Idea e strategia del dramma in 'Job' di Luigi Dallapiccola

Abstract

Luigi Dallapiccola's chamber opera Job, una Sacra Rappresentazione, a work commissioned by the Anfiparnaso association of Rome and composed in the summer of 1950, appears to have received little musicological attention. Overshadowed by the fame of both Il Prigioniero(1949) and Ulisse (1968), the dramatic and musical value of Job, Dallapiccola's first dodecaphonic theatre work, has been somewhat underrated. The present article, the first in Italian on the subject, takes its cue from the composer's correspondence on the opera, and makes use of the material preserved in the Archivio Contemporaneo “A. Bonsanti” of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence. From the hitherto unpublished epistolary material, Dallapiccola vividly emerges as deeply engaged in fulfilling the ethical and cultural mission that he considered composition to be. While the musical ideas appeared to pour out from a mysterious source, daily routine seemed to conspire against him, involving him in a conflictual relationship with reality. His letters, therefore, are highly charged with tension: the same tension that pervades the music in the opera. In the second section the author successfully tracks down the bibliographical sources of the libretto, by resorting not only to the collection left to Bonsanti by Dallapiccola, but also to the Bibles and commentaries on the Book of Job in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence. From the composer's choices one deduces that the idiom he aimed to give the Biblical story was a rhythmic prose in which symmetries and sonorities impart a mythical and ritual aura to the text. The musical analysis of the third section shows thatJob was the first work in which Dallapiccola's derived series were constructed on the interval pattern of the groups obtained by subdividing the fundamental series into three-note segments: a feature that makes the opera an important technical stepping-stone towards the composer's works of the future. His means of animating the psychological development of his characters is to adopt dramatic and musical strategies that exploit the particular timbres and sonorities and the specific rhythmic and harmonic formulae that underpin the work's structure. In this way he generates a dodecaphonic style that evokes sensations of great complexity and appeal.