La Scala in the Aftermath of the Liberation, 25 April 1945 to 22 June 1946
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5851820 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paola Merli (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 100 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 155-198 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Musical Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0027-4631 • E-ISSN: 1741-8399 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/musqtl/gdy002 |
| OpenAlex | W2795069679 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
More than seventy years after the end of the Fascist regime in Italy, our knowledge of how music institutions dealt with their Fascist past is still limited. Despite some early attempts to publish accounts of the transformations generated by Mussolini's regime in musical production and life,1 from 1946 on this uncomfortable topic was set aside. In the mid-1960s, Marxist critics began to publish on music and Fascism, but in the polarized political context of the Cold War era, such work remained rare.2 Most writings on composers, performers, and institutions focused on their artistic production, disregarding or implicitly denying the Fascist context in which they had operated. The impasse was eventually broken at the beginning of the 1980s, when Piero Santi, a former music critic of the Socialist organ Avanti!, launched a critique of the selective denial of the relationship between Fascism and music, and showed that the role of Fascism could only be understood by moving from an approach focused on artistic works to one that considered the role of the state apparatus and the bureaucracy.3 Expanding on Santi's claim, Luigi Pestalozza, then head of the music section of the Direzione (leadership body) of the Italian Communist Party,4 stated that it was necessary to put an end to the "silences" and "common-places," and to acknowledge that Fascism had produced fundamental structural changes in musical production and life, and that such changes were still determining factors in the organization of music.5 He argued that the Fascist regime had strengthened the centralized organizational models for music created by the Liberal state, and had, based on the notion of the state as patron and benefactor, offered musicians work security through the organization of their professional life within the corporative system of labor relations, in which the employers and the employed of the different industries and professions were represented under the coordinating power of the state. Subsidies to music institutions, he noted, were subject to full compliance with elaborate regulations and detailed, centralized directives that touched on every aspect of musical life. Pestalozza further observed that mediation of the cultural aspects of the class conflict were achieved by segregating musical production into different cultural tastes, modes of delivery, and venues based on class and geographical divisions, privileges, and hierarchies. In his view, Fascist arrangements originated in the transformation of music institutions from private to public organizations. La Scala, which had become a public institution in 1920-21, was the model later adopted by the Fascist state to restructure all other major music organizations in Italy according to a highly centralized template that, far from being an invention of Fascism, was firmly rooted in the development of the Liberal state. Most crucially and problematically, after the end of Mussolini's regime, music legislation, institutional ownership, and organizational patterns, as well as protagonists and events, continued much as during the Fascist era.6
Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Diverse Musicological Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |