Atonalist with Passion

For Italian Composer Luigi Dallapiccola, 57, life has by his own testimony been "one long suffer." The suffer is apparent in the spare, abrasively powerful twelve-tone music that has flowed steadily from his pen through years of poverty, persecution and neglect. But Dallapiccola is neglected no longer: even his severest critics in Italy acknowledge his influence as the patriarch of the Italian twelve-tone school. Manhattan audiences last week had a first chance to hear one of the patriarch's finest works -- the 13-minute Variations for Orchestra as performed by the visiting Boston Symphony under Guest Conductor Erich Leinsdorf.

Although Dodecaphonist Dallapiccola believes that his spiritual brother is James Joyce (he has read Ulysses eight times), Variations sounds more like a page out of Kafka. It opens with a funereal, ghostlike theme in the strings, erupts in a chilling shower of brasses, sinks to a series of restless, enervated whispers. Percussive and rhythmically complex throughout, it is scored sparely, skillfully using small instrumental combinations in strange, exhilarating blends of sound. What sets it apart from much of the desiccated twelve-tone music of the Viennese school is its sense of passion: Dallapiccola, however his music may suffer, always seems to care.

Night Flights. The composer was introduced to the twelve-tone idiom in 1924 at the Florence premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. "Only two people in the hall were impressed by the music," he recalls. "One was a very unimportant young man. Me. The other was Giacomo Puccini." Dallapiccola, who for a time composed in a largely traditional, tonal style (he has always been an ardent Wagner fan), gradually started learning twelve-tone technique, teaching himself by studying Schoenberg's scores. "But in those days nobody appreciated my music," and he and his wife were sometimes reduced to a diet of water and one roll a day.

Teaching helped keep Dallapiccola going, but his name began to be heard after the 1940 premiere of his first opera, Night Flight, based on the book by Antoine de Saint Exupery. During the war Dallapiccola went into hiding in the mountains to protect his Jewish wife from the German forces in Italy. Since the war, his reputation has steadily grown as he has added to his small body of work a number of impressive vocal compositions: Five Fragments from Sappho for Voice and Chamber Orchestra, Five Songs for Baritone, Two Anacreon Songs and Requiescat (set to words by St. Matthew, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce)

Hate Duets. A tiny man (5 ft. 3 in.), grey-maned Composer Dallapiccola is affectionately known in Italian musical circles as "Il Bruttino"--The Ugly One. He now lives in Florence in a musty, 17th century palazzo. There he is hard at work on a gigantic, twelve-tone grand opera to be based on Joyce's Ulysses. The trouble with modern opera, says Dallapiccola, is that composers "seem to have come to a mutual agreement to eliminate the love element which has delighted audiences for a century. The love duet was axed, and it would now be appropriate to introduce a new term, the 'hate duet.' The new operatic hero is the man without love who is hopelessly alone." In his Ulysses, Composer Dallapiccola hopes to come to terms with opera's new hero. The work will take him, he thinks, five years to finish, but "it will, I hope, be the termination of my search for my soul."

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