Ben Earle – författare

The first book in the English language to take a comparative look at the various roles played by all kinds of music and musicians in the fascist regimes of the twentieth century. It provides detailed overviews of musical life in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and identifies and challenges some of the stereotypes that became ingrained over the latter half of the twentieth century. Alongside comparative studies drawn from the German and Italian examples, the book presents case studies from a variety of regimes and situations. It analyses and compares numerous aspects of fascism (ideology, thought, practice, policy) in their interfaces with music and musicians across the twentieth century. Its broad range of topics expands the reader's horizons beyond a debate on 'music and totalitarianism' currently too often restricted to Stalinism on the one hand and Nazism on the other.

The first book in the English language to take a comparative look at the various roles played by all kinds of music and musicians in the fascist regimes of the twentieth century. It provides detailed overviews of musical life in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and identifies and challenges some of the stereotypes that became ingrained over the latter half of the twentieth century. Alongside comparative studies drawn from the German and Italian examples, the book presents case studies from a variety of regimes and situations. It analyses and compares numerous aspects of fascism (ideology, thought, practice, policy) in their interfaces with music and musicians across the twentieth century. Its broad range of topics expands the reader's horizons beyond a debate on 'music and totalitarianism' currently too often restricted to Stalinism on the one hand and Nazism on the other.

Luigi Dallapiccola is widely considered a defining figure in twentieth-century Italian musical modernism, whose compositions bear passionate witness to the historical period through which he lived. In this book, Ben Earle focuses on three major works by the composer: the one-act operas Volo di notte ('Night Flight') and Il prigioniero ('The Prisoner'), and the choral Canti di prigionia ('Songs of Imprisonment'), setting them in the context of contemporary politics to trace their complex path from fascism to resistance. Earle also considers the wider relationship between musical modernism and Italian fascism, exploring the origins of musical modernism and investigating its place in the institutional structures created by Mussolini's regime. In doing so, he sheds new light on Dallapiccola's work and on the cultural politics of the early twentieth century to provide a history of musical modernism in Italy from the fin de siècle to the early Cold War.