La giovinezza sommersa di un compositore

On the morning of 26 July 1943, Luigi Dallapiccola, Professor of Composition at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence, participated with two colleagues in an act of triumphant vandalism at their workplace, toppling and breaking a statue of Benito Mussolini that, as Luciano Alberti explains towards the end of this vast book, ‘dominated the big staircase that leads from the entrance hall to the balcony of the concert hall’ (p. 464). The composer was doubtless somewhat the worse for wear. Late the previous evening, on hearing the news (in a phone call from Igor Markevitch) of the Duce’s dismissal as head of the Italian government, Dallapiccola and his wife, together with his friend the pianist Pietro Scarpini, had proceeded to get drunk on acquavite. Or rather, Dallapiccola had. ‘Laura and Scarpini, abstemious people’, so the composer wrote in a letter to the critic Alberto Mantelli, ‘drank two little glasses; I lost count’ (p. 463). It would not be long before he had occasion to rue his enthusiasm. Following Marshal Badoglio’s announcement of the Italian armistice with the Allies, on 8 September 1943, and the subsequent near-total occupation of the country by the German army, the fascists were quickly back in power. Betrayed to the authorities in the spring of 1944, Dallapiccola was summoned to the notorious ‘Villa triste’ in via Bolognese, home to the brutal anti-Resistance thugs of the ‘banda Carità’, to explain himself before the S.S. Fortunately, as he explained to the choreographer Aurel Milloss, he managed ‘to find someone who was prepared to support me, and the interrogation went off without consequences’ (p. 497). To his surprise, he was not even beaten up.

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