It should not be forgotten that the small peninsula called Istria, where I was born, is at the intersection of three borders. When the train stopped at the station of my hometown, the conductor would shout in a loud voice: Mitterburg, Pisino, Pazin. It is well known how much borderlands contribute to the mixing of races and cultures. Moreover, the mentality in borderlands is very different from that usually found in the interior. How should one define that mentality? Perhaps with the attribute ‘restless.’
—Luigi Dallapiccola, Frammento autobiografico, 1953.
It is striking how many composers have been inspired by the 16th century Dutch Revolt against the Spanish Crown. This theme already made its entrance in an earlier episode of “Vivaldi & Others” devoted to Verdi’s Don Carlos. Before Verdi, Beethoven wrote impressive stage music for Goethe’s tragedy Egmont, set just before the start of the Eighty Years’ War. The Dutch Revolt also forms the historical setting of Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre (1977/1997). But probably no opera is to such an extent dominated by the theme of the struggle against tyranny as Il prigioniero (1944-1948) by the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975).
Dallapiccola had to deal with unfreedom and coercion already during his childhood when his family, suspected of Italian sympathies, was forced by the Austrians in 1917 to leave their hometown of Pisino—then a town in Austria-Hungary, now in Croatia—and move to Graz. But that was nothing compared to the agony Dallapiccola and his Jewish wife Laura Luzzatto had to endure from the 1st of September, 1938, when Benito Mussolini, under pressure from his German ally Adolf Hitler, introduced the first anti-Semitic racial laws in his country. Dallapiccola wrote: “I had wanted to protest, but I was not so naive as not to know that the individual is powerless in a totalitarian state. Only with my music could I express my indignation.” And that is exactly what he did: first in his sublime choral work Canti di prigionia (Songs of captivity, 1938-1941), and then by developing his thoughts for a short opera entitled Il prigioniero (‘The Prisoner’) from 1939 onwards. And of course, it is also no coincidence that his only child was named Annalibera (‘Anna Free’), but that aside.
For Il prigioniero (composed between 1944 and ’48), Dallapiccola himself wrote the libretto, completed in 1943, which he based on La Torture par l’espérance by Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838-1889) and on La légende d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak by Charles De Coster (1827-1879). The Dutch-speaking reader can hardly suppress a smile when reading names like ‘Flessinga’ (‘Flushing’), ‘Gand’ (‘Ghent’) and ‘i Pezzenti’ (‘the beggars,’ for the Geuzen), but otherwise there is bitterly little to laugh at in the libretto of Il prigioniero.
Il prigioniero is the pitch-black story of a sympathiser of the Dutch Revolt, who wears out his life in the prisons of the Inquisition in the Spanish city of Zaragoza. His visiting mother has all but given up hope, but the prisoner himself derives new hope from the fact that the jailer recently addressed him as ‘fratello’ (‘brother’). When he then hears from the jailer that the insurgents are supposedly winning, the prisoner suddenly feels himself revived, despite having a body and spirit broken by the incessant torture he has suffered. One day, when the prisoner sees his cell door open, he struggles out through the long dark corridors with superhuman strength. In the final scene, the prisoner can finally breathe fresh air and admire the starry sky. He even dares to utter the word “libertà” (‘freedom’), but then suddenly a man addresses him as “fratello.” It is the Grand Inquisitor, who turns out to be the same person as the jailer. The stake has already been lit. “La libertà?” are the prisoner’s last, whispered words as the curtain falls.
On the 1st of December, 1949, Dallapiccola heard the first performance of his opera when Hermann Scherchen conducted a studio recording for Italian radio. The first scenic performance took place on the 20th of May, 1950, during the famous festival Maggio Musicale Fiorentino at the Teatro Comunale, again conducted by Scherchen. The organiser had pressed ahead in defiance of vehement protests from the Communist Party and former Fascists, who saw it as an indictment of Stalin or Mussolini, and from orthodox Roman Catholics who feared that the professing Roman Catholic Dallapiccola had become a ‘mangiapreti’ (‘priest devourer’).
Il prigioniero quickly became the most successful modern opera of the 1950s: by 1962, the work had been performed around 150 times all over the world. Indeed, one of Dallapiccola’s colleagues spoke of it as “the Cavalleria rusticana of our time!” This success is all the more striking given the fact that Dallapiccola was one of the first Italian composers to be strongly influenced by the new compositional technique of the Viennese avant-gardists Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg: the 12-tone technique that was still extremely controversial in most countries at the time, certainly not only in Italy. But the mood of the work wonderfully matched the total disillusionment that World War II had caused. The unity between the text and the music also made a deep impression, as did Dallapiccola’s ability to compose expressive melodies even in the most modern idiom.
Recommended recordings
There are at least five good CD performances of Il prigioniero available. I still like the first studio recording, recorded for Decca in 1974 under the direction of Hungarian conductor Antal Doráti. Some later performances, such as the one conducted by Esa Pekka-Salonen (Sony), are much more brilliant and dramatic, but in one respect they all lose out to Doráti’s registration: Doráti was the only conductor who consistently chose Italian-speaking vocalists for the three leading roles and achieved a unity between the score and the libretto never since equalled. It was precisely the intimate relationship between text and music that occupied Dallapiccola throughout his life, which is why it is so essential for a good performance.
