couvreux, 136, 189, 190, 214 Il prigioniero, 110, 232, 233, 234, 235–40, 247–76 initial reception, 235–6, 238, 239 and the Nazi death camps, 248–51 performance history, 235, 259–61 plot summary, 247 as politically ‘committed’, 236–8 ‘Prologo’, 271 psychoanalytical reading, 275–6 Scene 3, 249, 250–1 Scene 4, 273, 274 musical idiom, 268–9 and Verdi, 269–71 Prima serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, 63, 89, 90–2, 190 Quaderno musicale di Annalibera, 63 Rapsodia (studio per ‘La morte del Conte Orlando’), 75, 190 Seconda serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, 22, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82–5, 111, 118, 124, 190 ‘Capriccio’, 83–4 ‘Invenzione’, 126 Sei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, 126 Sex carmina Alcaei, 231–2 Tartiniana, 87–8, 89, 94, 224 Tartiniana seconda, 87 Terza serie dei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, 63, 72, 190, 195, 210 ‘I lanzi briachi’, 127–31 ‘Il coro degli zitti’, 136–42, 144 Tre laudi, 76–7, 86, 140, 148, 149, 167, 168, 190, 199, 213 Tre studi, 74–5 Ulisse, 167, 256

297 Volo di notte, 71, 72, 142–93, 196, 199, 200, 201, 213, 214, 216, 219, 220, 233 backcloth and stage set, 143 and Casella’s Il deserto tentato, 148, 151–2 crescendo and catharsis, 161–3, 166–70 and fascist realism, 149–50 as fascistic, 163–70 initial reception, 188–9, 191–2 Scene 1, 150, 164–5 Scene 2, 165 Scene 3, 162, 165 Scene 4, 162–3, 175–6, 181 Scene 5, 144–8, 151–4, 161–2, 163, 166–8, 182, 184–6 musical idiom, 144, 147–8 Scene 6, 163, 164, 168–70, 175, 180, 181, 186–7, 230 final climax, 168 Dallapiccola, Pio, 59, 60, 121, 199 Dalrymple Henderson, Linda on the ‘fourth dimension’, 21 Damerini, Adelmo, 188 D’Amico, Fedele, 211 on Casella, 17 on Dallapiccola, 123, 154 Canti di prigionia, 201, 212, 219, 220 on Dallapiccola and Casella, 111 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 30–1, 32, 38, 40, 41, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62, 97, 172, 174 Alcyone, 62 ‘I pastori’, 51, 53 ‘La sera fiesolana’, 96 attack on Mascagni, 30–1 ‘La canzone del Quarnaro’, 60–1 Canzoni della gesta d’oltremare ‘La canzone dell’oltremare’, 119–21 Fedra, 40, 46, 62 Forse che sì forse che no, 150 Francesca da Rimini, 62 Il fuoco, 35–6, 55, 62, 172, 173, 180 La Gloria, 47 ‘invasion’ of Fiume, 60 irredentism, 60 La nave, 46–7, 51, 60, 62 Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, 46 Parisina, 40 Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno, 32–4 Dante Alighieri, 62, 167 Inferno, 78 De Pirro, Nicola, 119, 213, 214 De Sabata, Victor, 97 De Santis, Mila, 97 on Casella, 17, 95–6 Debussy, Claude, 28, 31, 43, 44, 45, 53, 54, 55, 58, 82, 87, 101, 117 ‘acoustic scale’, 38 Iberia, 210 incidental music for Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, 46 Pelléas et Mélisande, 54, 55, 72, 161 Préludes I ‘Danseuses de Delphes’, 17, 32

298

Index Della Corte, Andrea, 134, 233 on Volo di notte, 188 Depero, Fortunato, 115 DeVoto, Mark on Ravel, 82 Di Marzio, Cornelio, 77, 190, 212 Diderot, Denis, 220 D’Indy, Vincent Fervaal, 47 Dissonanza (journal), 56–7, 90 Döblin, Alexander, 149, 150 Donizetti, Gaetano, 58 Dos Passos, John, 149, 150 Duccio di Buoninsegna, 243 Dukas, Paul, 44, 55 Ariane et Barbebleu, 55 Durante, Francesco, 42 Einem, Gottfried von Dantons Tod, 260 Einstein, Albert, 21 Elgar, Edward, 28, 29 Estero, Andrea, 252 Etlin, Richard on Piacentini, 93 Euripides, 194 Evans, Joan, 109 expressionism, 122, 124, 258 Adorno on, 27–8, 240, 244–5, 268 Hermann Bahr on, 243–4 in Berg, 161 in Casella, 10, 27–8 Dallapiccola on, 243–5 in Dallapiccola, 144, 236, 262, 264–8, 269 Thomas Harrison on, 27, 134 in Schoenberg, 28, 135, 240, 244–5 in Webern, 240 Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, 165 the fascist leader as artist, 180–1 on Mussolini, 164–5 Falkenhausen, Susanne von, 166 Falla, Manuel de, 117 Pièces espagnoles ‘Andaluza’, 115 Farinacci, Roberto, 188 Fauré, Gabriel, 9, 58 Flamm, Christoph on the Canti di prigionia, 200–1, 210, 211, 221 Ford Foundation, 256 Forges Davanzati, Roberto on Casella, 103–4 Frazzi, Vito, 57, 73, 78–82, 85, 87, 127, 208–10, 231 Piano Quintet, 79–82 Preludio magico, 73 Scale alternate, 210 on twelve-note technique, 78–9 Frescobaldi, Girolamo, 45, 123 Freud, Sigmund, 276 Fubini, Enrico, 155, 156, 157

Galuppi, Baldassare, 42 Gasco, Alberto on Casella, 25 on Dallapiccola, 76, 122 Gatti, Guido M., 75–6, 148 on Dallapiccola, 123, 124, 126 on Pizzetti, 48 Gavazzeni, Gianandrea, 78, 192 on Dallapiccola, 124, 126 Canti di prigionia, 211 Volo di notte, 191–2 on Dallapiccola and Berg, 142 on Pizzetti, 51 Gentile, Emilio, 199 Gentile, Giovanni, 162, 183, 192, 241, 244 La filosofia dell’arte, 159–60 ghost-writer for Mussolini, 167 Gesualdo, Carlo, 194 Ghedini, Giorgio Federico Le baccanti, 70 Ghislanzoni, Alberto, 69 Ginsborg, Paul, 252 Giordano, Umberto, 70 ‘Giovinezza’ (anthem of the fascist party), 116, 119, 166 Giuranna, Barbara Decimo legio, 73 Gluck, Christoph Willibald Orfeo ed Euridice, 123 Goebbels, Joseph, 191 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 240 Goldbeck, Fred on Dallapiccola, 118, 122–3 Goldman, Henry F., 212 Gregor, Joseph, 163 Weltgeschichte des Theaters, 161–2 Griffin, Roger on fascism, 181, 196–9 Modernism and Fascism, 230 Gruppo Strumentale Italiano, 76 Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana on D’Annunzio, 31 Guerrini, Guido, 74 Tre pezzi, 74 Gui, Vittorio, 56, 71, 75 Gundle, Stephen, 252 Handel, George Frideric, 105 Harrison, Thomas on ‘the anti-aestheticist turn’, 46 on La voce, 54–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 237 on art and the Absolute, 133 Henze, Hans Werner, 239 Hepokoski, James, 30 Hindemith, Paul, 28, 86, 93 Clarinet Quintet, 103 Der Lindberghflug, 149 Mathis der Maler, 155 Hitler, Adolf, 69, 105, 199, 220, 238, 251, 254 visit to Florence, 77

Index Hoare, Samuel, 220 L’homme libre (newspaper), 58 Horace, 194 Carmen saeculare, 194 Horkheimer, Max, 272 Hulme, Thomas Ernest, 88 Huyssen, Andreas on Adorno, 32 on Bürger and Adorno, 22 Incagliati, Matteo, 213 ‘Inno Mameli’ (Italian national anthem), 26 ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music), 69, 72 Festivals Salzburg (1923), 94, 97 Venice (1925), 72 Frankfurt (1927), 94 Siena (1928), 72, 83 Florence (1934), 72, 75, 135 Prague (1935), 76, 133, 135, 141 Paris (1937), 118 London (1938), 134 London (1946), 211 Istria, 1, 59–61, 85, 122, 126, 127 Jachino, Carlo, 194 Jacobshagen, Arnold, 186, 233 Jameson, Fredric on Adorno, 21, 272 on the dialectic, 237 on historiographical beginnings, 19 Jarman, Douglas, 224 Kafka, Josef Der Proceß, 274–5 Kämper, Dietrich, 166, 186 Kant, Immanuel, 248 on ‘diabolical evil’, 247, 248 on the sublime, 132 Kay, Sarah, 249 Keller, Hans on Il prigioniero, 235, 274 Koechlin, Charles, 9 Koestler, Arthur Darkness at Noon, 257 Krenek, Ernst, 75, 136 Jonny spielt auf, 155 String Quartet No. 3, 103 Labroca, Mario, 76, 125, 189 on Dallapiccola, 76 Lacan, Jacques jouissance, 249 Lacerba (journal), 40, 42 Lambert, Constant, 72 Lamette, André, 15 Lanza Tommasi, Gioacchino on Malipiero, 39 Large, Duncan on Proust and Nietzsche, 242

299 Lascelles, George, 7th earl of Harewood on Il prigioniero, 262 League of Nations, 121 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 213 Leibowitz, René, 88, 246–7, 255 ‘Igor Strawinski ou le choix de la misère musicale’, 88 Leonardo (journal), 40, 42 Leonardo da Vinci, 241 Leopardi, Giacomo, 231 Leroux, Xavier, 9 Letteratura (journal), 149, 192 Levi, Erik, 117, 191 Liceo Musicale di Santa Cecilia (Rome), 26 Lindbergh, Charles, 149 Luther, Martin, 249 Lux, Simonetta, 187 Maderna, Bruno, 3, 4, 65 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 72, 76, 148, 155, 188, 189 I (1933), 71 II (1935), 71, 72, 220 III (1937), 72, 135, 143, 148 IV (1938), 72 VI (1940), 72, 143, 192 VIII (1942), 189 XIII (1950), 235 International Congresses on Music, 72 IV (1939), 155, 156–8 Mahler, Gustav, 2, 9, 29, 30 Symphony No. 7, 14 ‘Nachtmusik I’, 14 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 14, 32–40, 56, 57, 67, 70, 76, 89, 90, 97, 111–17, 170, 173 aristocratism, 41 audience with Mussolini, 67 and D’Annunzio, 32–5 on music and fascism, 119 on The Rite of Spring, 32 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, musical works Antonio e Cleopatra, 70 I capricci di Callot, 70 La cimarosiana, 87 Ecuba, 70 La favola del figlio cambiato, 116–17 Giulio Cesare, 70, 117, 194 Inni, 117 Pantea, 34–5, 39 Pause del silenzio, 35–9, 71, 89, 115 Rispetti e strambotti, 97 Sette canzoni, 111 ‘I vagabondi’, 112, 114–15, 117, 124 Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno, 32–4, 39 Torneo notturno, 89–90, 111, 116, 256 Malipiero, Riccardo on Il prigioniero, 235, 236, 276 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 30, 35 Manifesto di musicisti italiani per la tradizione dell’arte romantica dell’ottocento, 67, 74, 76, 179, 254

300

Index March on Rome, 57, 74, 94, 96, 100, 166 ‘Marcia reale’ (Italian national anthem), 119 Marcuse, Herbert on ‘affirmative culture’, 261 on Sartre, 272–3 Margaritone d’Arezzo, 243 Marin, Biagio, 60 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso parole in libertà, 44 Markevitch, Igor, 72 Mascagni, Pietro, 30, 31, 32, 43–4, 46, 57, 70, 132, 161 L’amico Fritz, 31, 43 Cavalleria rusticana, 30, 43, 235 Iris, 30, 43 Act II, 43 Act III, 44 Parisina, 40–1 I Rantzau, 31 Massarani, Renzo, 74, 127–31 Due canzoni corali, 125 incidental music for 18BL, 74 Sonatina for Cello and Piano, 126 Meine, Sabine, 246 Menotti, Gian Carlo The Consul, 260 Michelucci, Giovanni, 125 Mila, Massimo, 85, 93, 136 on Casella, 10, 26, 27, 95 on Dallapiccola, 85, 92, 123, 274 Il prigioniero, 235–6, 261–3, 269, 270 on Dallapiccola and Berg, 142 Milhaud, Darius, 72 Christophe Colomb, 161 La mort d’un tyran, 220 Milloss, Aurel M., 232 Ministero della Cultura Popolare (MinCulPop), 70, 71, 214 modernism Adorno on, 15–16, 22–5, 28, 39, 46, 133 and avant-garde, 2–4, 22–5 Peter J. Burkholder on, 29 in Casella, 4–15, 19, 20, 24, 25–8 T. J. Clark on, 132 and the cold war, 254–60 and dehumanization, 16–19, 20, 21 as domination, 179–80 as fascist, 180–1, 187, 230–1 Florentine, 1–2, 40–7, 54–5, 56–7 James Hepokoski on, 28–9 in Italy, 65–6 Fredric Jameson on, 20, 21, 88, 132, 133 in Malipiero, 32 Robert P. Morgan on, 21 as negation, 28, 132–4, 231 and Pizzetti, 56–7 in Il prigioniero, 264–9, 271–3 and ‘progressivism’, 28–32, 57 in Schoenberg, 15–16 in Volo di notte, 142–3, 187–8 Molinari, Bernardino, 39, 74, 97, 195 Il mondo (journal), 252

Mondo europeo (journal), 252 Monteverdi, Claudio, 16, 42, 44, 55, 111, 125, 172, 240 Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, 189 Montjoie! (journal), 110 Moravia, Alberto, 150 Mostra Aeronautica (1934), 166 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (1932), 166–7, 168 Mostra Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea. See Sindacato Nazionale Fascista dei Musicisti Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Don Giovanni, 244 Mulè, Giuseppe, 74 Musica d’oggi (journal), 100 Il musicista (journal), 69 Mussolini, Benito, 57, 69, 97, 100, 110, 111, 116, 119, 149, 167, 181, 196, 220, 254, 261 characteristics recognisable in Volo di notte, 164–5 cultural policy, 67 dedicatee of music by Casella, 143 dedicatee of music by Malipiero, 117 La dottrina del fascismo, 175 and the ISCM, 72 invasion of Ethiopia, 121 and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 71 and Malipiero, 67, 116 as modernist artist, 180–1 and Pizzetti, 71 and Savonarola, 220 symbolized in Petrassi’s Salmo IX, 196 urges artistic populism, 173 urges artistic realism, 149 Mussolini, Vittorio on Dallapiccola, 190 Nabokov, Nicolas, 255, 256 neoclassicism, 35, 66, 93, 94 Adorno on, 104–5 in Casella, 93–111 Dallapiccola and, 66, 86, 87–8, 89, 90–3, 123–5, 179 and fascism, 86, 104–5, 109–11 as modernism, 20, 66, 88–9, 104–9 in Schoenberg, 88 in Stravinsky, 103–9 Richard Taruskin on, 88, 101, 103 Neue Sachlichkeit, 149 Nicholls, Peter on decadence, 33 on Mallarmé, 30 Nicolodi, Fiamma, 77, 117, 192 bipartite periodization of fascism, 68 on Casella, 68–9, 96, 103, 104 on Dallapiccola, 60–1, 62, 136, 154–5, 171 on late-fascist performance statistics, 70 on Malipiero, 117 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42, 45, 51, 56, 174–7, 183, 242, 243 Also sprach Zarathustra, 174, 175, 176, 180, 242 Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 175

Index Nono, Luigi, 3, 4, 65, 95 Northcott, Bayan, 259 Novecento (artistic movement), 109–10, 125, 148 Opéra (Paris), 72 Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 72 Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia (Rome), 4, 71, 73 Orchestra Sinfonica Milanese, 71 Orff, Carl, 29 Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four, 257 Osmond-Smith, David, 77, 195 on Dallapiccola, 59, 62 Il prigioniero, 236 on Petrassi, 122, 196 Paganini, Niccolò, 87 Palestrina, Pierluigi da, 42, 45, 202 Pannain, Guido, 134 Papini, Giovanni, 40, 42 Parente, Alfredo, 155, 156–7, 158, 182 ‘Aspetti della cattiva musica novecentesca’, 156 La musica e le arti, 157 Parrino, Francesco on Casella, 21, 25, 26, 110 Partito Comunista Italiano, 95, 238, 252–3 Pasticci, Susanna, 24 Pavolini, Alessandro, 1, 69, 77, 143 Pavolini, Corrado, 143, 148 Pecci, Riccardo, 56 Pedrotti, Antonio on Dallapiccola, 126–7 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 87 Perle, George, 21 Pèrseo (journal), 69 Peskó, Zoltan, 141 Pestalozza, Luigi, 116, 253 on Casella, 93–4, 95 on Dallapiccola, 178, 188, 201 on Malipiero, 35, 36, 115, 116, 117 Peters, Edward, 269 Petrassi, Goffredo, 2, 72, 122, 133, 188, 189, 194, 231 Concerto per orchestra, 122, 231 Coro di morti, 231 on Dallapiccola, 121 Partita, 74 Salmo IX, 195–9, 213, 220 and Stravinsky, 195, 196 Petrobelli, Pierluigi, 89, 92 on Dallapiccola, 87 Pezzotti, Alessandra, 154, 161 Pfitzner, Hans Palestrina, 155 Philip II (King of Spain), 238, 269 Piacentini, Marcello, 93 Picasso, Pablo, 23 Piccardi, Carlo on Massarani, 125, 127–31 Piccardi, Oreste, 75 Pirandello, Luigi, 116

301 Pirotta, Nino on Malipiero, 35 Pius XI, 196 Pius XII, 251 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 40, 45, 46, 47–59, 60, 62, 67, 70, 72, 82, 97, 204, 213, 216 collaboration with Bastianelli, 56–7 collaboration with D’Annunzio, 46, 47–56 on Puccini, 41, 85 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, musical works Débora e Jaèle, 57, 151 Due canzoni corali, 57, 61 ‘La rondine’, 90 Fedra, 40–1, 46, 54–6, 57, 58, 61, 82 ‘Trenodia per Ippolito morto’, 55 incidental music for La nave, 46, 47–51, 55, 60, 61 ‘Coro di catecùmini e di cucutrici’, 48–51 ‘La danza dei candelabra e la danza di Basiliola’, 47–8 incidental music for La Pisanelle ou la Mort parfumée, 46 Orsèolo, 61, 71 ‘I pastori’, 51–4, 55 String Quartet in A major, 82 Tre liriche, 61 Vanna Lupa, 61 Violin Sonata, 57 Platti, Giovanni Benedetto, 42 Plautus, 140 Poe, Edgar Allan ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, 269 Polignac, Edmond de, 210 Il politecnico (journal), 252 Il ponte (journal), 252 Il popolo d’Italia (newspaper), 67 Porrino, Ennio, 73 attack on Casella, 68–9 Pratella, Francesco Balilla, 40 L’aviatore Dro, 143 Pravda (newspaper), 239 Previtali, Fernando, 201 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 40, 42, 56 Primato (journal), 191 La prora (journal), 100 Proust, Marcel, 241, 242–3, 245, 254 À la recherche du temps perdu, 242, 243 Puccini, Giacomo, 28, 30, 32, 42, 57, 132, 161 La Bohème, 41 Tosca, 41, 236, 269 Turandot, 3, 235 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 231 La rassegna musicale (journal), 75–6, 156, 201 Rassegna Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea. See Sindacato Nazionale Fascista dei Musicisti Rava, Carlo Enrico, 179 Ravel, Maurice, 9, 17, 44, 45, 58, 85, 87 L’Enfant et les sortilèges, 161 Introduction and Allegro, 82

302

Index Regino of Prüm, 50 Reich, Willi, 136 Rennert, Günther, 176 Respighi, Ottorino, 61, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74, 97, 124 La boutique fantasque, 87 Rossiniana, 87 Semirâma, 47 Rhené-Baton, 4 Ricordi (publishing house), 191 Ricordi, Giulio, 54, 55 Riemann, Hugo, 194 Rieti, Vittorio, 125 Riley, Matthew, 29 Ringer, Alexander, 258 Rivista musicale italiana (journal), 55 Robinson, J. Bradford as translator of Dahlhaus, 29 Roderick, Peter, 211, 216 Rognoni, Luigi on Dallapiccola, 124 Volo di notte, 196 Rosati, Giuseppe, 72 Rossi, Mario, 66, 72 Rossi-Doria, Gastone on Casella, 16, 17, 20 Rossini, Gioacchino, 125 Rosso di San Secondo, Pier Maria, 115 Rousseau, Henri, 243 Rufer, Josef, 258, 259 on Il prigioniero, 258 Russolo, Luigi, 2–4, 40 L’arte dei rumori, 3–4 Convegno d’automobili e d’aeroplani, 2 intonarumori, 2, 3, 143 Il risveglio di una città, 2, 3, 40 Si pranza sulla terrazza dell’Hôtel, 2 Sachs, Harvey, 71, 192, 196 on Casella, 66 on Dallapiccola, 200 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 175, 188, 192 on Nietzsche, 174 Vol de nuit, 142–3, 151–63 Sala, Luca, 189, 190 Salvetti, Guido, 24 Salviucci, Giovanni, 194 Alcesti, 194, 195 Samson, Jim on Casella, 16–17 Santoliquido, Francesco, 69 Sanzogno, Nino, 76 Sarfatti, Margherita, 110 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 196, 236–7, 246, 247, 255, 264, 271 on torture, 264 on twelve-note music, 255 Savonarola, Girolamo, 215, 219–20, 221, 233 La Scala (Milan), 41, 57, 173, 189, 259 Scardamaglia, Edoardo, 214 Scarlatti, Domenico, 125 Scherchen, Hermann, 72, 253 Schiff, David

on Elliott Carter, 256–7 Schiller, Friedrich Don Carlos, 251 Schmidt, Franz, 75 Schoenberg, Arnold, 2, 16, 21, 28, 35, 44, 56, 79, 87, 88, 93, 95, 104, 132, 173–4, 177, 179–80, 183, 191, 240, 243, 244–5, 246, 260, 269 Blicke, 269 ‘fluctuating tonality’, 141, 221 Harmonielehre, 15, 21, 135, 141, 158, 159–60, 174, 182, 242, 243 on Puccini, 30 Schoenberg, Arnold, musical works Drei Klavierstücke, 135 Erwartung, 20, 27, 35, 256 Fünf Orchesterstücke, 27 Die glückliche Hand, 244–5 Kammersymphonie, 16, 26 Moses und Aron, 155, 256 Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, 220 Pierrot lunaire, 89, 97–100, 135, 179 ‘Mondfleck’, 224 Suite (septet), 72 A Survivor from Warsaw, 238 Three Satires, 173 Variations for Orchestra, 141, 144 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 42, 158, 243, 260 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 242–3 Scriabin, Alexander, 44, 56, 132 Piano Sonata No. 6, 44 Piano Sonata No. 10, 44 Senici, Emanuele on Verdi, 30 Sereni, Emilio, 253 Il selvaggio (journal), 210 Shostakovich, Dmitri Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, 239 Symphony No. 7 ‘Leningrad’, 190 Shreffler, Anne C., 255 Sibelius, Jean, 28, 29 Symphony No. 5, 28 Sindacato Fascista delle Belle Arti, 70–1 Sindacato Nazionale Fascista dei Musicisti, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 208 II Mostra Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea (1933), 73–4 III Rassegna Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea (1935), 66, 76 IV Rassegna Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea (1937), 73, 76–7 V Rassegna Nazionale di Musica Contemporanea (1939), 76, 77 Sironi, Mario, 67 Slataper, Scipio, 62 Il mio Carso, 62 Società Italiana di Musica Moderna, 40, 96 Società Nazionale di Musica, 40 Soffici, Ardengo, 40 Somer, Avo, 82 on Debussy, 79 Sonzogno, Edoardo, 40

Index Sperenzi, Mario, 192 on Dallapiccola, 164 Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentino, 71, 72, 75 Stalin, Joseph, 254 La stampa (newspaper), 67, 188 Steinberg, Michael, 257 Stenzl, Jürg, 151, 169, 172, 187, 199, 233 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 29 Stone, Marla, 167, 187, 188 on fascism as coercive, 68 on fascist mass exhibitions, 166–7, 168 on fascist patronage, 71 on fascist pluralism, 66 Stonor Saunders, Frances, 256 Strapaese (artistic movement), 125–6, 149 Strauss, Richard, 9, 28, 30, 31, 43, 44, 161 on Elgar, 29 Stravinsky, Igor, 2, 14, 21, 28, 39, 56, 70, 72, 83–9, 93, 95, 101, 103, 104–9, 114, 117, 124, 131, 132, 135 and Mussolini, 110–11 Poétique musicale, 86 Stravinsky, Igor, musical works Apollon musagète, 86, 104, 105, 109, 195 Cantata, 87 Capriccio, 86, 195 Circus Polka, 86 Concertino, 104 Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, 88, 105, 110 Divertimento, 86 Dumbarton Oaks, 86 Duo concertant, 86, 124 Histoire du soldat, 23, 86 ‘Ragtime’, 23 Jeu de cartes, 109 Les noces, 83, 86, 90, 97, 118, 204 Octet, 88, 103, 104, 105–9 Oedipus rex, 86, 104, 105 Perséphone, 86, 124 Petrushka, 85, 87, 101 Piano-Rag-Music, 23, 24 Pulcinella, 87 Ragtime for Eleven Instruments, 23, 24 Renard, 86 Requiem Canticles, 87 The Rite of Spring, 2, 3, 4, 9, 15, 20, 27, 28, 32, 39, 85, 86, 88, 123 ‘Mystic Circles of the Young Girls’, 83 ‘Ritual of the Rival Tribes’, 84 ‘Ritual of Abduction’, 27 Scènes de ballet, 86 Scherzo à la russe, 86 Sérénade en la, 109 Sonata for two pianos, 86 Symphony of Psalms, 86, 142, 194, 195, 196 Three Easy Pieces, 24 ‘Polka’, 103 Three Pieces for String Quartet, 85 Strobel, Heinrich on ‘fascist classicism’, 131

303 Stuart, Mary, 200, 202, 215, 233 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 85, 259 on Il prigioniero, 258 symbolism, 148, 150 Carolyn Abbate on, 150–2 in D’Annunzio, 35–6 Thomas Harrison on, 134 in Malipiero, 38–9 in Volo di notte, 150–4, 188 Saint-Exupéry and, 150–1 Tanner, Michael on Nietzsche, 176 Tartini, Giuseppe, 87, 89 Taruskin, Richard, 66, 104, 258 on ‘anxiety of influence’, 87 maximalisation thesis, 16–22, 88–9 on modernist historiography, 15 on Stravinsky, 39, 83, 101–3 Taylor, Charles on Augustine, 167 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Illyich Overture ‘1812’, 26 Teatro Comunale (Florence), 61, 75 Teatro dell’Opera (Rome), 114, 116 Teatro della Pergola (Florence), 188, 192 Teatro delle Arti (Rome), 189 Teatro delle Novità (Bergamo), 71 Teatro Romano (Fiesole), 126 Tebaldini, Giovanni, 50 Tedeschi, Rubens, 253 Tempo (newspaper), 192 Terence, 140 Il tevere (newspaper), 69 Togni, Camillo on Dallapiccola, 236 Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, 157, 160 Tomlinson, Gary, 181, 188 Tommasini, Vincenzo, 74 Le donne di buon umore, 87 Toni, Alceo, 67, 179, 188, 254 on Volo di notte, 178 Torrefranca, Fausto, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 55, 58, 114, 241 Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale, 41–2 La vita musicale dello spirito, 42, 45 Unamuno, Miguel de, 263, 264 L’Unità (newspaper), 239, 253 Uras, Lara Sonja, 58 Valesio, Paolo on D’Annunzio, 46 van den Toorn, Pieter C., 17, 208 Van Gogh, Vincent, 243 Varèse, Edgard, 104, 132 Amériques, 27 Vecchi, Orazio, 92 L’Amfiparnaso, 90, 97

304

Index Venice International Festival of Contemporary Music, 73, 213–14 II (1932), 74 III (1934), 72, 75, 135, 141 IV (1936), 135 V (1937), 72–3, 77, 126 VII (1941), 214 Venuti, Massimo on Il prigioniero, 154, 247, 273 Verdi, Giuseppe, 41, 43, 58, 125, 240 Aïda, 269 Don Carlo, 151 Don Carlos, 251, 269 Falstaff, 3, 30 ‘Dal labbro al canto’, 30 Il trovatore, 269, 270–1 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 72 Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Auguste, 269 ‘La torture par l’espérance’, 237–8 Vittorini, Elio, 252 Vivaldi, Antonio, 101, 131 Vlad, Roman on Dallapiccola, 124, 136 Vocabolario della Crusca (dictionary), 126 La voce (journal), 40, 41, 42, 44, 54, 56, 62, 89 Voce operaia (newspaper), 212 Votto, Antonino, 75 Vuillermoz, Émile, 15 Wagner, Richard, 31, 43, 53, 151, 154, 172, 182, 239 Die Meistersinger, 155, 187 Parsifal, 123 Tristan und Isolde, 1, 56 Waterhouse, John C. G. on Casella, 16, 17, 95, 101, 111 on Dallapiccola, 227 on Malipiero, 32, 34, 36, 115, 116–17 Webern, Anton, 2, 29, 39, 75, 87, 240, 245 Das Augenlicht, 134, 135 Concerto, 133, 134, 135 Sechs Orchesterstücke, 4

Weill, Kurt Der Lindberghflug, 149 Weininger, Otto Geschlecht und Charakter, 41 Wellesz, Egon, 75 Wildberger, Jacques on Dallapiccola and Stravinsky, 110–11 on Il prigioniero, 261, 269 Wilson, Alexandra, 30 on Torrefranca, 41 Wolin, Richard, 24 Yeats, William Butler The Wild Swans at Coole ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, 182 Zafred, Mario, 253 on Il prigioniero, 239, 253 Zandonai, Riccardo, 32, 67, 70, 132, 213 Il bacio, 70 Conchita, 47 Francesca da Rimini, 31, 32 Zanetti, Roberto, 194 Zanolini, Bruno, 86 Zecchi, Adone, 188–9 Zemlinsky, Alexander, 2 Zhdanov, Andrei, 95 Zillig, Winfried Das Opfer, 191 Žižek, Slavoj, 240, 247 on Adorno, 274, 275 desire and drive, 275–6 on Kafka, 274–5 masochistic ‘fundamental fantasy’, 275 on the Nazi inner circle as psychotically split, 250–1 on sadism, 249 on the sincerity of Nazi belief, 248 on ‘totalitarianism’, 261 the ‘Thing’, 276 Zweig, Stefan, 200, 201 Mary Stuart, 200 Zwingli, Huldrych, 249