There are two Bartóks. The first passed away in New York on 26 September 1945. The second is the mythical Bartók that emerged when the actual and historical musician died in exile. The story of Bartók’s reception in Italy has shown that the moralisation and politicisation of his legacy were not merely consequences of the composer’s deeds, but a collective process of myth-making that took place in a traumatic and disruptive period of Italian history – the 1940s – and whose origins dated back to the first decades of the twentieth century and the fascist period. The Italian case is not anecdotic. By examining the foundations of the Bartók myth in the late fascist years, and its crucial association with anti-Nazi resistance and democratisation, I have tried to elucidate not only the genesis, structure and far-reaching diffusion of the myth per se, but also the role played by music heroes in the memorialisation of the history of the last century.

In the wake of a generalised amnesty for the protagonists of a highly divisive civil war, Italian intellectuals tried to erase any link that had existed between forms of artistic modernism and the cultural institutions of the fascist dictatorship. They instead promoted conciliatory models, based on widely shared values. They also took advantage of the polysemy of Bartók’s figure, a quality that underpins the effectiveness of myths. Mila and Rondi, in particular, glorified the messianic advent of Bartók as the dawn of the new republican society: Bartók had sacrificed himself to defend the ideals of freedom and social progress, as well as the traditions and aspirations of the people. A perfect synthesis between modernity and tradition, universalism and nationalism, art and politics, the myth of Bartók-as-hero was thus merged with the myth of the Resistenza, a social myth anchored in the traumatic experience of the ventennio and the Second World War and informed by a narrative of exculpation, foreign invasion and resilience. The myth of the Resistenza fostered a new collective ethos based on the pursuit of freedom, cultural superiority and national resurrection. Mila seemed to be prophetically aware of this process of merging when he wrote in 1950 that ‘the main myths of our time found a lasting expression in Bartók’s music’.