The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola (Eastman Studies in Music)

"Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975) was one of the most important Italian composers of the twentieth century. His music is admired by performers and listeners as much for its lyrical expressivity and emotional power as for its clarity of form and construction. As well as writing several operas (including the one-act The Prisoner and the later full-length Ulysses), Dallapiccola composed a large number of works in which the human voice, whether solo or in chorus, plays an important role. "Most prominent of these is the three-movement Canti di prigionia (Songs of imprisonment), in which the composer created a powerful piece of "protest music" against the oppressions of fascism by setting prayers by three prisoners awaiting execution: Mary Stuart, Boethius, and Savonarola. Dallapiccola also set texts by writers as diverse as James Joyce, Salvatore Quasimodo, Antonio Machado, Goethe, and Heine." "The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola is the first book in English which deals with the work of Dallapiccola as a whole, offering a survey of his development as a composer from the first, hesitant vocal compositions of his student years up to the works of his last decade, in which Italian lyricism is combined with great formal and constructional rigor. Dallapiccola was the first Italian to adopt the twelve-tone techniques of Schoenberg, but he placed them within a "Mediterranean" ambience of sensuousness and sharply contoured formal outlines. Raymond Fearn suggests that Dallapiccola should be understood not only as an influential figure in the postwar development of Italian music, but also as one who renewed and revitalized the older traditions of Italian music."--Jacket.