The Principles of Serialism

Dallapiccola had been the first Italian composer to engage with the serialism of the Viennese composers, and by the time that he completed Il prigioniero in 1948 he had composed a number of works in which the twelve-tone idea had played a central role. Nonetheless, he had not up to that point composed a work in which a single tone row was used to unify a whole composition. In the majority of his compositions before 1948, the dodecaphonic procedures and ideas had appeared alongside other musical elements of equal importance. This is an essential matter in understanding the development of Dallapiccola’s music. His adoption of the serial idea was a conscious choice, as he was constantly to stress in later years; the choice had been made not simply because of his inherent tendency to employ highly rational musical devices, but also for reasons of expressivity. Serialism was a means to create a musical language capable of generating the large-scale tensions and resolutions that he exploited in building whole works. The serial principle provided a focus for the essentially lyrical and polyphonic nature of Dallapiccola’s musical expression, and through this he was able to forge a language capable of an extraordinarily wide expressive range, moving from the tortured anguish of many pages of Il prigioniero to the limpid beauty of Liriche greche.

It should not be thought, however, that the establishment of the serial idea as a guiding light in Dallapiccola’s music after 1945 was in any sense “pre-ordained,” that his move in this direction somehow obeyed some historical law of inevitability. It has already been observed that Dallapiccola’s path towards serial composition had been a slow and in some ways tortuous one, given the lack of guidance available in Italy that might have assisted him on this path.The necessity of finding an individual musical voice had played a part, as had his natural inclination towards polyphonic writing. Also, the meeting with Anton Webern in the spring of 1942 in Vienna provided the composer with a “moral example” of the possibilities of serialism, but, nonetheless, after 1945 several paths were open to him.

Dallapiccola’s adoption of serialism contrasts in some ways with its adoption by other composers.