Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Piccola musica notturna (1954)
Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester
Claudio Abbado
The first performance of Piccola musica notturna took place in Hanover in June 1954; Luigi Dallapiccola had completed it in April of that same year, dedicating it to Hermann Scherchen, one of the few great conductors who at the time also devoted himself to avant-garde music. The composer prefaced the score with a poem by Antonio Machado, entitled Notte d'estate (Summer Night ):
It's a beautiful summer night.
The tall houses have
open windows
overlooking the broad square of the old town.
In the large, empty rectangle,
stone benches, hedges, and
symmetrical acacia trees cast
their black shadows on the white sand.
At the zenith, the moon, and on the tower,
the sphere, the clock; illuminated.
I walk through this old town
alone, like a ghost.
Dallapiccola's music effectively reflects the magical realism of poetry, identifying its dreamlike and metaphysical values beneath the realistic appearance and therefore excluding any impressionistic or descriptive intent.
The orchestra is eighteenth-century in size and could be described as Haydn- or Mozart-esque, were it not for the celesta, a harp, and a well-stocked percussion section, handled with great delicacy to produce rustles, tremors, and mysterious, nocturnal whispers. This small-to-medium-sized orchestra is treated with an almost chamber-like style, which becomes explicit in the version for a small eight-instrument ensemble that Dallapiccola composed in 1968: there are numerous indications such as leggerissimo, bisbigliando, dolcessimo, and mistero, furthermore, the string instruments are often muted, or their sound is rendered disembodied by distant, undefined tremolos.
Piccola musica notturna unfolds in rarefied and suspended sonic atmospheres, almost motionless and timeless, but beneath this apparent serenity shines a sense of mystery and a search for sweetness, dreamed of rather than grasped by the delicate sonorities Dallapiccola demands. In this almost complete impassivity, the few contrasts between the brief, marked fortissimo and sforzando and the prevailing piano (in all gradations from p to pppp ) also take on significance: these contrasts have both structural functions (they are the keystones of an apparently free yet actually solid and clear in its symmetry) and expressive functions (they are the moments in which the restrained fervor and intensity break out into brief moments of more overt drama).
Timbres and dynamics therefore play a decisive role in the conception of this piece, but the melodic aspect is also important, entirely based on very small chromatic intervals and arising almost entirely from the phrase exposed by the clarinet in the first three bars: this phrase is repeated numerous times by different instruments, in its original or inverted form, in full or in fragments, according to procedures derived from dodecaphony, although this is one of the pieces in which Dallapiccola uses this technique most freely, adopted from 1942 onwards, among the first in Italy. --Mauro Mariani
Art by Winslow Homer
Piccola musica notturna (1954)
Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester
Claudio Abbado
The first performance of Piccola musica notturna took place in Hanover in June 1954; Luigi Dallapiccola had completed it in April of that same year, dedicating it to Hermann Scherchen, one of the few great conductors who at the time also devoted himself to avant-garde music. The composer prefaced the score with a poem by Antonio Machado, entitled Notte d'estate (Summer Night ):
It's a beautiful summer night.
The tall houses have
open windows
overlooking the broad square of the old town.
In the large, empty rectangle,
stone benches, hedges, and
symmetrical acacia trees cast
their black shadows on the white sand.
At the zenith, the moon, and on the tower,
the sphere, the clock; illuminated.
I walk through this old town
alone, like a ghost.
Dallapiccola's music effectively reflects the magical realism of poetry, identifying its dreamlike and metaphysical values beneath the realistic appearance and therefore excluding any impressionistic or descriptive intent.
The orchestra is eighteenth-century in size and could be described as Haydn- or Mozart-esque, were it not for the celesta, a harp, and a well-stocked percussion section, handled with great delicacy to produce rustles, tremors, and mysterious, nocturnal whispers. This small-to-medium-sized orchestra is treated with an almost chamber-like style, which becomes explicit in the version for a small eight-instrument ensemble that Dallapiccola composed in 1968: there are numerous indications such as leggerissimo, bisbigliando, dolcessimo, and mistero, furthermore, the string instruments are often muted, or their sound is rendered disembodied by distant, undefined tremolos.
Piccola musica notturna unfolds in rarefied and suspended sonic atmospheres, almost motionless and timeless, but beneath this apparent serenity shines a sense of mystery and a search for sweetness, dreamed of rather than grasped by the delicate sonorities Dallapiccola demands. In this almost complete impassivity, the few contrasts between the brief, marked fortissimo and sforzando and the prevailing piano (in all gradations from p to pppp ) also take on significance: these contrasts have both structural functions (they are the keystones of an apparently free yet actually solid and clear in its symmetry) and expressive functions (they are the moments in which the restrained fervor and intensity break out into brief moments of more overt drama).
Timbres and dynamics therefore play a decisive role in the conception of this piece, but the melodic aspect is also important, entirely based on very small chromatic intervals and arising almost entirely from the phrase exposed by the clarinet in the first three bars: this phrase is repeated numerous times by different instruments, in its original or inverted form, in full or in fragments, according to procedures derived from dodecaphony, although this is one of the pieces in which Dallapiccola uses this technique most freely, adopted from 1942 onwards, among the first in Italy. --Mauro Mariani
Art by Winslow Homer
