Word: dallapiccola
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...Dallapiccola, Luigi, whose name as a composer has become something to reckon with as well as pronounce. See Music...
...Italian Composer Luigi Dallapiccola, 57, life has by his own testimony been "one long suffer." The suffer is apparent in the spare, abrasively powerful twelve-tone music that has flowed steadily from his pen through years of poverty, persecution and neglect. But Dallapiccola is neglected no longer: even his severest critics in Italy acknowledge his influence as the patriarch of the Italian twelve-tone school. Manhattan audiences last week had a first chance to hear one of the patriarch's finest works - the 13-minute Variations for Orchestra as performed by the visiting Boston Symphony under Guest Conductor Erich...
Although Dodecaphonist Dallapiccola believes that his spiritual brother is James Joyce (he has read Ulysses eight times), Variations sounds more like a page out of Kafka. It opens with a funereal, ghostlike theme in the strings, erupts in a chilling shower of brasses, sinks to a series of restless, enervated whispers. Percussive and rhythmically complex throughout, it is scored sparely, skillfully using small instrumental combinations in strange, exhilarating blends of sound. What sets it apart from much of the desiccated twelve-tone music of the Viennese school is its sense of passion: Dallapiccola, however his music may suffer, always seems...
Night Flights. The composer was introduced to the twelve-tone idiom in 1924 at the Florence premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. "Only two people in the hall were impressed by the music," he recalls. "One was a very unimportant young man. Me. The other was Giacomo Puccini." Dallapiccola, who for a time composed in a largely traditional, tonal style (he has always been an ardent Wagner fan), gradually started learning twelve-tone technique, teaching himself by studying Schoenberg's scores. "But in those days nobody appreciated my music," and he and his wife were sometimes reduced...
Teaching helped keep Dallapiccola going, but his name began to be heard after the 1940 premiere of his first opera, Night Flight, based on the book by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. During the war Dallapiccola went into hiding in the mountains to protect his Jewish wife from the German forces in Italy. Since the war, his reputation has steadily grown as he has added to his small body of work a number of impressive vocal compositions: Five Fragments from Sappho for Voice and Chamber Orchestra, Five Songs for Baritone, Two Anacreon Songs and Requiescat (set to words...