La giovinezza sommersa di un compositore: Luigi Dallapiccola by Luciano Alberti (review)

On the morning of 26 July 1943, Luigi Dallapiccola, Professor of Composition at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence, participated with two colleagues in an act of triumphant vandalism at their workplace, toppling and breaking a statue of Benito Mussolini that, as Luciano Alberti explains towards the end of this vast book, 'dominated the big staircase that leads from the entrance hall to the balcony of the concert hall' (p. 464). The composer was doubtless somewhat the worse for wear. Late the previous evening, on hearing the news (in a phone call from Igor Markevitch) of the Duce's dismissal as head of the Italian government, Dallapiccola and his wife, together with his friend the pianist Pietro Scarpini, had proceeded to get drunk on acquavite. Or rather, Dallapiccola had. 'Laura and Scarpini, abstemious people', so the composer wrote in a letter to the critic Alberto Mantelli, 'drank two little glasses; I lost count' (p. 463). It would not be long before he had occasion to rue his enthusiasm. Following Marshal Badoglio's announcement of the Italian armistice with the Allies, on 8 September 1943, and the subsequent near-total occupation of the country by the German army, the fascists were quickly back in power. Betrayed to the authorities in the spring of 1944, Dallapiccola was summoned to the notorious 'Villa triste' in via Bolognese, home to the brutal anti-Resistance thugs of the 'banda Carità', to explain himself before the S.S. Fortunately, as he explained to the choreographer Aurel Milloss, he managed 'to find someone who was prepared to support me, and the interrogation went off without consequences' (p. 497). To his surprise, he was not even beaten up.

Biographical details of this kind, the majority new to the literature, are the stuff of Alberti's account. Thanks to his efforts, anyone interested in Dallapiccola can follow the twists and turns of his career, up to the birth of his daughter Annalibera on 1 December 1944, in far greater detail than was previously possible. The book is now an indispensable first port of call for those intending to carry out further work on the composer. It is no easy read, however. Unlike many of his generation—the author himself was already a teenager when his narrative breaks off—Alberti is no Marxist. His prose avoids the Hegelian thickets of subordinate clauses that make so much Italian leftist commentary of the Cold War period such a trial. Yet Alberti has his own idiosyncrasies, notably a penchant for piling up short clauses by parataxis into sentences almost as cumbersome as those of his 'dialectical' peers. His text is liberally showered with typos, with words in languages other than Italian especially prone to mangling. But there is nothing for it but to read the book through. There is no index.

Dallapiccola frequently wrote in autobiographical vein. Yet as commentators have long pointed out, his narration of his past is highly strategic, and contains striking omissions. As John C. G. Waterhouse observed in his review of Rudy Shackelford's collection of translations, Dallapiccola on Opera (London, 1987), for this journal (70 (1989), p. 439), the composer's most celebrated autobiographical piece, 'Genesi dei "Canti di prigionia" e del "Prigioniero"', which reached its final form in Appunti incontri meditazioni (Milan, 1970), 141–53, passes over the crucial formative years 1920–37: from his sixteenth to his thirty-third years. Alberti's aim is to recover Dallapiccola's youth, constructing the 'involuntary autobiography' (pp. xv—xvi) of a period which, as his title has it, has been 'submerged', primarily by the composer himself. The means are, in part, the autobiographical writings (from which Alberti is mostly careful to maintain a critical distance), but primarily the composer's letters. A self-confessed 'grapho-mane' (p. 143), capable of spending entire half days on his correspondence (p. 206), Dallapiccola wrote thousands of letters over his lifetime, many of...