Nicolòe Palazzetti (2021). Béla Bartók in Italy

There are two Bartóks," says Nicolò Palazzetti, in the Conclusion to this bold, revisionist book: the one who died in New York in 1945, and the "mythical Bartók," born from those exiled ashes.Palazzetti's book is ultimately about the moralisation and politicisation since 1945 of the second Bartók.But its basis lies in evidentiary revision, through its tracing of the first Bartók's many, largely overlooked dealings with Italy over some four decades, as well as the surprisingly early establishment of his strong musical legacy there across several generations of Italian composers.This, then, is a book of some complexity, that attempts to weave together strands of biography, reception history, and cultural memorialisation, as well as more technical musical and political analysis.Béla Bartók in Italy: The Politics of Myth-Making is largely successful in its explication of the two Bartóks, although some readers may not welcome Palazzetti's unvarnished revision of the inherited "beacon of freedom" portrait of Bartók.Others will undoubtedly want more discussion of the multi-themed intentions of this book, that are clearly set out in its crisp Introduction and the opening paragraphs of each chapter.A few readers may even balk at his representation of a congruence between Bartók's inter-wars modernist directions and Mussolini's own tenets of Italian modernisation across these same years.Palazzetti's book is divided into six substantial chapters, the first five of which pursue a loosely chronological path from 1911, when Bartók first visited Italy professionally and his First Suite, op. 3, was performed there, to 1956, at the end of the posthumous "Bartók Wave" decade of Italian (indeed, world-wide) popularity.Bartók's own concerts, other early performances of his music, and his growing aesthetic sympathy with Italian musiccontemporary and baroqueare recurring themes across these chapters.The sixth chapter addresses wider questions of Bartók's early influence upon Italian composition (including of Casella, Dallapiccola, Turchi, and Maderna), with a case study of the influence of Bartók's "night music."The growing conditions for, and then staged emergence of, the Bartók myth are depicted in the book's Introduction and Conclusion (with particular reference to the triumphal return in 1988 of Bartók's body for reburial in Budapest), as well as at many key points within the chronological chapters.Through the book, then, the myth-building contributions of several leading Italian "thought leaders" are traced: composer-pianist Alfredo Casella (1920s), seeing in Bartók an emerging synthesis of folk and avant-garde qualities; music critic

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