Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

Ben Earle's study explores twentieth-century music and politics in two of their most extreme forms: modernism and fascism.

Tracing the history of musical modernism in Italy from the fin de siècle to the Cold War, this book follows the work of Luigi Dallapiccola, the leading Italian composer of the mid-twentieth century, as he moved from support for the fascist regime to a committed resistance to totalitarianism.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 doing so, 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.