Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero

Interprets Dallapiccola’s one-act opera The Prisoner (Il Prigioniero) as an allegory about how people remain hopeful in the face of authoritarianism.

Completed by Dallapiccola in 1948 and set in Aragon in the 1570s during the time of Philip II and the Inquisition, The Prisoner is an allegory about how people remain hopeful in the face of authoritarianism. The libretto draws explicitly and implicitly on several sources: Villers de l’Isle-Adam’s short story “Torture by hope”; Charles de Coster’s novel The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel; and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The libretto was also inspired by Dallapiccola’s personal experiences living in confinement in World War I and World War II. Born in 1904, he grew up in a minority Italian community in Istria, then part of Austro-Hungary. After Italy declared war on Austro-Hungary in May 1915, his family were interred for eighteen months in the Austrian town of Graz. Dallapiccola was again forced into confinement when the Nazi occupied Italy in September 1943. Fearing for the life of his Jewish-born wife, he hid in Florence until the city was liberated in August 1944.
Building on ideas about hope taken from these sources, as well as from insights from other authors such as Seneca, Baruch Spinoza, Józef Kozielecki, Katie Stockdale, Sally Scholtz, Jeremy Bentham, and Michel Foucault, this book explores the various ways in which the complex nature of hope is manifest in Dallapiccola’s The Prisoner. Among other things, it shows how the concepts of hope, freedom, and prayer are represented musically by means of specific twelve-tone rows and motives and how these materials articulate the work’s intricate formal structure, especially its use of strophic forms and canonic techniques. Just as the opera has a prologue and four scenes, so the book has five chapters. Chapter 1 begins with the Prologue and compares the feelings of hopelessness expressed by the Prisoner’s Mother to those expressed by the pilgrim at the start of Dante’s Inferno. No longer endowed with the capacity for free will, those sentenced to Hell exist without any hope for the future. Chapter 2 then considers Scene I and ways in which the Jailer gives the Prisoner hope by referring to him as “My brother.” Following Coster’s The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel, Chapter 3 describes how the Prisoner’s growing optimism is transformed in Scene II by news of the Dutch Revolt. Chapter 4 then shows how the Prisoner turns hope into action in Scene III; it compares Dallapiccola’s version of his escape with those described by Villiers in “Torture by hope.” Last, Chapter 5 considers Scene IV when the Prisoner realizes that the idea of escape implanted in him by the Jailer was nothing but a false hope, a possibility that Dante addressed in Paradise.