Il giudizio di Giorgio Vigolo su Arnold Schönberg tra legittimazione dell’Entartung e motivi antigiudaici

Paolo Dal Molin

2021-01-01

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Abstract

Giorgio Vigolo, poet, writer, philologist and translator, also worked as a music critic from 1945 to 1976. The present contribution examines his criticism of Arnold Schönberg, comparing the articles that appeared in «Il Mondo» with pages from his personal notebooks (Ideari). These texts illustrate the poet’s peculiar romantic and an- ti-modernist line in the musical field and the assimilation of elements from Western thought on Judaism. Not only does Vigolo re-legitimize Entartung as a key aesthetic category but, quite explicitly in the Ideari and, more subtly, in his contemporary musical reviews, he portrays Schönberg as the paladin of the decline and destruction of European music. He also describes him as an indecisive dualist torn between the values of ‘Romantic Germany’ and those of ‘Israel’. Unlike the negative criticism of Schönberg found to date in the writings of other important Italian music critics of the interwar and post-war period, Vigolo’s papers show that he can address the composer also on non-philological and anti-Judaic grounds.