Freedom. The last word heard before the curtain falls. The word is heard as a question, expressing doubt, ambiguity, and relativism. This symbolism concludes the opera Il prigioniero (The Prisoner), a gloomy, existential work by the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola, who wrote the opera under the weight of the events of the Second World War.
Luigi Dallapiccola (1904‒1975) was born in 1904 to Italian parents in Istria, then part of Austria-Hungary. His father was the headmaster of an Italian-language school, which Austrian officials shut down at the beginning of the First World War. The family, seen as being politically unreliable, was sent to Graz for internment. Little Luigi resented his first encounter with political repression, but at the same time, the move to a large city helped shape his choice of career: having heard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman at the age of 13, he decided he would become a composer. He began his musical studies in Trieste and furthered his education at the conservatoire in Florence, where he graduated with a diplomas for piano performance in 1924 and for composition in 1932. As a student, he regarded Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Hindemith as his models. In 1924, Dallapiccola heard Arnold Schoenberg conduct Pierrot lunaire in Florence, an experience that profoundly shaped the young composer’s emerging musical language. He began studying Schoenberg’s textbook Harmonielehre and delved into the mysteries of the system known as dodecaphony built on a prearranged series of twelve tones. Dallapiccola saw dodecaphony not as a technical code, but rather as a means of internalised, concentrated artistic expression. He gradually aligned himself with the currents of expressionistic modernism, but his style still features an audibly expressive melodic line in keeping with the Italian tradition.
Artists born around 1904 necessarily found the historical events of the 20th century reflected in their lives and works. In the 1920s, the young student supported the ideas of Benito Mussolini and of Italy’s National Fascist Party because they advocated promoting the interests of ordinary people and of Italy. After 1930, however, his opinion changed radically because of his disagreement with Mussolini’s imperialist intervention in Abyssinia, Italy’s part in the Spanish Civil War, and the turn towards Adolf Hitler. Dallapiccola was particularly affected by the antisemitism promoted by the fascists and Nazis because his wife Laura was Jewish. When Mussolini announced his anti-Jewish campaign in September 1938, Dallapiccola went to work on composing Canti di prigionia (Songs of Imprisonment) for choir, two pianos, two harps, and percussion. Its three movements telling three different stories are linked by the same 12-tone series and by fragments of the Latin hymn Dies irae.
In June 1939, he and his wife visited Paris, where they came into possession of the decadent tale La torture par l’espérance (Torture by Hope) by Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, published in 1888. The plot depicts the cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition: a rabbi unjustly accused of usury is tortured into converting to Christianity. One night, he is “accidentally allowed to escape: the door was left open, and the guard was asleep. It all seemed miraculous, and the rabbi fled, fully believing that he had been liberated. In the end, however, he finds that a trap had been set for him—he is caught, and death awaits him. The hope he had momentarily felt was just another means of torture. Giving someone the hope of freedom and then taking it away is more treacherous than causing physical pain. It was this existential suffering that Dallapiccola chose to portray in an adaptation for the theatre as a reflection of the impending war. That September, the composer was deeply shaken by Hitler’s attack of Poland and by the intense bombardment of Warsaw. In his eyes, a people defending themselves and then being subjugated came to be represented by a prisoner, and he saw the freedom of mankind as the value of most immediate importance. He began writing a libretto in which the main hero is transformed into an unnamed Protestant prisoner from the time of the Dutch uprising against the rule of Spain’s King Philip II in the latter half of the 16th century, at the height of the repressions of the Spanish Inquisition. The text mentions both the king and his cruel governor, the feared Duke of Alba. Also mentioned are the “sea beggars”, who liberated the Netherlands under the leadership of William of Orange, and Ghent’s famed Roland Bell, which rang in support of the rebels.
In the Prologue, the Mother of the Prisoner appears as the opera’s only female character. She has visions of King Philip II in her dreams. The main action takes place in a prison in Saragossa, where the Gaoler awakens the hope of release in the Prisoner—he addresses the prisoner as “fratello“ (brother) and tells him of a successful uprising by Dutch freedom fighters. He then leaves the door to the cell open, and the Prisoner goes out into the courtyard and garden; freedom seems to be within reach. But it is at the height of his joy that all hope is extinguished: awaiting him outside is the Grand Inquisitor—it is he who dressed himself as the Gaoler and treacherously promised the Prisoner freedom. He asks the Prisoner: “Why do you want to leave us now, on the very eve of your salvation?”. What he means by salvation (and therefore freedom) is the stake, where the Prisoner is to find death. As they lead the Prisoner away, he asks: “La libertà?” (Freedom?).
Dallapiccola set the libretto to music between 1944 and 1948. The score is constructed within a rigorous twelve-tone framework, based on intervallic and contrapuntal principles. Among all the motifs, the recurring death signal—formed by the three opening chords—holds special significance. Alongside the intense solo parts, the choir is given an important role, with its interjections sung exclusively in Latin—the language of prayer. The opera in a prologue and one act was first heard in Italy on an RAI radio broadcast on 1 December 1949. The staged premiere took place at the Teatro Comunale Fiorentino on 20 May 1950 with Hermann Scherchen conducting. The opera was first heard in the USA ten years later under the baton of Leopold Stokowski.
