Between the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, the Kingdom of Italy experienced one of the darkest periods of its history. After the promulgation of the infamous racial laws in 1938, Mussolini tightened the bonds between Italy and Germany and plunged the country into the war (10 June 1940). As explained by the historian Jonathan Dunnage, ‘the majority of Italians were not enthusiastic about another conflict, after the strain which the Ethiopian war of 1935–6, the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 and the Albanian conquest of 1939 had placed on their daily lives.’ However, diehard fascists and, to a lesser extent, conservative forces saw the war as an opportunity to fulfil Italy’s imperial destiny and recover fascist revolutionary power. These dreams of military glory, however, dissolved into a nightmare. During the Second World War, Italy soon revealed the lack of readiness of its military forces and, as a result, its position ‘within the new Fascist European order’ became ‘increasingly subordinate’ to that of its stronger ally. Amid this gloomy outlook, the fascist regime waged a final cultural battle. As the Italian military effort stalled and Nazi political supremacy over the Italians became clear, culture provided an opportunity for the fascists to claim a fleeting independence within the Axis and offered a critical arena in which young intellectuals could challenge the government’s ideology. At the apex of their military alliance, the cultural policies pursued by the two fascist regimes began to compete with each other. This phenomenon was particularly evident in relation to the funding and government patronage of avant-garde films, the performing arts and modernist music. This process reached its highpoint in the autumn of 1942, when the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture sponsored an exceptional season of contemporary stage works featuring Berg’s Wozzeck in Rome and Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin at La Scala.

This chapter, organised in two sections, outlines the trajectory of Bartók’s reception between 1939 and 1942, when he came to represent one of the symbols of anti-Nazi cultural resistance. In the first section, I analyse Bartók’s divergent attitudes towards Italy and Germany and examine how his music was received under the fascist regimes at the turn of the 1940s.