At the Threshold of a New Beginning: The Language of Ethics in Con Luigi Dallapiccola (1979)

Nono’s Con Luigi Dallapiccola sketches include a note to a “continuous presence of a brother of great human moral and musical rigor,” then citing the imminent Prometeo. My paper explores Dallapiccola’s influence, intertextually and through a larger, ethical model, which I claim figures crucially at the threshold of Nono’s final period. To highlight this shared worldview, I first explore Dallapiccola’s wider influence on the immediate postwar Italian avant-garde by reassessing the relationships between compositional process and ethical import.

As noted by Alessandro Mastropietro, Nono’s term “brother” alludes to the “Brother” motive from The Prisoner (1948), permeating both scores. Nono’s homage goes beyond that, however, to unfold a dense, memory-like narrative of the staged psychological drama, including the evocation of other Prisoner leitmotives, for example those representing a bell and a lantern. A “futuristic nostalgia” develops through the percussion ensemble fused with live electronics. The subtraction of pitch foregrounds rhythm and timbre, underscoring features of Dallapiccola’s craft often overlooked; at the same time, the electronics dis- and re-orient the listeners’ time-space sense. In this and other ways, what at first seems an introspective, intimate meditation evolves into a theatrical, even revolutionary work, absorbing the musico-dramatic characteristics of Dallapiccola’s experimentally twelve-tone opera into a new language (linguaggio specifico, in Nono’s words).  The prisoner’s struggle emerges from the soundworld, his alternating entrapment and liberation through listening, within a maze-like physical and psychological space. Nono had pushed the concept of genre with Intolleranza, similar to Prisoner for the boldness in dramatic innovation; Con Luigi Dallapiccola continues in the same vein, emphasizing the ethical rather than the political.

Nono’s “con” acknowledges a singular influence, distinguishing this work from other dedications, in his and others’ outputs, that are “to” or “for.” “Con” evokes a presence, a present, a journey together; a dialogue, however, not just of technique and form. Nono’s musical language itself, I propose, embodies liberation, similar to the freedom inherent in Dallapiccola’s serialism. Both composers–at significant junctures of life, work, and political path–communicate a “new beginning” (nuovo inizio) through a narrative in which language and ethics are one.