Rebuilding a Culture: Studies in Italian Music after Fascism, 1943-1953 Peter Roderick PhD Music Department of Music, University of York March 2010 Abstract The devastation enacted on the Italian nation by Mussolini’s ventennio and the Second World War had cultural as well as political effects. Combined with the fading careers of the leading generazione dell’ottanta composers (Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero and Ildebrando Pizzetti), it led to a historical moment of perceived crisis and artistic vulnerability within Italian contemporary music. Yet by 1953, dodecaphony had swept the artistic establishment, musical theatre was beginning a renaissance, Italian composers featured prominently at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse , Milan was a pioneering frontier for electronic composition, and contemporary music journals and concerts had become major cultural loci. What happened to effect these monumental stylistic and historical transitions? In addressing this question, this thesis provides a series of studies on music and the politics of musical culture in this ten-year period. It charts Italy’s musical journey from the cultural destruction of the post-war period to its role in the early fifties within the meteoric international rise of the avant-garde artist as institutionally and governmentally-endorsed superman. Integrating stylistic and aesthetic analysis within a historicist framework, its chapters deal with topics such as the collective memory of fascism, internationalism, anti- fascist reaction, the appropriation of serialist aesthetics, the nature of Italian modernism in the ‘aftermath’, the Italian realist/formalist debates, the contradictory politics of musical ‘commitment’, and the growth of a ‘new-music’ culture. In demonstrating how the conflict of the Second World War and its diverse aftermath precipitated a pluralistic and increasingly avant-garde musical society in Italy, this study offers new insights into the transition between pre- and post-war modernist aesthetics and brings musicological focus onto an important but little-studied era. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 Preface – ‘What will they do afterwards?’ 6 Motivation: aims and boundaries 7 Methodology: syntheses and subjectivities 10 Meaning: colliding narratives 14 The Early Years: Reconstruction and Cultural Boundaries 1. 1943-1945: The years of Italy’s (musical) darkness? 17 War and liberation 18 The idea of resistenza 23 Musical reconstruction 29 2. Dallapiccola in London: internationalism and cultural memory in post-war Italy. 52 ‘La ricostruzione musicale’: the foundational ambiguity of ‘internationalism’ 53 Italy and the breakdown of the international before the war 57 The 1946 ISCM Festival 62 The ambiguous cultural memory of Dallapiccola’s Canti di Prigionia 72 Musical ‘Crisis’ and Stylistic Experimentation 3. ‘Un’estetica o una tecnica’? Reformulating dodecaphony in the music and debates of the later 1940s. 93 Crisis and conversion 94 Venice, 1946: the ‘rebirth’ of the new 98 Milan, 1949: serialists at congress 104 The ‘hyper-rational’ approach to the twelve notes 113 The musically humane and a ‘lyrical synthesis’ 124 4. Alternative approaches to style and technique in works by Ghedini and Petrassi 153 Ghedini’s new tonal stylistics: the Concerto dell’Albatro (1945) 154 Transformation of musical language: Petrassi’s Noche Oscura (1950-1) 183 3 Aesthetic and Political Debates 5. ‘Linguaggio musicale’, realism, and the role of the composer 208 Musical language: from Croce to Mila 209 Musical objects: realism versus formalism 220 Musical composers: the influence of Sartre and Gramsci 232 6. Works of protest and commitment: the paradoxes of politicised music, 1948-1953 243 Early post-war politicisation: Casella, Ghedini, and Zafred 245 Interlude: Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero 261 A new musical ‘hegemony’: Nono and Maderna’s early political works 266 The Rise of the Avant-Garde 7. Nono, Maderna, Berio, and new means of expression, 1950-1953 301 Nono: Variazione Canoniche (1950) 301 Maderna: Musica su Due Dimensioni (1952) 325 Berio: Chamber Music (1953) 343 Conclusion 356 Rebuilding a culture: music after fascism 356 Italian musical modernism 1943-1953 360 Musical meaning in post-war Italy 365 Bibliography 369 Primary sources 369 Secondary sources 375 Archival sources 386 Selected Scores 389 Selected Films 390 Selected Recordings 391 4 Acknowledgements Research – especially in the form of a university doctorate – might appear to be one individual’s solitary exploit. But in reality, it takes a network of people, relationships and minds to create the conditions in which academic work – and certainly this PhD – flourishes. First of all, I would like to thank the University of York Music Department for providing a stimulating environment in which to study and for financial assistance via the Vinson and Mellor awards; when they ran out, a generous Schools Competition Act Settlement Trust award for my writing-up period significantly aided the final months of this thesis, just as a kind grant from the Windle Charitable Trust had aided the first. Secondly, there are numerous colleagues working in my field with whom I have enjoyed a sustained exchange of ideas, and thanks is due to them all: Francesco Parrino, Emiliano Ricciardi, Martin Iddon, Bruce Durazzi and especially Ben Earle. Doris Lanz and Carlo Picardi have been most generous in sending me copies of their work, though I have never met them in person. In York, Nicola LeFanu and Jenny Doctor have commented on the text helpfully at various points in its gestation, but most praise and thanks must go to my supervisor Tim Howell: without his assured guidance and keen critical eye, this thesis would be very different. Brian Gillie and Julienne Dorsch have provided the occasional translations from German in this study, as has Linda Flavell with the French. All Italian translations are my own; specialised advice on certain articles discussed in Chapter 5 was given by Enrico Bertelli. Thanks is due to the Society for Musical Analysis for a grant enabling a research trip to Italy in September-October 2008; whilst there, I was aided in my research in Florence by the help of Gloria Manghetti and Fabio Desideri at the Gabinetto Vieusseux, in Venice by Nuria Schoenberg-Nono at the Fondazione Luigi Nono and by Prof. Giovanni Morelli at the Fondazione Cini, and in Latina at the Istituto Goffredo Petrassi by Alfredo Romano. Lastly, it is hard to acknowledge adequately the contribution of both sides of my family; in particular, my father Ian who meticulously proof-read the drafts of this thesis with skill and insight. Probably only one person, my wife Beth, knows fully the joy and the work the thesis has represented, for she has supported me through every moment of it – thank you. 5 Preface: ‘What will they do afterwards?’ I could be making a mental study of the details of the attack, the dispositions of weapons and squads. But I am too fond of thinking about these men, studying them, making discoveries about them. What will they do ‘afterwards’, for instance? Will they recognise in post-war Italy something made by them? Will they understand what system will have to be used then in order to continue our struggle to better humanity? 1 The ruminations of the partisan Kim in Italo Calvino’s 1947 novel The Path to the Spiders’ Nests neatly encapsulate the basic question that prompts this study: ‘What will they do “afterwards”?’ Nobody doubts the extraordinarily disruptive and devastating effect that the Second World War had on Italian culture, but whilst scholarly attention has often focussed directly onto the period of conflict, only recently has the ‘aftermath’ garnered any significant historical attention.2 As soon as Mussolini’s twenty-year Roman empire (the ventennio ) collapsed in July 1943, Italian society was plunged into a ‘terrible crisis’,3 and the next years would become crucial in determining the future of one of Europe’s most prestigious civilisations, poised on the brink of revolution and burdened with the knowledge that it had created one of the most pernicious ideologies of modern times. So how does a nation on the wrong side of history rebuild its artistic establishments and networks; what creative subjects are born out of the seeds of war, and how do they constitute the beginnings of modern Italian society? Calvino himself was one of the earliest to attempt an answer to this question, setting out the motivations, contradictions and privations of post-war Italian writers and attempting to dissect their literary achievements. 4 But musically, such a feat has not yet been attempted. Hence this present thesis, the first on Italian music in the immediate post-war period which combines historical, stylistic and analytical approaches; an attempt, however ambitious, to achieve a synthetic narrative. 1 Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests , 145. 2 See, for example, work by Anna Maria Torriglia, David Ward, David D Roberts, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Claudio Pavone, Renate Holub and Jonathan Dunnage listed in the bibliography, the earliest dating from 1996. 3 Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy , 1. 4 Calvino, 1966 preface to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests , 7-30. 6 Preface Motivation: aims and boundaries Calvino’s ‘What will they do “afterwards”?’ is, for these purposes, too concise a question. A less succinct but more detailed one could be put like this: How did Italian music recover from the effects of war and ventennio socially, politically and aesthetically, and how – in its transition to a thriving culture in the early 1950s – was it produced by (and did it produce) its own era? The initial motivations that prompted this line of enquiry were diverse and multiple. Amongst them, an interest in the regrettably under-studied topic of Italian twentieth-century music after Puccini must rank as the broadest and most important. At a narrower level, the trope of the ‘post-war’ and all the cultural rebuilding that this entails quickly found its focus upon Italy as an extremely interesting and diverse exemplum.