VI - Ulysses, Wanderer and Discoverer: 1965–1975

Summary

Ulisse

It would seem inevitable that Dallapiccola should choose the Ulysses myth as the subject of his only full-scale opera; the subject had, as the composer himself said, “chosen him.” In an interview he had with Leonardo Pinzauti during the last stages of preparing the opera, Dallapiccola spoke of how an artist’s creation follows a path which is almost autonomous, independent of his own will, and he quoted the phrase of Nietzsche relating how “if you look for a long time into an abyss, you realize at a certain point that the abyss is looking into you.” Dallapiccola had lived with the myth since he first heard it from his father’s lips in his early childhood:

Since my father was a Humanist, Gods, Demi-Gods, and Goddesses sat, so to speak, at our dining table at midday and in the evening. My father told my brother and me the beautiful stories from mythology.

He immersed himself in Homer’s epic poems during his school days, and again in later life, but there was one event of particular significance in his childhood that had first prompted his lifelong fascination with the Ulysses myth, a silent film on the subject of the Odyssey, made by Giuseppe De Liguoro, which Dallapiccola saw in 1912. It was always a source of regret to the composer that, despite his father’s position as head of a classical high school, he himself had not studied Greek. He was therefore always at a certain disadvantage in his intimacy with Greek literature through his lack of close acquaintance with the original. The Ulysses myth was to reappear in other guises at various points in his life: in 1938, Léonide Massine suggested the idea of a Ulysses ballet, an idea that was not taken up, but in 1941 Dallapiccola was asked by Mario Labroca, then Director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, to make a transcription of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria for the Festival. In Dallapiccola’s way of working, any experience, however unimportant it might seem at the time, remained within him, waiting to have unexpected results in a quite different context many years later. We have frequently noted in this study how Dallapiccola’s cre ativity abounded in returns—to the world of tonal and modal music, to medieval and classical literature, to texts of a religious nature, to serial symbolisms and musical ideograms.