The Discovery of Webern

During the Second World War, Dallapiccola decisively established the twelvetone technique as the major dynamo of his music. In Liriche greche he combined the technique with the canonic structures that had long been a feature of his music, and the technique would also pervade the kaleidoscope of expressive devices in his second opera, Il prigioniero. In Volo di notte, the modal language Dallapiccola first adopted during his studies with Vito Frazzi in the 1920s had been set against the chromatic-serial language that had fascinated him since he had encountered Berg’s and Webern’s music. In the music he began to compose in the late 1930s, this dualism of modality-tonality on the one hand and twelve-tone techniques on the other, became an important factor, providing a major source of its expressivity. The motivation for Dallapiccola’s adoption of twelve-tone techniques of composition was to be found above all in expressive necessities, and the composer himself gave an indication of this in an essay he wrote in 1950:

This shows that Dallapiccola could see the historical necessity for the twelvetone method, but it makes it equally clear that he himself had adopted Schoenberg’s method because of expressive necessity. He felt this necessity most keenly at precisely the moment when he had the greatest need of a language in which to protest against the tide of increasing totalitarianism then engulfing Italy. This is not a coincidence: the modal-diatonic language he had employed up to that point was inadequate to convey the vehemence and urgency of his mood of defiance and protest. In Canti di prigionia, and even more in Il prigioniero, works in which oppression and liberty were the central themes, Dallapiccola employed significant elements of chromaticism and dodecaphony as an essential part of the expressive vocabulary, though by no means to the exclusion of other elements.