Il modernismo di Ildebrando Pizzetti

This paper proposes a new interpretation of Ildebrando Pizzetti’s artistic experience within the framework of twentieth-century musical modernism. The first part questions the premises and methodologies underlying the historiographic narrative that in recent decades has shaped the reception of his music: the myth of the “generazione dell’Ottanta”, the epic of nationalism, the apologia of the avant-garde, the dialectic between history and memory, and Pizzetti’s connections with Fascism. The second part focuses on the dialectic between aesthetics and compositional technique, in order to retrace the signs of the composer’s modernist attitude in his artistic praxis through the analysis of the following works: Concerto dell’estate, Sonata in A for piano and violin, Assassinio nella cattedrale and Dèbora e Jaéle. The analysis of Pizzetti’s autographs and compositional sketches, examined here for the first time, sheds light on his strong experimental approach and the most original features of his style: “musical prose”, variant technique, block construction, dialectical interactions between text, music and stage space, the refusal of a linear temporality and the structural role of musico-dramatic signs.