By the early 1950s, Dallapiccola’s name had become better known throughout Europe, and his music began to be played more frequently, especially in Germany, England, and France, rather less so in his native Italy. At the same time, some of the younger generation of European composers, those born in the early 1920s whose first mature music had begun to emerge after1945, were beginning to move in the direction of a radical experimentation, on occasion almost to an ab ovo reexamination of fundamental principles. This experimental spirit was represented above all by those composers who attended the Darmstadt Summer School during its earliest years, and the Italian presence at Darmstadt was spearheaded by the enormously active and influential figure of Bruno Maderna, closely followed by his pupil Luigi Nono. Dallapiccola, on the other hand, never visited Darmstadt. For him, the radicalisms that soon began to be linked with the name of Darmstadt were far removed from his own artistic concerns. These concerns were not centered upon a root-and-branch realignment of music, nor upon the rather one-sided view of Webern’s music espoused for a while by many of the Darmstadt composers. Dallapiccola based his aesthetic view on all three Viennese serialists—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—readily encompassing the highly emotional and expressive music of those composers, and he wished to integrate such expression with his innate Italian lyricism. Dallapiccola, therefore, in some sense ploughed a rather lonely furrow during the period, but at the same time his ground-breaking and highly rational approach to serialism had an enormous influence on his younger colleagues, most particularly on Luigi Nono. Although Luciano Berio had briefly been a pupil of Dallapiccola in Tanglewood and had retained a warm relationship with him, it was Nono with whom Dallapiccola had the closest artistic rapport, above all through their shared humanitarian and libertarian concerns.

Piccola musica notturna

Piccola musica notturna reflects the element of poetic and highly colorful expression that we have already identified as one of the most important components of Dallapiccola’s art. It was written in response to a request from Hermann Scherchen for a short orchestral piece for the “Jeunesses Musicales” Festival in Hanover in June 1954, and, like Goethe-Lieder, its composition occupied Dallapiccola for only a few weeks.