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| Dallapiccola and the Politics of Commitment: Re-reading Il prigioniero | ||
| Ben Earle |
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| Introduction: Dallapiccola, Sartre and the Dialectic |
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| Well over half a century since its premiere, Luigi Dallapiccola’s ‘prologo e un atto’ Il prigioniero (1944-48) remains the only Italian opera since Puccini’s Turandot (1926) to have come anywhere close to a footing in the international repertory. New productions have been announced for 2008 in the most prestigious of houses (La Scala, Milan, and the Paris Opéra), which will bring the total of new productions mounted since 2000 to thirteen. Even allowing for the fact that three of these were associated with the composer’s centenary in 2004 (when one would have expected a greater than usual interest), this is an impressive record for a twentieth-century opera, let alone a twelve-note one.[1] After a downturn in fortunes during the 1980s and 90s, when it more or less disappeared from the world’s stages, Dallapiccola’s best-known work has evidently recovered something of the success of its early 1960s heyday – when, as his compositional colleague Riccardo Malipiero (1914-2003) put it, the word was that, ‘in the future, Il prigioniero will be the Cavalleria Rusticana of our time’.[2] The notion of a popularity of this kind may seem absurd. But the statistics of forty-five years ago can be startling: ‘The publisher records that in the first dozen years after its premičre, there were no fewer than 186 performances of this modern opera on radio, concert platforms and stage’.[3] One wonders why the latter decades of the century should have proved the prediction reported by Malipiero so wrong. And also: what has happened such that the work should once again have come into favour? |
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| Some suggestions will be put forward in due course. In an initial approach to Il prigioniero, we should ask how the success came about in the first place. Though immediate – the artists received seven curtain calls, the composer four[4] – it was hardly self-evident. As critics have complained ever since the stage premiere – at the Teatro Comunale, Florence, on 20 May 1950, as part of the 13th Maggio Musicale (Il prigioniero had previously been heard in a RAI concert broadcast from Turin, on 1 December 1949) – the opera is theatrically problematic. Hans Keller was characteristically outspoken. ‘The greatest part of the work’, he wrote, ‘is immensely expressive and impressive as long as you don’t look at the stage. For if you look you don’t see what you hear: the “action” chiefly consists of the drama of the prisoner’s inner life. I have not met a musician who did not object to the untheatrical character of the piece.’ For the Torinese critic and musicologist Massimo Mila (1910-88), it was as if Dallapiccola ‘had in mind a form of oratorio-like theatre [teatro oratoriale], where the physical presence of the actors and stage ends up as a cumbersome surplus, and all the dramatic substance of the action is transmitted through the music’.[5] Il prigioniero was carried in the opera house by its vivid neo-expressionist score. For Mila, the work brought to light ‘a sense for the dramatic and theatrical use of music […] no less powerful than what we are accustomed to appreciate in a Tosca’.[6] The premiere was an instant music-historical event: Dallapiccola had written the first important twelve-note opera in Italian. ‘[E]ven at the time’, writes David Osmond-Smith, it ‘was seen as marking a crucial step forward […] after the war years’.[7] But the rapid progress of the work through the opera houses of all the major cities of Western Europe (and beyond) cannot be explained solely by reference to its music’s aesthetic charge or technical novelty. As Malipiero put it, ‘the springboard, the first gear that put in motion the mechanism of the interest of the whole world’, was ‘the subject matter’.[8] Il prigioniero is an opera of ideas, and has always been received as such. It is ‘one of the great political operas’, declares Anthony Arblaster: ‘a direct and manifestly deeply felt response to the experience of fascism’.[9] |
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| Like many commentators, Arblaster follows the composer, who considered his work an autobiographically informed instance of ‘protest music’, ‘a protest against tyranny and oppression’.[10] Nor is this the only well-established reading that treats the opera as, before all else, ‘political’. Another critical commonplace – a more complex and interesting guide, it is suggested, to the significance of Il prigioniero – is the characterisation of Dallapiccola’s work of the late 1930s and 1940s as ‘musica impegnata’: ‘committed music’.[11] The composer, Camillo Togni (1922-93), in an encyclopedia entry first published in 1964, tries harder than most to explain what this means. Appropriately, given the provenance of ‘commitment’, he quotes Sartre. ‘By taking part in the singularity of our era, we ultimately make contact with the eternal, and it is our task […] to allow the eternal values implicit in our debates to be perceived’.[12] These words are carefully chosen for their ambiguity vis-ŕ-vis the philosopher’s atheism: Togni refers to Dallapiccola’s ‘religious humanism’. But as we shall see, in the case of Il prigioniero such care is unnecessary. Religion brings little comfort here. Dallapiccola is indeed close to Sartre, for whom man is ‘absolute’ only ‘in his time, in his surroundings, on his parcel of earth’.[13] To put it another way, emphasising the philosophical heritage of Sartre’s position: in so far as Dallapiccola’s work is ‘committed’, it aspires to the quality of the dialectic. |
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| Unmistakeably Hegelian in its metaphysical ambition, Sartre’s argument is also Hegelian in structure. The conditions he presents as interdependent – ‘the eternal’ and ‘the singularity of our era’; man as ‘absolute’ and man ‘on his parcel of earth’ – are, at the same time, dialectically opposed. Unlike ‘analytic’ or ‘static’ binaries, in which, as Fredric Jameson has explained, ‘both poles […] are positive, both are existants, equally present to the naked eye’, such dialectical oppositions involve ‘differential perception’. They are a ‘dynamic’ combination of positive and negative terms.[14] How could man’s activities be simultaneously unconditioned (‘absolute’) and conditioned (grounded ‘in his time, in his surroundings’)? To common sense, the poles simply cancel each other out. Nor is the above a digression of purely philosophical – that is, logical – interest. Sartre’s words here are taken from a discussion of literature. Following Hegel, his aesthetics too are thoroughly dialectical. The ‘committed’ work of art is a mode – the result of a dialectical process – of knowledge. Il prigioniero, on this view, is seen as negating its autonomy, as going out into its socio-political other (‘taking part in the singularity of [its] era’). It experiences the latter, moreover, not from any pre-ordained perspective, but such that it loses itself in the historical condition of spirit, grasps it from the inside. Returning to itself, the work displays its other as the content of its musical-dramatic form, striving by artistic means to make the truth of the age – what there is in it of ‘eternal value’ – transparent to all. It is a report on the state of human freedom, the manifestation of a desire (this is the specifically Sartrean political element) ‘to change simultaneously the social condition of man and the concept he has of himself’ in line with the ‘distant goal’ of ‘liberation’.[15] In simpler terms: the opera confronts audiences with an image of the world as they have made it. By this unpalatable reminder, it urges them to positive action. |
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| The dialectical impulse in Il prigioniero is not hard to locate. It emerges, for example, from a consideration of the striking contrast – often noted – between Dallapiccola’s libretto (which, like those of all his operas, he put together himself) and its principal source. Prompted by his wife, Laura, as the composer later recalled in a celebrated essay (henceforth the ‘Genesis’ essay), he decided to fashion a text from a short story, ‘La torture par l’espérence’ (‘Torture Through Hope’), by the early symbolist writer, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838-89). Many of the details of this sinister narrative of imaginary events during the Spanish Inquisition found their way into the opera. And yet Dallapiccola deleted the identity of the protagonist, named in the story as the Rabbi Aser Abarbanel. In the opera, he is simply ‘The Prisoner’.[16] |
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| We should doubtless be relieved that the work is not so ‘topical’ that – as Adorno felt with respect to Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46 (1947) – it runs the risk of aestheticising real suffering, of making ‘the unthinkable appear to have some meaning’.[17] Nevertheless, given Dallapiccola’s intention to write ‘an opera that could be at once moving and contemporary despite its historical setting’,[18] the removal of the Jewish name seems an odd decision. But this is precisely to miss the dialectical point. Villiers presents a fictional episode of the sixteenth century, comprehensible only in terms of a particular set of religious or political circumstances. His story resonates with particular events of the mid-twentieth century. And yet Dallapiccola removes the link that most encourages the resonance. The period of his opera’s composition saw many forms of persecution, and Il prigioniero is intended to protest on behalf of those who suffered under all of them. It will not merely link two particular instances of persecution but speak, dialectically, of the particular and the general at once. To keep the name, the composer explains, would have placed limits on the opera’s scope. ‘[T]he tragedy of our time’, he writes, is ‘the tragedy of the persecution felt and suffered by the millions and tens of millions’. The ‘problem’ is ‘now universal’.[19] Similarly, in an earlier version of the ‘Genesis’ essay, apropos the setting of a prayer by Mary Queen of Scots in his first work of ‘protest music’, Canti di prigionia for chorus and instrumental ensemble (1938-41), Dallapiccola declares his ‘intention […] to transform the prayer of the queen as an individual into a song for all mankind’. ‘I wanted to dwell at length upon the word “libera” in the music’, he continues, ‘to have this divine word shouted by everyone’.[20] |
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| The aim is lofty. And signs of trouble were quick to appear. In the same essay, Dallapiccola is annoyed that it is apparently no longer the name Hitler that audiences associate with the figure of Philip II of Spain (present in Il prigioniero as an unseen source of malevolence), but ‘some other character’.[21] In a short piece published in London in 1960, he was less guarded. At the premiere of his opera, he writes, the Italian Communist Party, ‘whose attentions had been lavished on me in the past […] pretended to believe my barbs were aimed at the Soviet dictator of 1950’.[22] The accusation of bad faith echoes an accusation made in the earlier version of the ‘Genesis’ essay: that ‘many people refused to understand the libretto’.[23] But if Dallapiccola had wanted to restrict the work to an allegory of Nazi barbarism – to ensure that its audiences saw only the malign influence of Hitler behind his opera’s cruel outcome – then the name of the protagonist should not have been deleted. If the work was to have universal contemporary significance, then it is difficult to see why its ‘protest against tyranny and oppression’, even if not aimed specifically at the Soviet Union, should not have the Show Trials and the Gulag in its sights just as much as it might have the Gestapo and Auschwitz. Indeed, this is just the connection one would expect a Cold War audience to make. Dallapiccola’s insistence that in 1942-43, when he wrote the libretto, he ‘was combating only one kind of dictator’,[24] may perhaps be enough to clear him of anti-Stalinism (at least at this stage of his career), but the meaning of the text that emerged at the end of the decade could not be circumscribed according to his wishes. |
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| From the vehemence with which the composer Mario Zafred (1922-87) denounced Il prigioniero, in his capacity as music critic on the Rome edition of the Communist daily, L’Unitŕ, it is clear that something more than aesthetic judgment was at stake. In a review entitled ‘Altoparlanti e confusione nell’opera di Dallapiccola’ (‘Loudspeakers and Confusion in Opera by Dallapiccola’) – the echo of the notorious 1936 Pravda denunciation of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1930-32), ‘Chaos instead of Music’, may not have been unintentional – the work was defined as ‘sonorous filth’ (‘melma sonora’): a ‘muddle of sounds which not even the most educated and refined ear would succeed in disentangling’.[25] Dallapiccola continued until his death to refer to Communist hostility towards the opera, in a manner that suggests he was deeply wounded by this attack.[26] But it cannot have been entirely surprising. The failure of audiences correctly to identify the referent of Il prigioniero – if indeed the work is supposed to have a single contemporary referent – is only half the story. As Dallapiccola explained in 1960, opposition to the opera sprang not so much from the work as from an article he had published in January 1950 under the title ‘Musica pianificata’ (‘Planned Music’).[27] |
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| This is an extraordinary piece of writing, worth dwelling on at length. An account of Dallapiccola’s aesthetic stance, as revealed in this and other essays published at the same period, will place under considerable pressure the ‘dialectical’, ‘truth-telling’ image of the composer’s work sketched above. To then situate Il prigioniero in the context of its original reception, at the height of the ‘cultural Cold War’ – a climate, as commentators have recently been so keen to emphasise, marked by widespread instrumentalisation of artists and their work – will be to view the success of this ‘political’ opera in a new and equivocal light. The confidence of a Hans Werner Henze, that ‘[a]s a good Italian intellectual, [Dallapiccola] belonged of course to the Italian left’, is difficult to sustain.[28] But the ultimate aim of the present essay is not to produce a critique of Il prigioniero or its composer. Instead, the latter stages will endeavour to rise to what Adorno, in a commentary on his own book on Wagner, calls a ‘Rettung’,[29] a ‘rescue’ or ‘salvation’ of the opera: even (or especially) at the expense of Dallapiccola’s own thoughts on contemporary music and its relation to history and society. To that end, Adorno’s theorisation of these issues will be a crucial resource. But Adorno will prove useful only up to a point. In a concluding attempt to go beyond critique (to the ‘Rettung’, in other words), this essay will turn to recent developments in dialectical psychoanalysis. The politically charged Lacanianism of Slavoj Žižek, it is suggested, will permit us to recover a sense of Il prigioniero as a ‘committed’ work: one that continues to have resonance for our own time. |
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| The Aesthetics of Angst |
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| ‘Musica pianificata’ is a review, hostile and sarcastic in tone, of a classic document of the period, an ‘Outline for a Five-Year Plan for the Composers and Musicians of Czechoslovakia’, issued in April 1949. In the face of proposals for musical collectivisation, Dallapiccola insists on the indissolubly personal, necessarily solitary, nature of artistic creation. He reads condemnation of the artist who would remain sitting at his desk, instead of throwing himself into the life of the people and their struggle for liberation, as a product of fear: |
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| This is a characteristically allusive passage. The nod to Goethe is clear.[31] To place Dallapiccola adequately amid his contemporaries and predecessors in aesthetics is no easy task, however. The association of ‘solitude’ and ‘critique’ is one hint. Dallapiccola would have had to be quick, but he would not have had to read far in the Schoenberg essay of Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik to come across the section entitled ‘Dialektik der Einsamkeit’ (‘Dialectic of Loneliness’), which seems to describe precisely the relationship between artist and world he has in mind.[32] |
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| Isolation is no bar to dialectics. As Adorno puts it, ‘“Lonely discourse” expresses more about the tendency of society than does communicative discourse’ (48). The expressionist compositions of Schoenberg and Webern, which strip music of conventions, destroy the self-sufficient character of the work of art. If dramatic music from Monteverdi to Verdi presented images of emotions, the unmediated subjectivity of expressionism registers ‘undisguised stirrings of the unconscious itself, shocks, traumas’. This radical music tends towards knowledge. Powerless to maintain any distance between itself and reality, it ‘perceives […] the untransfigured suffering of mankind’ (42-47). For Dallapiccola, too, ‘lonely discourse’ stands in relation to truth. As he put it in 1949, ‘solitude […] does not by any means imply lack of contact with the souls of men’.[33] And yet one should not rush to identify his thought with that of Adorno. In Philosophie der neuen Musik, music’s preservation of ‘social truth’ causes it to ‘wither away’. If art is to retain its authenticity in an inhuman ‘organized society’, it must withhold its ability ‘to speak to people’ (28). Dallapiccola thinks the reverse. As he declares in what would remain his major post-war aesthetic statement, the imposing ‘Die moderne Musik und ihre Beziehung zu den übrigen Künsten’ (‘Modern Music and its Relation to the Other Arts’), delivered in 1951, great art is recognised as such because it ‘fully realizes the expression of an inner truth, of a universal truth, which grips the whole of humanity’.[34] |
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| It would be a mistake to suppose that the dialectical grandeur of Dallapiccola’s ideas necessarily involves a direct appeal to the German philosophical tradition. The pre-eminent Italian aesthetician of the period, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), was another Hegelian: by no means an orthodox one, but far less radical than Adorno. For Croce, in his 1917 article, ‘Il carattere di totalitŕ dell’espressione artistica’, |
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| But Dallapiccola is no straightforward Crocean either. If the composer declares that the ‘beauty of the work of art is guaranteed by the complete correspondence of truth and representation’, he also insists, moving in an Adornian direction, that truthful representation ‘can only be achieved in artistic terms by means of a new “technique”’. ‘[I]ncluded in any work of art’, he writes, citing Leonardo da Vinci, ‘is the thought of the new’.[36] To a Crocean, such emphasis on technical novelty contradicts Dallapiccola’s equally strong conviction that the source of the work of art, if not of all human activity and knowledge, is ‘intuition’ and ‘intense emotion’ (‘Erschütterung’). And indeed, technique does not stand at the centre of his argument. ‘The impulse which compels us to write, paint and so forth’, Dallapiccola writes, ‘is the inner necessity we experience to grant an inner movement of feeling perceptible expression’.[37] He backs himself up with a quotation – not from Croce, but from the lengthy passage of aesthetic reflection, the ‘Adoration perpétuelle’, which stands at the centre of Le temps retrouvé, the final volume of Ŕ la recherche du temps perdu: |
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| This is a crucial sentence for Dallapiccola: ‘much quoted’, he writes in another place, ‘yet never quoted enough!’.[39] Its roots lie in Schopenhauer, above all, in the declaration, from the third book of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, that the true artist ‘anticipates the beautiful prior to experience’. As the philosopher explains, the artist can do this to the extent that he is ‘the “in-itself” of nature’: part of the will in its self-objectification. The sculptor of genius loses his individuality in the contemplation of the human form and comes to objective knowledge of its Platonic Idea. He finds himself ‘dimly aware a priori’ of the beautiful shape his sculpture will take: he ‘so to speak, understands nature’s half-spoken words’. In the case of poetry, where the possibility exists to apprehend ‘the Idea of mankind’, the artist’s knowledge is, similarly, ‘half a priori’, for ‘it is the nature of his own self that is objectified […] for him’ in his work.[40] The argument is reasonably clear – once one has mapped out the philosophical framework. But Proust is far from loyal to his source. As Duncan Large has argued, the novelist’s evident familiarity with Schopenhauer formed the basis for a Nietzschean ‘overcoming’ of the older philosopher’s position.[41] It is a point that is important to bear in mind, for the same overcoming can be located in a text that exerted an influence comparable to that of Proust on the formation of Dallapiccola’s aesthetic position, Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre. |
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| In Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music, the composer is able to bypass the contemplation of Ideas (which are the will’s ‘most adequate objectivity’), in favour of self-sacrifice to instinct. For ‘music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is’.[42] There are many places where Schoenberg is happy to go along with this kind of thinking.[43] But elsewhere, above all in the narrative of the birth of the ‘new man’, the ‘young artist’ who has the ‘courage’ to submit ‘wholly to his inclinations’, a different note is sounded. In an instance of what the author of Also sprach Zarathustra termed amor fati, the artist’s involuntary tastes (‘inclinations’) are affirmed as his own.[44] As Large makes clear, such an active contrast with Schopenhauer’s passivity is just as typically Proustian. In another of Dallapiccola’s favourite passages, the narrator of Ŕ la recherche speaks of reading his ‘inner book of unknown signs’. This is a process for which none but the reader can provide rules: it is ‘one of those acts of creation in which nobody can take our place or even collaborate with us’.[45] No longer is the artist subject to a pre-existent ‘law of nature’. As Large observes, the explication of involuntary memories – the celebrated starting point of Proust’s discussion of aesthetics – is here ‘figured as a dynamic process of “reading” a self-text’.[46] |
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| It would be wrong to suggest that either Proust or Schoenberg manages a complete overcoming of Schopenhauer. They tend to hesitate between the two poles: loss of individuality in the contemplation of Ideas (or self-sacrifice to instinct) on the one hand, affirmation of individuality on the other. Interestingly, though, there is one place in the Harmonielehre where Schoenberg attempts a Hegelian synthesis. If he argues for Nietzschean individualism with respect to composers’ styles, he also notes that this is an effect of proximity. With historical distance, individualities are sublated, reappearing as expressive of ‘the spirit of mankind’. Thus Schoenberg can speak of ‘what is most important about the individual, that most profound introspection into an absorption with his own nature, that which leads him to express: the nature of mankind’ (411-412). This notion might have been Dallapiccola’s direct model, but he does not cite it. Nor does he pay attention to Schoenberg’s warnings about fulfilment: ‘Integrity, truthfulness never turns into truth’, writes the author of the Harmonielehre, ‘for it would hardly be bearable if we knew truth’ (326). For Dallapiccola, it is precisely truth – the ‘deep inner truth of humanity’ – that the solitary, self-reading artist may reveal. |
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| This essence does not require historical distance to be grasped. As Dallapiccola sees it, the Idea of humanity is revealed in the art of today just as much as in that of eight hundred years ago: in the work of Cézanne, the Douanier Rousseau and Van Gogh just as much as in that of the thirteenth-century artists Duccio, Cimabue and Margaritone d’Arezzo. ‘Faced with artistic success’, Dallapiccola declares, ‘we always find ourselves outside time’.[47] That sounds like Proust at his most Schopenhauerian. But once again Dallapiccola asserts his independence. For the narrator of Ŕ la recherche, the extra-temporal contemplation of essences gives pleasure: the only pleasure that is ‘both real and fertile’.[48] For Dallapiccola, what the artist or spectator learns in the extra-temporal sphere is disturbing: |
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| At this point, the argument seems to be spiralling out of control. These are not eternal problems: they belong explicitly to modernity.[50] But this is, in fact, the crux of the issue. In contrast to Proust and Schoenberg, Dallapiccola makes a concerted effort to think particular and universal together, on the grandest scale. Drawing on an essay, Expressionism, by the Austrian man of letters, Hermann Bahr (1863-1934), he sketches an all-encompassing philosophy of art history. If, in impressionism (according to Bahr), the de-individualised artist sees ‘with his bodily eyes’, in expressionism, the passionately individual creator sees with ‘the eye of the spirit’. While impressionism – ‘the completion, the climax of classic art’ – increased ‘the outer vision to its highest possibilities’, striving to make man ‘a complete passivum of his senses’, expressionism ‘seeks to dominate the outer world by the powers inherent in man’. The result is a recovery of ‘the oldest Art expression of mankind’: that of ‘all primitive and all Oriental art’.[51] |
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| Bahr does not grant the spiritual eye ‘truth’. But, for Dallapiccola, this is precisely what ‘inner hearing’ – ‘the ear of the spirit’ – can reveal. In art that is faithful to the conventions of classical beauty (the ‘physical’, or ‘bodily’, variety), truth is covered up. When creators strip aside the veil, they are suddenly our contemporaries. The most notable case is Mozart. Plumbing the truth he carried ‘in the depths of his consciousness’, in the finale of Don Giovanni, Act 2, he found himself impelled to break with the conventions of his age and glimpse the future. Not only do the Commendatore’s tenths (at ‘Risolvi: Verrai?’) anticipate the wide intervals of expressionism; the governing rhythm following his entrance (dotted crotchet, quaver) adumbrates the Bergian Hauptrhythmus.[52] |
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| Expressionism as Ideology |
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| We have come a long way from Croce, who would never have countenanced this positing of angst as the trans-historical essence of humanity. The necessity Dallapiccola is thereby able to attribute to Mozart would have been anathema to him.[53] And it is not only Croce who would argue that, in his attempt to shore up the ‘truth’ of expressionism, Dallapiccola has taken a step too far. Adorno is particularly instructive here. In Philosophie der neuen Musik, as for Dallapiccola, Schoenberg’s music lays bare the tormented soul of mankind. Expressionism’s rending of the veil of convention is, furthermore, the revelation of the culminating stage in a despairing narrative of human destiny – the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ – whose roots lie in prehistory.[54] And yet Adorno advances the idea of the universality of expressionism only to criticise it. In its ‘critique of illusion and play’ (Philosophie der neuen Musik, 42-46), Schoenberg’s music of the period immediately preceding the First World War is hostile to the autonomous work. At the same time, Adorno suggests, in its characteristic polarisation between frenzy and glacial stillness, the ‘seismographic sketching of traumatic shocks’ becomes a principle for the creation of the very autonomous compositions – by extension, for the safeguarding of the very bourgeois subjectivity – that expressionism sought to shun (47, 52-53). In Scene 3 of the ‘drama with music’, Die glückliche Hand, op. 18 (1910-13), the ‘secret of loneliness’ is revealed. Its angst is real, but only as the fear of ‘those cut off from material production’ that they might have to wake up to reality (48, 49). |
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| Dallapiccola may raise the topics of ‘solitude’ and ‘critique’, but such Adornian candour with respect to the social meaning of his work stands outside his mode of thought. As the Don Giovanni examples show, his conception is precisely what Adorno calls ‘loneliness as style’ (51-52). The authenticity of autonomous subjectivity remains above suspicion. Not even twelve-note technique can touch it. Dallapiccola does concede that serialism ‘has given us laws that expressionism lacked’. It offers composers an alternative to ‘being utterly individual’. But in their twelve-note music, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were all successful in developing ‘their own special personality that was unique to their art’. Future generations will recognise that, ‘for the most part’ all three wrote music ‘for inner listening’.[55] As he puts it, ‘[p]ersonally, I have adopted this method because it is the only one, up till now, that has allowed me to express what I feel I have to express’.[56] |
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| To return to our starting point, a greater contrast with the ideals of socialist realism would be hard to imagine. In Proust, the Dallapiccola of ‘Musica pianificata’ evidently thought, the commissars had met their match. Rejecting demands for an art that would take its subject matter directly from current problems, he cites the narrator’s insistence that the artist’s only duty is to his ‘inner book’. He can serve his country only in his capacity as artist, in his concentration on the ‘truth that lies before him’. Questions of patriotism, of law, morality and so on, have no place in his work.[57] Such insistence on the autonomy of the aesthetic might well be read as a Crocean commonplace, typical of Italian intellectuals of Dallapiccola’s generation. But the composer’s modernism drives him, once more, to positions that Croce would have found intolerable. Against the Czech musicians’ demand that composers should aim for success with the public, he invokes Cocteau: ‘Cultivate what the public holds against you: it’s you’.[58] |
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| This is an important moment. If the earlier critique of Dallapiccola’s aesthetic stance in terms of ‘loneliness as style’ appeared somewhat abstract, now the ideological presuppositions of his argument unravel before our eyes. Great art, we recall, is recognised because it ‘fully realizes the expression of an inner truth, of a universal truth, which grips the whole of humanity’. But for all expressionism’s insight into ‘the souls of men’, Dallapiccola does not suppose that angst-ridden truth will be universally comprehensible. Not everyone can enjoy a work of art. Enjoyment presupposes ‘a minimum of preparation’, a certain ‘habituation to a given language’.[59] |
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| There need be no prima facie objection to these statements. At their core is a matter of fact – albeit one that, within what has been called the ‘ideology of natural taste’, is typically overlooked or rejected.[60] The problem with Dallapiccola’s position, and the root of his incompatibility with both the liberal Croce and the Marxist Adorno, lies in the way this evidence of what the author of Philosophie der neuen Musik calls ‘the debt of privilege’ (28) – the separation of mental and manual labour – is shrugged off. As Dallapiccola put it in 1948, ‘I don’t think I have ever believed in the fable – I don’t know whether it is romantic or demagogical – of “art for everyone”. I am, by nature, more disposed to think of an art for the “happy few”’. As for the masses, he suggests, let them have Beethoven Nine.[61] |
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| The issue of ‘commitment’ is once more close to hand. In the first paragraph of ‘Musica pianificata’, Dallapiccola refers, with evident approval, to an ‘exhaustive and […] drastic’ review of the so-called ‘Prague Manifesto’ of 1948 – the forerunner of the Czech five-year plan – by the Polish-born Paris-based composer and writer on music, René Leibowitz (1913-72). Under the title ‘Le musicien engagé’, this had appeared in early 1949 in Sartre’s journal, Les temps modernes.[62] Given the equivalent positions then occupied by Dallapiccola and Leibowitz in their respective countries, as leading exponents and apologists for twelve-note technique, one might assume that the composer of Il prigioniero was inspired to his diatribe by a sense of dodecaphonic solidarity. The socialist realists had, after all, criticised the way ‘so called serious music’ was becoming ‘ever more individualistic and subjective in terms of its content, more complicated and artificial in terms of its form’.[63] On reading Leibowitz’s text, however, one is struck how, following the lead of Sartre, this French disciple of Schoenberg shows sympathy for the egalitarianism of the socialist realist proposals. |
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| To be sure, Leibowitz pours scorn on the idea that music could return to the simplicity that socialist realism has in mind. And yet he is primarily concerned to lament the lack of clarity among Communist musicians as to how to put their plans into practice. If he commends dodecaphony, it is because, in a manner apparently influenced by Adorno (with whom, according to Sabine Meine, he had made contact in 1946[64]), he sees musical technique as the locus of the mediation between music and society these intellectuals had failed to define. In contrast to Adorno, Leibowitz puts forward an optimistic vision. Musical innovation is tied to social innovation: ‘The committed musician is he who, defying the established order on the musical level, thereby defies the established order on the social level, and thus participates in his way in the establishment of a free society’.[65] |
24 | |
| One might begin to wonder how the slogan of ‘impegno’ ever came to be attached to Dallapiccola. In his aristocratic anti-egalitarianism and insistence on the apolitical nature of creative activity, he occupies a position a good way to Leibowitz’s right. Indeed, it seems the Italian was taking the opportunity in ‘Musica pianificata’ to distance himself not just from socialist realism but – against everything asserted at the start of this essay – from Sartrean existentialism as well.[66] The situation is complex: a careful look at the circumstances surrounding the premiere of Il prigioniero will be necessary to untangle it. But it is high time we started to look at the opera ‘itself’, beginning with the chilling vision of its libretto. |
25 | |
| Totalitarian Sadism |
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| Dallapiccola’s observation that, up until the premiere, Communist critics had lavished their attention on him, appears especially significant when one starts to look at this text. Any Communist intellectual chancing upon it in the late 1940s would surely have assumed its author was a comrade. Most tendentiously, the libretto can be read as a ferocious condemnation not just of the tyranny of fascism but of the Catholic Church as well. Set, as we have noted, during the Spanish Inquisition, it depicts priests as politically reactionary and inhuman torturers. In what Massimo Venuti calls his ‘inexplicable’, ‘irrational’ wickedness, Dallapiccola’s Grand Inquisitor exemplifies nothing less than the Kantian ‘diabolical Evil’, carrying out ‘a cruel aesthetic joke’ (in Žižek’s definition) ‘just for the sake of it, not for any external goal like power’.[67] |
26 | |
| Encouraged by his Jailer, who addresses him as ‘fratello’ (‘brother’), and tells him to ‘hope fervently’ – ‘you must hope to the point of agony’ – the Prisoner slips out of his cell (the door has been left open) and, after a terrifying journey along a seemingly endless passage in the Official in Zaragoza (the Inquisitorial prison in which he is being kept), emerges into a beautiful starlit spring night. He is allowed only a few moments to rejoice in his freedom. At ‘the height of ecstasy’, as the Prisoner ‘spreads out his arms in a gesture of love for all humanity’, he finds his embrace returned by that of the Grand Inquisitor. From his greeting, ‘fratello’, the Prisoner learns that it was him posing as the Jailer all along. ‘On the eve of your salvation’, the Grand Inquisitor asks, ‘why ever did you want to leave us?’. Taking his victim by the hand, ‘with great tenderness’, he leads him towards the rear of the stage, where a ‘ruddy light’ has begun flicker. ‘Il rogo!’, the Prisoner cries out: ‘The stake!’.[68] |
27 | |
| The temptation to link the action of Il prigioniero to concrete events is strong. ‘The fundamental argument against the “sincerity” of Nazi belief’, writes Žižek, |
28 | |
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| The Grand Inquisitor is similarly hard to accept at face value. If he is so dismayed by the Prisoner’s desire ‘to leave us’, if he genuinely believes the starlit night of the opera’s conclusion to be ‘the eve of your salvation’ (as he tells his captive in ‘a tone of the most sincere compassion’), then why does he find it necessary to reduce him to such a state of abjection? ‘“Hope…” the final torture… Of all I have suffered, the worst…’, the Prisoner cries out, finally recognizing his deception. As the Prisoner tells his Mother during her visit to his cell in Scene 1, since the Jailer first spoke his ‘friendly word’, ‘fratello’, he has begun to pray again. He prays in Scene 1 and twice in Scene 3. His first word on escaping is ‘Alleluja!’. The Prisoner’s hope is intertwined with his faith: if the one perishes, the other must also. Experienced as crushingly hollow, the Grand Inquisitor’s question becomes a version of the inscription, ‘Arbeit macht frei!’, above the entrance to Auschwitz: confirmation that the Inquisition, like the ‘final solution’ – in Žižek’s words – ‘was carried out as a gigantic joke which submitted the victims to a supplementary act of gratuitous, cruel and ironic humiliation’.[70] |
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| For Hannah Arendt, whose study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, appeared the year after Il prigioniero, the most shocking aspect of the concentration camps was precisely this ‘open anti-utility’.[71] The business of ‘transforming the human personality into a mere thing’ amounted to ‘an unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil’ (438, 459). Arendt’s invocation of Kant, for whom ‘diabolical evil’ is something that cannot even be conceived, is explicit. In the way they ‘simply surpass our powers of understanding’ (441), the camps are its realisation. The meaningless cruelty of Dallapiccola’s Grand Inquisitor, we might say, serves to keep this unfathomable evil before audiences’ eyes, as a terrible reminder. |
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| But the opera has a subtler message. As Il prigioniero helps us to see, the Nazis had a ghastly rationale. Arendt herself points out that the mass destruction of individuality produced a situation where ‘millions of human beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into the gas chambers’ (445). One notes how, at the close, the Prisoner needs only the gentlest of encouragement to move towards the stake. Moreover, far from testifying to a lack of Kant’s ‘pathological’ – which is to say, all-too-human – motives (Arendt lists ‘self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice’ [459]), the Grand Inquisitor’s inhuman behaviour points to the Nazis’ thoroughly ‘pathological’ intentions. The Prisoner is being put to death, not for the sake of it, but because he is a heretic: a Protestant. That much can be gleaned from the conversation between two priests he interrupts in Scene 3: ‘The Communion sub utraque specie… They deny the real Presence…’.[72] As far as these priests – and the Grand Inquisitor – are concerned, the Prisoner’s execution is in accordance with divine will: just as the extermination of millions of Jews, far from being impossible to deduce from ‘humanly comprehensible motives’ (as Arendt would have it [ix]), was held to be in accordance with the infallible will of the Führer. ‘Sacerdotes tui induantur justitiam’, sings the off-stage chorus (of monks in the Official, according to the composer) in the first of the opera’s two choral intermezzi: ‘May thy priests be clothed with justice’.[73] |
30 | |
| A psychoanalytic approach suggests that there is more, too, to the Grand Inquisitor’s employment of ‘pointless’ torture than a means to a clean kill. In Žižek’s account, the totalitarian Leader is a ‘sadist pervert’. This is not ‘the pre-theoretical, common-sense notion of a “sadist” as a person who fully wills and enjoys the suffering he inflicts upon others’. The Leader ‘works for the enjoyment of the Other, not for his own: he becomes a sole instrument of the Other’s Will’.[74] Nor is the notion of ‘enjoyment’ the standard one. It is Lacan’s jouissance, ‘usually identifiable’ in Žižek’s usage, as Sarah Kay points out, with ‘surplus enjoyment’: an unconscious pleasure in transgression that, urged on by the superego, accompanies the desiring subject at all times.[75] In the ‘perverse’ case of totalitarianism, both desire and enjoyment are aligned with the Law. The Leader is the executant both of this Law – in Il prigioniero, the divine will – and its shadowy double. ‘Sadism’, writes Žižek, ‘relies on the splitting of the field of the Law into Law qua “Ego-Ideal” – that is, a symbolic order which regulates social life and maintains social peace – and its obscene, superegotistical inverse’.[76] |
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| For Arendt, Nazi power is cynical. It is only ‘sympathizers’ who believe. ‘The party members’, she writes, ‘never believe public statements and are not supposed to’ (383). As for the elite, they have a ‘supreme contempt for all facts and all reality’: ‘freedom from the content of their own ideologies’ (385, 387). A reading of Il prigioniero along these lines might run as follows: ‘The Grand Inquisitor knows very well that the Inquisition is nothing more than a cloak for pointless torture in which he is fully implicated, nevertheless he carries on with its external rituals, to the point of promising salvation to those who will be meaninglessly killed’. The problem is that, as Žižek insists, this situation describes the normal functioning of ideology in a totalitarian state. The case of the elite involves a ‘much more radical type of self-distance’. ‘[N]otwithstanding his awareness of manipulation’, Žižek claims, ‘Hitler basically believed in its results’. The Nazi inner circle maintained a ‘simultaneous coexistence of the ultimate cynicism and the ultimate fanaticism’: a ‘psychotic split’.[77] |
32 | |
| Despite what was suggested above, it cannot be taken for granted that the Jailer and the Grand Inquisitor are one and the same. Dallapiccola may insist that the two parts are to be played by a single singer; he thus indicates that they are two parts.[78] Their relationship is ambiguous. Better: the Grand Inquisitor is psychotically split in the way Žižek describes. There is a sense in which his question, ‘On the eve of your salvation, why ever did you want to leave us?’, is utterly cynical. At the same time, as the composer directs, it is ‘most sincere’. But it is not so much the Grand Inquisitor who is ‘split’ as the Law he embodies. The ‘pointless’ torture of the Prisoner is the unspeakable truth of divine will, its necessary support. ‘Power […] relies on an obscene supplement’, which ‘is operative only in so far as it remains unacknowledged, hidden from the public eye’.[79] This is why the Grand Inquisitor initiates the Prisoner’s ‘torture through hope’ in disguise: in the form of a character who has only a shadowy existence. |
33 | |
| For Žižek, ‘identification with community is ultimately always based upon some shared guilt or, more precisely, upon the fetishistic disavowal of this guilt’.[80] As he explains, |
34 | |
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| The ‘pointless’ torture perpetrated in the camps follows the same logic. Its very excess bears witness to the ‘surplus-enjoyment provided by executing orders’: it too, argues Žižek, was experienced as ‘transgressive’. Consider how, in Scene 3 of Il prigioniero (according to the stage directions), one of Dallapiccola’s priests ‘lets his eyes rest for a long time on the spot where the Prisoner is crouching’. It seems clear that the priest sees the Prisoner, and yet nothing happens. The alarm is not raised, the victim is not recaptured and led back to his cell; indeed, he is left in desperate confusion. ‘Did they see me, those terrible eyes?’, he cries out. Fully aware of the trap into which the Prisoner has fallen, one might suggest (following Žižek), the priest is ‘enjoying’ the whole transgressive business.[82] As for the chorus, its ‘invocation of God’s mercy in a place where torture and burning at the stake are part of the daily routine’ amounts to a blasphemous perversion, according to one commentator.[83] The behaviour of the Inquisition, as portrayed in this opera, confirms Žižek’s general thesis: maintenance of community – all community – requires a ‘primordial lie’.[84] |
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| Neither Left Nor Right? |
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| Introducing the psychoanalytic dimension allows us to resolve the ambiguity over the opera’s contemporaneous referent: as a study in the very mechanism of tyranny, it can indeed be particular and universal all at once. This is a reading to which we shall return. But one can imagine how, in the Italy of the late 1940s, such theoretical finessing might not have been the order of the day. For the notional Communist intellectual summoned up earlier, Dallapiccola’s Inquisition would have laid itself open to interpretation not as a universally applicable allegory so much as a specific condemnation of the conduct of the Catholic Church under fascism. Evidence of collaboration with the regime was ready to hand. A reference to the Lateran Pacts of 1929 and to Pius XI’s subsequent hailing of Mussolini as the ‘Man whom providence has sent us’ would have been sufficient; the reluctance of Pius XII to protest against Hitler’s policies – in particular, his failure to intervene more forcefully on behalf of Rome’s Jewish population during the Nazi occupation of that city – could also have been invoked. |
35 | |
| The Jailer’s celebration of the ‘Beggars’ revolt’ of the late 1560s and early 1570s against Spanish rule in the Netherlands, in the jubilant ‘Aria in tre strofe’ he sings to the Prisoner in Scene 2, appears to confirm the opera’s left-wing credentials. A key element in the Don Carlos story, and thus well known to operatic audiences familiar with the treatment by Verdi, this historical material echoes down the centuries as one of the great monuments to popular liberation (thanks, above all, to the play by Schiller on which Verdi’s opera is based). The Prisoner does not only hold the ‘wrong’ religious views. As Arblaster puts it, he is ‘a partisan of the revolt, who rejoices when his jailer tells him of the success of the […] Beggars against the Spanish’.[85] In the late 1940s, the contemporary resonance of such an uprising against a cruel foreign oppressor would have been unmistakable. Dallapiccola himself makes the connection when, in an early version of the ‘Genesis’ article, immediately following his description of a visit to the estuary of the Scheldt (a major scene of the Flemish revolt), he notes that the first draft of the opera was completed on April 25, 1947: ‘two years after the Partisan uprising in northern Italy’.[86] As Dallapiccola was doubtless aware, this insurrection was precipitated by the Communists.[87] |
36 | |
| This is not to suggest that Dallapiccola was secretly pro-Soviet. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his opposition to socialist realism. On the other hand, one cannot help wondering whether, had the Italian general election of spring 1948 not delivered its crushing defeat to the Left, he would have felt the need to take the strident anti-Communist stance displayed in ‘Musica pianificata’. The polarisation of Italian politics at this time should not be underestimated. Paul Ginsborg writes of ‘two vast opposing fronts: the one having its focal point in the employing classes, the Christian Democrats and the United States; the other centred on the working-class movement, the Communists and Russia’. By the time of the election, the ‘conflict of interests and ideologies’ was reaching ‘dramatic and decisive heights’.[88] ‘Musica pianificata’ was a provocation, appearing in Il ponte, a leading left-wing monthly journal in which Dallapiccola had never previously published and never would again. |
37 | |
| It would also be wrong, though, to view the composer as a standard bearer for Christian Democracy. The technical innovations of Il prigioniero caused just as much controversy on the Right as they did among proponents of socialist realism.[89] Significantly, Dallapiccola’s one brief period of regular journalistic activity, in 1945-47, had been in the service of the fortnightly Il mondo (later Mondo europeo), which combined high cultural internationalism with ‘democratic’ political non-alignment.[90] In the mid-1940s, there were even gestures towards an alliance between the artistic avant-garde and the Left. Nevertheless, as Andrea Estero has explained, this characteristic post-war Italian formation would not begin to solidify for another fifteen years.[91] |
38 | |
| Stephen Gundle notes how the 1946 ‘dispute’ over Il politecnico, the short-lived left-wing journal edited by the novelist Elio Vittorini (1908-66), ‘had revealed that many of the intellectuals who had adhered to the PCI [Partito comunista italiano] remained individualistic and aristocratic in their outlook’. In the clampdown that followed, under the dogmatic Emilio Sereni (1907-77), ‘the PCI’s alignment with the USSR was more or less total’. ‘[N]o open criticism whatsoever was brooked of Soviet positions’.[92] Zafred’s attack on Il prigioniero was part of a concerted ‘anti-formalist’ offensive aimed at Schoenbergians by the music critics of both L’Unitŕ and Avanti!: Zafred and Rubens Tedeschi (1914-) on the one; Diego Carpitella (1924-70) and Luigi Pestalozza (1928-) on the other.[93] By putting himself at loggerheads with the Stalinists, Dallapiccola was emphasizing that, for all the endorsement he might have received in the past from Communist intellectuals, and for all that his opera was apparently philo-revolutionary and anti-clerical in the extreme, he was no hard-line Leftist, indeed no Leftist at all. |
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| In the circumstances, such political manoeuvring was scarcely to be avoided. In October 1949, in a tortured confessional letter (he asked the recipient to destroy it), Dallapiccola showed his concern at the negative image of the Inquisition that audiences would find – and that the conductor of the premiere, Hermann Scherchen (1891-1966) was already finding – in the work.[94] It seems the Florentine premiere only went ahead as a result of a chance conversation between an acquaintance of Dallapiccola’s and ‘a ministerial big-shot’ (‘un grosso personaggio ministeriale’). According to the composer, his acquaintance was asked ‘whether it was true that I was a rabid anticlerical’ (‘un mangiapreti’). ‘“I don’t know him all that well”, the acquaintance replied, “but I meet him every Sunday at Mass with his little girl”.’ Letters arrived at the Ministero dello Spettacolo, protesting against the performance of an opera ‘which showed the Spanish Inquisition in a dim light, and, what is more during the Holy Year 1950’.[95] ‘Of all the insults hurled at me during the first half of 1950’, Dallapiccola later wrote (some seventeen years after the event), the implication that the work was ‘essentially an attack on the Catholic Church […] was the only one that deeply wounded me’.[96] But this ‘implication’ would not go away. In an ironic reversal, Dallapiccola soon found himself defending the work not against, but from, the Church’s arch-enemies. If Italian Communists objected to Il prigioniero, the authorities in Moscow seem to have appreciated the opera’s anti-clerical flavour. Anticipating the possibility of a performance in the Soviet capital, Dallapiccola insisted that the following text was to be inserted into the programme book: ‘As a believer I want to emphasize that there is nothing against the Catholic Church in Il prigioniero, but only a protest against tyranny and oppression’.[97] The performance did not take place. |
40 | |
| Cold War Connections |
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| In June 1950, in the thick of the controversy, Dallapiccola published the very first version of his ‘Genesis’ essay. He admitted that, without the political experiences of the previous dozen years (first the ‘legalized persecution’ of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign, then the Nazi occupation), he would have written neither the Canti di prigionia nor Il prigioniero. But his main concern was to show how his obsession with the themes of freedom and imprisonment had its origins in experiences of his childhood and adolescence. As far as Il prigioniero was concerned, he wanted to stress ‘how, in the opera, there is no reference that might be interpreted as directed towards this or that current political tendency’.[98] By tracing the source of his work, in self-consciously Proustian style, to distant events conjured up in memory – his ‘inner book’ – Dallapiccola was upholding his central aesthetic claim. The way to truth lies in solitary meditation, not in preoccupation with current events. As Mila explained, if Dallapiccola’s work is ‘engagé’, it is ‘engagé malgré lui’.[99] |
41 | |
| But what of the composer’s audience? No aesthetic stance, not even one so declaredly self-sufficient as Dallapiccola’s inward-turning modernist aristocratism, can subsist in a vacuum. His opera has to have listeners, must receive some form of ideological – not to say financial – backing, if it is not to collapse into solipsism: if its ‘dialectical’ aspiration to universal recognition is not to prove absurd. Let us look at ‘Musica pianificata’ one more time. The starting point of this attack on socialist realism is a direct identification of the Czech five-year plan with the cultural policies of Italian fascism. The ‘Prague Manifesto’ is immediately compared to the neo-romantic ‘Manifesto musicale’ of December 1932, framed by the critic of the fascist daily Il popolo d’Italia, Alceo Toni (1884-1969). Dallapiccola proceeds twice more to relate the proposals for the five-year plan to his memories of the fascist ventennio.[100] In other words, he is employing what would become a typical Cold War ploy: perhaps the quintessential ideological weapon as far as the West was concerned. It is the notion of ‘totalitarianism’, Arendt’s notion (most famously), according to which ‘the Nazi and the Bolshevik systems’ are ‘variations on the same model’.[101] |
42 | |
| In other words, for all that fascist Italy coined the term, Arendt does not consider Mussolini’s regime to have been ‘totalitarian’.[102] The very example Dallapiccola draws on, in sarcastic reference to having ‘enjoyed totalitarianism for twenty years’, backfires. He wants to demonstrate the obtuseness of those – Stalinist commissars and fascist gerarchs alike – who imagine that ‘works of art can be written to order’.[103] Instead he pays unintentional tribute to a regime that, despite its slogans about ‘going towards the people’ (and the fuss caused by the ‘Manifesto musicale’), looked after its modernists with generosity. The season of contemporary opera and ballet staged in Rome and Milan in 1942, including the Italian premieres of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin (1918-19) and Berg’s Wozzeck (1914-22), as well as the second production of Dallapiccola’s first opera Volo di notte (1937-39), involved state sponsorship of the avant garde of a kind unthinkable under Stalin. |
43 | |
| Dallapiccola’s notion of an ‘apolitical’ art is difficult to defend under any circumstances. To abstain from politics, as Sartre insists, is also to take up a position.[104] And this is particularly evident in the case of the twelve-note composer. As Sartre points out in his response to the article by Leibowitz cited earlier, dodecaphonic music does not merely require an elite audience for its appreciation. By its very difficulty it tends to exclude the majority of listeners, actively shoring up the elite’s distinctive status.[105] To assert that such music may be truth-telling and yet ‘apolitical’, that the path to universal humanity must bypass what Sartre would call the contemporary ‘situation’, is to ignore the social inequal |
