Songs of freedom
by © Misha Donat
[Source: Misha Donat, "Songs of Freedom",
©
The Guardian,
February 13, 2004 (London, GB). Courtesy of Marko Valcic (Toronto, Ontario,
CA).]
Interned in the first world war and persecuted in
the second, Luigi Dallapiccola had a deep hatred of tyranny. His groundbreaking
music deserves to be celebrated as an expression of liberation
On April
1 1924, Schoenberg arrived in Florence
with his touring ensemble for a performance of his expressionist cabaret piece
Pierrot Lunaire at the Palazzo Pitti. Most of those present regarded the
occasion as an elaborate April fool, but at least two people sat listening
intently. One was Italy's
most famous living composer. Although terminally ill with throat cancer, he had
driven the 50-odd miles from his home in Viareggio
to hear the performance, and after it ended he asked to be presented to
Schoenberg. The other was a 20-year-old music student named Luigi Dallapiccola.
Not for a further 25 years did Dallapiccola summon up the courage to write to
Schoenberg and explain how that evening had been a defining moment in his life.
For his part, Schoenberg confessed how proud he'd always been that Puccini had
come to the Pierrot concert.
There is, perhaps, something symbolic about the
way the paths of the three composers crossed for that brief moment. For it is in
Dallapiccola's music that Italianate warmth and lyricism find a meeting ground
with Austro-German contrapuntal rigour. In fact, Dallapiccola - born on
February 3 1904 - was the first significant composer in his country
to adopt the 12-note method of composition that Schoenberg had formulated in the
early 1920s as a means of unifying music that no longer relied on the
traditional major and minor keys. In so doing Dallapiccola may be said to have
brought Italian music very belatedly into the 20th century. Not surprisingly, he
was something of a father figure to the generation of Italian composers that
came after him: he was for a brief period the teacher of Luciano Berio, and his
music was deeply admired by Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna.
As Dallapiccola was finding his feet as a
composer, Italy
was going through its darkest period, politically and culturally. Even
Dallapiccola flirted briefly with fascism in the 1930s. His eyes were opened on
September 1 1938, when Mussolini issued
Italy's anti-semitic racial laws. "I wanted to
protest," Dallapiccola said later, "but I wasn't so naive as not to know that in
a totalitarian state the individual is powerless. Only in music could I express
my indignation." Earlier that year Dallapiccola had married a Jewish woman, and
the couple were forced to seek refuge in the hills surrounding
Florence. On the day of Mussolini's proclamation,
Dallapiccola began work on his Canti di Prigionia (Songs of Imprisonment) - the
first in a series of "protest" works.
A hatred of tyranny and oppression had been instilled in Dallapiccola from an
early age. He was born on February 3 1904, in a frontier town on the Istrian
peninsula near Trieste. At the time
it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though after the first world war it
reverted to
Italy. (It is
now in Croatia.)
The composer recalled that when a train pulled in to the local station, the
guard would announce its name in three languages: Mitterburg/Pisino/Pazin - an
indication of its status as a cultural melting-pot. The Austrian authorities
were quick to stamp on any suspected irredentist sympathies among the Italian
population, and Dallapiccola's father - a classics teacher at the only
Italian-language school - was considered "politically unreliable". As a result
the school was closed down, and the family deported to the Styrian capital of
Graz.
The experience of internment left a deep scar on Dallapiccola. The Canti di
Prigionia (scored for chorus with an instrumental ensemble consisting of two
harps, two pianos and percussion) sets texts by three condemned prisoners: Mary
Stuart, Boethius and Savonarola. Mary Stuart's fervent prayer for freedom struck
a particularly strong chord: "I wanted," Dallapiccola said, "the divine word
libera to be shouted by everyone." Some five years later, when his only child
was born shortly after the libera tion of Florence
from the Nazi occupation in August 1944, she was named Annalibera.
Dallapiccola's progress towards 12-note music was a gradual one, and it was
made difficult by the lack of performances of the music of Schoenberg, Berg and
Webern in Italy.
But he managed to acquire a score of Berg's Wozzeck and, in 1934, he heard the
same composer's concert-aria Der Wein at a contemporary music festival in
Venice. The two works left an indelible impression on him
- as did Lulu, of which he heard the first broadcast performance in 1937. At
that time Dallapiccola was working on his own first opera, Volo di Notte (based
on Saint-Exupéry's novel Vol de Nuit), and Berg's influence can be heard
throughout: in the opera's symphonic musical forms; in the casting of one of its
scenes as a "pezzo ritmico" (an idea that harks back to the "monoritmica" that
reaches its climax with the suicide of Lulu's husband in the first act of Berg's
opera) and in the Movimento di Blues, which echoes the off-stage jazz band
interludes that punctuate the scene in Lulu's dressing-room.
Dallapiccola lived in Florence
for more than 50 years, the majority of them in an apartment in the Via Romana
overlooking the
Boboli Gardens,
and his exquisitely executed scores have an air of Florentine craftsmanship
about them. Even the look of the music on the page carries symbolic
significance, as it occasionally does in Italian renaissance music. In his
one-act opera Il Prigioniero, set during the Spanish Inquisition, a prisoner is
led to believe that freedom is at hand. He manages to escape his cell but as he
emerges into a starlit garden, only to fall into the arms of the Grand
Inquisitor, he understands that all the events leading to his escape have been
pre-arranged as the ultimate torture - hope. In the music, a complex web of
ricercars, or intricate contrapuntal studies, seems to reflect the labyrinth of
Saragossa's subterranean corridors through which the
prisoner stumbles.
In the beautiful late piece Sicut Umbra ... for mezzo-soprano and chamber
ensemble, Juan Ramón Jiménez's lines "Hay que buscar, para saber tu tumba, por
el firmamiento" ("You have to search the firmament to know your tomb") are
mirrored by melodic lines based on the shapes of various constellations, which
Dallapiccola "draws" in the score. And the Cinque Canti of 1956 for baritone and
chamber ensemble use a 12-note row whose sinuous line suggests the shape of a
crucifix. At the work's mid-point a single "tutti" chord in an otherwise
sparsely scored passage enables Dallapiccola to "draw" an actual cross on the
page. The listener may not consciously be aware of such symbolic devices, but
they nevertheless cast a metaphysical shadow over the music.
At the heart of Dallapiccola's art lie elaborate canons of every conceivable
kind. They are heard at their most serenely simple in the Wartime Series of
Greek Lyrics the composer wrote as a mental refuge from the turmoil that
surrounded him. More complex are the Goethe-Lieder of 1953 for voice and three
clarinets, based on poems from the Westöstlicher Divan. In one, the character of
Suleika contemplates her reflection: "The mirror tells me I am beautiful. You
tell me it is also my fate to age." Dallapiccola writes a mirror-canon, with the
answering voice not only upside-down but also in a refracted rhythm that
suggests the process of ageing, as though in a distorted looking-glass.
There is in Dallapiccola's art a touching faith in the 12-note system, almost
as a way of life. That faith is one that is deeply unfashionable today. Thirty
years ago, at the time of the composer's 70th birthday, I produced a
retrospective evening of his work for Radio 3, and I remember asking him what
was being done in Italy
to mark the occasion. "I think nothing," he said, with a resigned shrug of the
shoulders.
At least this time round, on his centenary, there will be performances of his
music in Rome
and Florence. But over here there
have been precious few attempts to spark a revival of interest in recent years,
other than a rather ill-judged production of Il Prigioniero at English National
Opera. It's difficult to know why this hauntingly beautiful music remains so
little known to all but a small circle of admirers. Certainly, it is
undemonstrative in its perfection; but that very perfection is a quality we
should treasure.
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