I drammi di Ildebrando Pizzetti: la componente verbale

The paper deals with the librettos, or more specifically the verbal texts of Pizzetti’s music dramas, from a literary and linguistic perspective. The first part examines the composer’s critical-aesthetic approach to opera, which was certainly very original in the context of his time: its core principles give an account of the ethical and aesthetic aims of Pizzetti’s drama, allowing a better understanding of its features. The second part provides a chronological excursus of his dramas. The third part focuses on some relevant texts in order to explain the literary-linguistic traits of the dramas for which Pizzetti wrote the librettos too (the trilogy Dèbora e Jaéle, Lo straniero, Fra Gherardo; Orsèolo, L’oro) and those with librettos by other authors (Assassinio nella Cattedrale from Eliot, Il calzare d’argento by Bacchelli). From these analyses emerges an absolute coherence in the topics and the drama’s ethical aims. Furthermore, the librettos written by Pizzetti himself reveal a very personal style, sober and only slightly old fashioned: an essential element, along with his music, in that renewal of the musical drama to which his aesthetic reflections are devoted, in a coherent interweaving between theory and practice. Ultimately, this reveals a personal and significant example of a radically new way to conceive an opera, in the context of a crisis of this musical genre in the first half of the twentieth century.