Luigi Dallapiccola

The story is well known: on 1 April 1924, in the Sala Bianca of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, a piano and composition student from the city conservatory, Luigi Dallapiccola, looked on while Giacomo Puccini listened to a performance of Pierrot lunaire, conducted by Arnold Schoenberg. After the concert, Puccini and Dallapiccola talked quietly together for about ten minutes in a corner of the foyer. No one knows what they said, but observers sensed a genuine connection, a rare moment when two artists of utterly different temperaments and ideals found common ground in their shared love of music.¹

By this time, the musical dualism symbolized by that historic encounter had already begun to shape Dallapiccola’s own compositional voice, molded by a variety of influences. Foremost among them was the Italian tradition of melodrama, particularly the works of Giuseppe Verdi. Writing in 1930 about Simon Boccanegra (he also wrote about Falstaff, Rigoletto, and Un bal masqué), Dallapiccola recognized in Verdi’s music and drama a modern sensibility enriched by an openness to the cosmopolitan spirit of contemporary art. Another important influence was Ferruccio Busoni. Though Dallapiccola never met or heard him perform, he shared Busoni’s dual Italian and Germanic heritage, and admired the sentimentality, “solid granite construction,” and dramatic intuitions in Busoni’s Doktor Faust.

Dallapiccola was also drawn to Maurice Ravel, admiring his sense of balance and ability to conjure a whole sound world from a single musical idea, as in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. In that work, Ravel serves not merely as narrator but an active participant in the child’s inner world.

Along with the influence of the Second Viennese School (to which we will return later), there was that of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy (“What would our youth have been without Debussy?” Dallapiccola asked himself), and even Edgard Varèse, a former pupil of Busoni, with whom he would work from 1951 onward. Dallapiccola was specially positioned at the confluence of these diverse musical modernities.

With Puccini’s death and the decline of verismo, the “Ottanta” generation was emerging; these composers would dominate the Italian stage in the 1930s. The date of the above anecdote is thus significant. From 1925 onward, laws passed by Mussolini’s fascist government were dividing the musical world. On 17 December 1932, a manifesto against “atonal trumpeting,” signed by Ildebrando Pizzetti, Ottorino Respighi, and Riccardo Zandonai, was published in Il popolo d’Italia, Il corriere della sera, and La stampa. Not long after, in 1937, the Syndicate of Fascist Musicians condemned expressionism, “objective” music, the “cerebral ramblings” of modernity, and the consequences of atonality, likening the effects of atonality to those of Bolshevism. Dallapiccola, like Bernd Alois Zimmermann, thus found himself belonging to a difficult generation: too early to participate in the avant-garde of a democratic state, yet too late to absorb, freely and contemporaneously, the achievements of serialism.

In the 1930s, amid the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and Italy’s military intervention in Spain, Dallapiccola opposed fascism, despite the risk to his family. Confronting political oppression, he also began to rethink his approach to sound, a transformation that would lead to a distinctly Italian form of postwar serialism rooted in the nation’s reconstruction and its anti-fascist values. This ideological stance is already evident in his 1937-1938 work Volo di Notte, a one-act opera based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel Vol de nuit. In stark contrast to the fascist and Nazi glorification of military heroism, Dallapiccola’s opera denies its central character, the aviator, the status of a hero. At a time when aviation — once a symbol of technological modernity — was becoming an instrument of mass destruction, the leap from civil heroism to military heroism was a short one, yet Volo di Notte refuses to take it. Instead, the protagonist’s actions realize and engage with a profound sense of humanity. Resisting the rhetoric of blind individualistic willpower, Dallapiccola’s music favors clarity, restraint, and serenity.

In his 1950 article “Sulla strada della dodecafonia” (“On the Road to Twelve-Tone Technique”), written well after he had adopted serialism, Dallapiccola reflects on his early encounters with atonality — an innovation he felt had come “too soon.” He recalled experimenting with twelve-tone writing as early as the 1930s, drawn not by its strict system but by its melodic potential and coloristic effects.

He had previously described his discovery of works by Anton Webern: Concerto, op. 24, on 5 September 1935 in Prague, and Das Augenlicht, Op. 26, on 17 June 1938 in London. In his diary, he praises these works for their brevity and extraordinary concentration, noting that they “express the maximum of ideas with the minimum of words.”

What also struck him was Webern’s use of silence — once considered unsettling within traditional music theory — along with the stylistic and aesthetic unity that bound Webern’s compositions together. Dallapiccola discerned in them a deep respect for tradition, an ethic, and a profound attentiveness to sound itself. This last quality, though somewhat difficult to define, was central to his own aesthetic, encompassing both timbre and the sonic reality of musical structure. In Webern’s serialism, he saw a world where everything was invention, which allowed “highly varied differentiations.”²

Before reading the theoretical works of Ernst Krenek, René Leibowitz, or Josef Rufer,³ Dallapiccola confirmed his orientation toward serialism through his appreciation of the literary assonances in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as the way Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time evokes memory and develops its characters slowly, rhythmically, and melodically. “I therefore began to understand that in music the same succession of sounds can assume different meanings, provided they are articulated in different ways.”⁴

Was his serialism, then, a language or a technique? Dallapiccola introduced a third term: for him, it was a state of mind, a disposition — what could be described as a Stimmung, an atmosphere. He believed serialism “may one day be as satisfying as the seconda prattica adopted by Monteverdi more than three centuries ago.”⁵ The acoustic upheaval it introduced was, in his view, a natural development, resulting from the breakdown of the tonal universe and the emancipation of dissonance. Serialism represented the most comprehensive compositional method, the only one that allows for articulation, transformation, and variation while also providing a means of achieving coherent musical discourse. Yet he remains aware that “no technical artifice has ever guaranteed anything in art, and the unity of a work, like melody, rhythm, and harmony, is ultimately an internal matter.”

Dallapiccola’s rejection of rigid systems also denied an essential, if not founding, principle of dodecaphony: the equality of all twelve tones. Instead, he treated each pitch as it was heard, within a flexible framework shaped by dynamics, duration, timbre, and placement — whether they fall on a strong or weak beat, or in a fast or slow passage. While he avoids the traditional tonic, octaves between outer voices and on strong beats (though not necessarily elsewhere), and classical cadential motion (making sonata form impossible), he retains one force from conventional harmony: the presence of distinct, privileged intervals. These intervals create subtle connections between sounds — less immediately perceptible than tonal dominant–tonic relationships, but nonetheless essential in shaping the music’s structure.

These intervals are not fixed; they shift throughout a piece and vary from work to work, in constant reinvention. Dallapiccola’s progressive embrace of dodecaphony stemmed chiefly from its application to melody (melodia, in Busoni’s sense of the term⁶) and did not preclude tonal, modal, or diatonic echoes and tropes. In the fifth of his Sei cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il giovane (1932-1936), for choir alone or with instruments, Dallapiccola — who had been an early reader of Schoenberg’s Treatise on Harmony (studied in 1922, particularly the chapter on fourth chords) — experimented with replacing perfect fourths with diminished fifths. “To my astonishment,” he recalled, “I realized that doing so resulted in the complete chromatic set.” The descending melodic row he used was F–B–F#–C–G–Db–Ab–D–A–Eb–Bb–E.

A similar exploration unfolds in the first section of Tre Laudi (1936-1937), for voice and chamber orchestra, where Dallapiccola employs a twelve-tone series and its retrograde. In Volo di Notte, he introduces series in inversion and retrograde inversion. In Canti di Prigionia (1938-1941), for choir and instruments, he applies a Webern-like model, dividing the series into three almost identical tetrachords, each structured as a minor third, diminished fifth, major ninth, and major seventh: E–G–Bb–F# / A–C–Eb–B / D–F–Ab–Db.

By the 1940s, Dallapiccola’s serial harmony included perfect intervals as well as major and minor chords. Thus, Cinque Frammenti di Saffo (1942), for voice and fifteen instruments, features C major and Eb minor chords: C–E–G / Eb–Gb–Bb / C#–A–B / D–F–G#. Similarly, the “Liberty” series from the opera Il Prigioniero (1943-1948) contains three tetrachords with diatonic contours: A–B–D–F / G–Bb–C–Eb / F#–G#–C#–E.

Sometimes Dallapiccola employed several series in a single work, as in the end of his Canti di Prigionia, which also quotes from the Dies irae. Similarly, Cinque Frammenti di Saffo assigns one or two series to each part, and Il Prigioniero is based on three. Over time, however, Dallapiccola began to limit his material, adopting derived series modeled after Berg’s Lulu, in which the initial row is transformed by omitting six of its pitches.

• Main series: F–(Gb–Bb–C–C#–E–G)–Eb–(A–B–D–G#/F–Gb)–Bb
• Derivative series: F–Eb–Bb–B–C#–G#–G–F#–A–C–D–E

It becomes clear that Dallapiccola’s tone rows preserve a careful balance between consonant and dissonant intervals. This concern for equilibrium is a consistent characteristic of Italian serialism, as accentuated by Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono in the 1940s based on their study of Paul Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz (The Craft of Musical Composition).

In the 1950s, Dallapiccola undertook intensive study of twelve-tone composition. Under the guidance of René Leibowitz, he abandoned major and minor chords, as well as false octave relations, and instead turned toward symmetrical series and constellations of common intervals derived from Webern. The influence of Webern’s Concerto, op. 24, is apparent in the structural design of Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (1952) for piano. However, the series he employed (A#–B–Eb–Gb–Ab–D–Db–F–G–C–A–E), including all the intervals, follows more closely Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. Dallapiccola divides the row into four melodic groups and enriches the harmony with the B-A-C-H motif and a descending chromatic line.

Symmetry continued to concern him in Cinque canti (1956), for baritone and eight instruments. The series is split into two hexachords, the second the retrograde inversion of the first: Gb–F–B–D–C–Ab / C#–A–G–Bb–E–Eb.

Dallapiccola’s final opera, Ulisse (1960-1968), has a harmonic framework of three series. The basic series “Mare I” (Db–C–D–Eb–A–Ab / F–E–G–F#–A#–B) gives rise to the “Mare II” series made up of the first hexachord and its transposed retrograde inversion: Db–C–D–Eb–A–Ab / B–Bb–E–F–G–F#. The “Mare III” series is made up of the retrograde and transposed inversion, G#–A–Eb–D–C–C# / F#–G–F–E–A#–B, following the model of Weber’s Symphony, op. 21, whose second hexachord corresponds to the retrograde of the first.

Symmetry affects not only pitch organization but also form. Nearly all his works — including Canti di liberazione (1951-1955), for choir and orchestra, the Goethe-Lieder (1953), for mezzo-soprano and three clarinets, Requiescant (1957-1958), for mixed choir and orchestra — are structured as arches. This principal reaches its fullest expression in Ulisse, whose dramatic design mirrors the Homeric return. As Dallapiccola told the psychologist Julius Bahle, the work’s true source lies not in its opening but at its climax. In Ulisse, this central summit is “The Kingdom of the Cimmerians,” a scene that has no parallel within the opera’s grand arch.

Dallapiccola had already borrowed Webern’s use of canon, not as a rigid formal device but as an organic outgrowth of the principles of polyphony. One example is the third song of the Canti di Prigionia (1938-1941), where the choir sings a double canon while the instruments weave a canonic texture around a central mirror point. Another appears in the fifth movement of Quaderno musicale di Annalibera, “Contrapunctus secundus,” which is a canon in contrary motion. A further and especially significant instance is Sex Carmina Alcaei (1943), for voice and ensemble. Dedicated to Webern’s memory, the work is more than an homage to a friend; it convey’s Dallapiccola’s “admiration for and indebtedness to the teaching of the master — the composer new among the new.” The polyphonic fabric of Sex Carmina Alcaei stands as a testament to the “treasure” Dallapiccola found in the Viennese composer’s work.⁷

The text consists of ancient Greek poems in Salvatore Quasimodo’s 1940 translation. Though grounded in rigorous metrical and linguistic scholarship, these poems also carried a powerful political charge, standing as an artistic act of resistance against the vulgarity and barbarism of Nazi ideology:

Those were the years when Europe, surrounded by barbed wire, was rapidly being reduced to a heap of ruins. The sovereign equilibrium emanating from these Greek poems helped me, at least in certain periods, to find comfort amid the relentless disorder that shaped our lives. It allowed me to endure the tragic events of the time and, perhaps, to provide a necessary contrast with the atmosphere of the opera Il Prigioniero, which I was working on at the time.⁸

The structure of the work is as follows:
I. Expositio
II. Canon perpetuus
III. Canones diversi
IV. Canon contrario motu
V. Canon duplex contrario motu
VI. Conclusio

Dallapiccola’s approach to dodecaphony, reaching its most rigorous expression in Sex Carmina Alcaei, reveals a contrapuntal foundation. As Nono observed, this orientation led Dallapiccola to “construct his music with a developed architectural sense, giving his later works an organicism and logic that finds its resolution in the dodecaphonic vision.”

By the 1950s, Dallapiccola was applying increasingly intricate internal structures to tone rows, segmenting them into groups of two to six notes, producing a kind of sui generis variation. In Canti di liberazione, for example, he builds much of the material from a single melodic cell consisting of notes 7, 8, and 9 of the series, yet, through simultaneous transformations, unveils the immense variety contained within this small fragment. The orchestration reinforces the qualities of the row, highlighting the shifting contours of the counterpoint. In this way, timbre itself becomes a structuring element of the canonic texture.

Similarly, Cinque canti’s eight parts are divided in two, following the Renaissance concept of the proportional canon. Meanwhile, the overtly canonic nature of Sex Carmina Alcaei gives way to a more abstract serial canon with increasingly elaborate rhythmic configurations.

Ultimately, any discussion of Dallapiccola’s use of serial techniques and their canonical expressions must acknowledge the underlying humanism of his work. Critical of mystification, he sought new modes of expression, no matter how difficult or utopian, as a way to deepen the dialogue between individuals. Three distinct yet interconnected domains emerged from this pursuit.

1. The first of these is the Hellenic. Bracketing the obvious example, Ulisse — Dallapiccola’s magnum opus and, in his own words, “the result of my whole life” — his fascination with the ancient world is apparent throughout his work. Cinque canti, for instance, is based on a fragment by the Pythagorean philosopher Ion of Chios, lyric poetry by an anonymous author and by Likymnios of Chios, the Dorian dialect and Laconian legends found in Alcman’s songs, and verses by Ibycus of Rhegium, celebrated in antiquity as a poet of love inspired by nature. Yet the ancient texts Dallapiccola set are never treated as academic, esoteric, philologically self-conscious, or nostalgic for some inaccessible past. Instead, as the son of a professor of classical studies, raised in the fervent spirit of Italian irredentism, and the last heir of the Risorgimento’s tradition of resistance, Dallapiccola finds in antiquity an exaltation of humanity’s struggle against overwhelming forces. His turn to the past is profoundly political; it is never an escape, never a refuge from the tragic realities of his own time.
2. The second is the religious. A prime example is Job (1950), a sacred oratorio with a libretto by Dallapiccola based on the Bible. Other Christian texts he set to music include works by St. Augustine in Canti di liberazione, the book of Matthew in Requiescant, St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians in Parole di San Paolo (1964), and excerpts from the book of Ecclesiastes in Tempus Destruendi — Tempus Aedificandi (1970-1971). Though a believing Christian, Dallapiccola rejected any notion of religion as a means of repression or domination. His works explore faith, charity, and hope — central themes in Il Prigioniero, itself influenced by the parable of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. They also confront mystery, redemptive suffering, doubt, the dark night of the soul, and prayer, all of which bear witness to the anxieties and moral reckonings of the mid-twentieth century.
3. The third domain is the political, or, more precisely, the power of indignation. For Dallapiccola, musical creation was both an ethical act and a form of commitment. Both principals are evident in Canti di Prigionia and Il Prigioniero, which stand as searing denunciations of intolerance and the deprivation of freedom, whether individual or collective. His music speaks against the brutalities of the Spanish Inquisition, the oppression of Istria by the Habsburgs, the racial laws of fascist Italy, and the tragedy of mass extermination in Hitler’s Germany. Within his work, the denizens of dungeons, prisons, and camps raise their voices in a call for fraternity. In Il Prigioniero, the repeated invocation of “fratello” (brother), intoned over a three-note motif, would later resonate in the works of Nono and Luciano Berio. And the final word of the opera, libertà (freedom), is not a cry of triumphant resolution but a tormented question.

As Giacomo Manzoni writes about Dallapiccola:

The value of his work and presence lies above all in the fact that even in the most tragic moments of recent human history, he maintained his faith in a high and noble ideal of man, believing in the possibility of rediscovering it through art, its truest voice.⁹

^{1. Luigi Dallapiccola, “Sur le chemin du dodécaphonisme” (1950), Paroles et Musique, Paris, Minerve, 1992, pp. 196-197. See also Dallapiccola, “Di un aspetto della musica contemporanea” (1936), Parole e musica, Milan, Il saggiatore, 1980, pp. 207-224, an article not reproduced in the French edition. ↩}

^{2. Dallapiccola, “Encounter with Anton Webern” (14 June 1938, at the premiere of Das Augenlicht), Paroles et Musique, op. cit. (note 1), p. 130. Dallapiccola also met Webern in Vienna on 9 March 1942. ↩}

^{3. See Ernst Krenek, Über neue Musik, Vienna, Verlag der Ringbuchhandlung, 1937; René Leibowitz, Schoenberg et son école, Paris, Janin, 1947; and Josef Rufer, Teoria della composizione dodecafonica (for which Dallapiccola’s wife, Laura, collaborated on the translation of the technical terminology), Milan, Il saggiatore, 1962 (Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen, Berlin/Wunsiedel, Max Hesse, 1952). ↩}

^{4. See Dallapiccola, “Sur le chemin du dodécaphonisme”, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 196-208. ↩}

^{5. Luigi Dallapiccola, “Den 13. September,” in Stimmen, 16, 1949, p. 455, translated into French by Lucienne Thalmann. ↩}

^{6. “A series is (1) a collection of repeated intervals that (2) ascend, descend, articulate and animate (3) rhythmically, which contains (4) a latent harmony and describes (5) a state of mind that can and does exist independently of the text as well as (6) expression, while also remaining independent of the accompaniment and (7) form; the essence of which is in no way modified by the (8) tonality or (9) performance instrumentation.” Dallapiccola, “Témoignage sur le dodécaphonisme” (Testimony on dodecaphony, 1952), Paroles et Musique, op. cit. (note 1), p. 212, quoting Ferruccio Busoni, “Appunti” (1922), Lo sguardo lieto, Milan, Il saggiatore, 1977, p. 131. ↩}

^{7. Luigi Nono, “Luigi Dallapiccola et les Sex carmina Alcaei” (circa 1948), Écrits, Geneva, Contrechamps, 2007, p. 29. See Webern’s letters to Dallapiccola on 3 June 1942 and 15 April 1944 in Luigi Dallapiccola: Saggi, testimonianze, carteggio, biografia e bibliografia, Milan, Suvini Zerboni, 1975, pp. 66-69. Despite their stylistic differences, Webern emphasized their “common path” (einen gemeisamen Weg) and thanked Dallapiccola for the dedication of Sex carmina Alcaei: “How proud it makes me! But above all it consoles me and reassures me: how we need such warmth and such friendship today!” ↩}

^{8. Dallapiccola, “Liriche greche” (CBS Epic BC 1088, December 1968), reprinted in Luigi Dallapiccola: Saggi, testimonianze, carteggio, biografia e bibliografia, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 122-123. ↩}

^{9. Giacomo Manzoni, “Il tempo ha dato ragione al suo stile” (1964), Tradizione e utopia, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1994, p. 257. Translated from the French translations of the Italian. ↩}