After two decades of virtually uninterrupted success, Mussolini’s regime collapsed in less than twenty-four hours during the evening of 24 July and early hours of 25 July 1943, undermined by its military reverses and various political intrigues. Italy was soon plunged into civil war. In April 1945, the Gothic Line – a defensive line between Massa and Pesaro created by the German occupying forces – was finally broken and Italy was transformed into a democratic republic over the course of the next three years. This chapter focuses on Bartók’s Italian reception between 1943 and 1947, shedding new light on this intense period of social crisis, institutional change and political reconstruction from a musical and cultural point of view. To a large extent, the genesis and emergence of the Bartók myth, at least in Italy, coincides with that of the new Italian Republic. The oppositional value of Bartók’s figure, which had been first adumbrated during the later years of the fascist regime, was used to legitimise the new order. At the same time, the post-fascist development of the Bartók myth relied on the total concealment of any explicit continuity that the composer’s previous reception and appropriation in Italy might have had with the fascist culture and regime.

The year 1945 symbolically represents the keystone of this story. On the one hand, this date indicates the ‘year zero’ of the new social and political system, based on the defeat and disavowal of fascism. On the other hand, 1945 was at the centre of a complex period of upheaval and change. In recent decades, both historiographical research and collective narratives have retrospectively foregrounded the cultural reconstruction of the country and the rise of new political parties in the late 1940s (such as Christian Democracy and the Italian Communist Party), within a political context marked by the Cold War and the American model of modernisation. Such a forward-looking and optimistic attitude, although understandable, altered the feeling, prevalent among most Italians around 1945, of living in a sort of interregnum: a ‘broken time’ in a ‘fragmented space’. Much of the historiography devoted to the immediate post-war period has tried to smooth over the many divisions and compromises created by the twenty-year