While the political impact of Italy's 1936 Ethiopian invasion has long been recognized, its cultural history has only recently come under scrutiny. This paper investigates one musical legacy of Mussolini's colonial project by means of a case study of Alfredo Casella's Il deserto tentato (The Attempted Desert, 1937). Performed on the first anniversary of the Empire's founding and dedicated to ‘Mussolini, fondatore dell'Impero’, the work depicts the arrival of a group of Italian airmen in Ethiopia and their welcome by the indigenous peoples. I set the text against contemporary propaganda such as speeches, visual imagery and popular song, exploring tropes central to fascist imperialist rhetoric: virility, civiltà and aeronautical prowess. The opera's integration of historical musical references into a modern musical setting not only represents the theme of endowing the Ethiopian people with a history, in this case embodied by the Italian musical past, but also exemplifies a contemporary desire to make the past present in everyday fascist life. The historiography of Casella's work, what is more, characterized by the same ‘missing debate’ as the broader discussion of Italian colonialism, raises questions about the effects of Italy's ‘memory wars’ on accounts of twentieth-century Italian music history.

This essay aims to find a unifying thread amid the eclectic works of Bruno Maderna, and also to situate his compositional philosophy in relation to his more famous colleagues of the Darmstadt Summer Courses. More than any of the other composers at Darmstadt, Maderna was committed to its ‘project’ and to the values it placed on musical discourse, in spite of the fact that he seemed to abstain from its often-heated polemics. In contrast to many of his colleagues, Maderna was not one to speak at length about his compositions, preferring to express himself through his music. However, one work – his 1969 radio documentary, Ritratto di Erasmo – makes a poignant statement both about his music and the post-war generation as a whole. By championing Erasmus's equivocation, the work reveals something of Maderna's relationship to the arguments at Darmstadt. Just as Erasmus was situated between Luther and the Catholic Church, Maderna seemed to sit silently in the middle, while the more ideologically inclined composers swarmed at the periphery.

After the premiere of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960 at Venice's Teatro La Fenice in 1961, the critical press began a series of debates and redefinitions in response to what struck them most: how noisy the opera was. Although they agreed that Nono's work was unlikely to be popular with a broad public, many immediately recognized that Intolleranza could serve to recall the horrors of Fascism and the sounds of war – to offer, in other words, a warning call that history must not repeat itself. In a debate in the Communist newspaper L'Unità, the sonic hubbub was interpreted as a new kind of realism, formed in order to use memories of the Fascist regime as an allegory of contemporary oppression. The potency of the opera's noise was seen as in part due to Nono's incorporation of the auditory experiences of cinema and television, thus providing an insight into how traditionally elite genres such as theatre and opera could respond to the emergence and increasing hegemony of new mass entertainments. This article seeks to place Intolleranza within these fraught and conflicting discourses on mid-twentieth-century Italian modernity, and show that postwar reconstruction was as much about a concern for the past as it was with a coming to terms with the present.

Dario Fo worked with La Scala only once, in 1978–79; the occasion was an adaptation of Ramuz and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat (1918). This brief, pointedly anti-operatic work connected the dissident artist and a leading cultural institution at a time when both were re-evaluating their means of addressing the public. For Fo, as well as for the Italian Left at large, 1978 marked the ten-year anniversary of the 1968 riots and a time of deep doubt about the possibility of collective political action. For La Scala, 1978 was not only the tenth year under the bold musical directorship of Claudio Abbado, but also involved celebrations of the theatre's bicentenary. In this article we weave together the Left's crisis with a close reading of Fo's adaptation, using the notion of vocal address as an interpretative linchpin. By considering the myth of Risorgimento opera as vox populi, the figure of Stravinsky's songless soldier, the sound of babbling crowds and the recorded speaking voice of Antonio Negri, we offer a new exploration of the cross section of art and left-wing politics in the Italy of 1978.