I - The Beginnings: 1904–1938

Summary

In 1946 Luigi Dallapiccola was asked to compose music for a planned documentary film on the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. He set about the task so enthusiastically that, when the film project was abandoned a few weeks later, he had already composed some of the music, based upon scenes depicted in the famous cycle of Piero’s frescoes in Arezzo, “The Legend of the True Cross.” This film music was to find its way into another composition, but given the speed with which Dallapiccola had responded to the commission, it is tempting to ask whether his evident enthusiasm was prompted by the film’s subject, rather than simply because the commission came when he was most in need of it. It seems that he felt a bond with Piero that went much deeper than simply an admiration of that most “Tuscan” of artists and touched upon some essential qualities shared by both composer and painter. In the work of both Piero and Dallapiccola, there can certainly be found a seriousness of theme and a vibrant sense of coloration, but it is above all in the powerful combination of poetry and rationality that the two artists share common ground. That sense of an expressivity founded upon a rational structure within the work of art can also be found in many creators whose work impinged at various points upon Dallapiccola’s music: Dante, Bach, Joyce, Berg, and Webern. Such a rational conception of artistic design and purpose did not arise suddenly, but, along with other characteristics of the composer’s work, grew from a host of experiences and influences, many of which had their origins in the composer’s early years.

Childhood and Youth

Dallapiccola was born in 1904, not in one of the historic cities of Italy, but in Pazin (Pisino), a small town at the centre of the Istrian peninsula, that often-disputed triangle of land jutting out into the northern Adriatic, and this birthplace was judged by the composer himself as of considerable importance in the formation of his artistic personality. He described the place of his birth as a “microcosm.”

Psychology maintains the dominant, almost unique importance that childhood and adolescent experiences have in the formation of personality in general, and in particular that of the artist … it should not be forgotten that the little peninsula called Istria, where I was born, was located at the crossroads of three cultures.