Born in 1904 to Italian parents in Pisino, a city in Istria that was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today it is called Pazin, and is part of Croatia), Luigi Dallapiccola began playing piano at a very young age, and started composing at the age of ten. However, it was only after World War I that he was able to pursue studies in piano and harmony with Antonio Illersberg, who passed on to Dallapiccola his enthusiasm for early Italian music, particularly Monteverdi, whose opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria Dallapiccola would adapt for the modern stage in 1941-42. During the First World War, Dallapiccola’s family, suspected of political subversiveness, was transported and interned (as were many families at that time) in Graz, Austria, for two years. There, the future composer attended operas by Mozart and Wagner which he would later cite, along with Puccini’s lyric works (about which he would later write several articles) were decisive in his choice to become a musician. In 1921, he discovered Schoenberg‘s Treatise on Harmony and the music of Debussy, which drove him to Florence to pursue his piano and composition studies with Roberto Casiraghi and Vito Frazzi. In 1924, he heard a performance of Pierrot lunaire conducted by Schoenberg himself, whom he met on this occasion - another decisive moment in his early career. It was not until 1949 that he paid direct tribute to Schoenberg by dedicating Tre poemi to him, but the influence of the Vienna School can already be heard in Dallapiccola’s work in the 1930s.

During these years, Dallapiccola worked as a pianist and a teacher, while also writing his first compositions. He gave recitals across Europe with violinist Sandro Materassi, with whom he became a fervent advocate of New Music and for whom he wrote his Tartiniana (in 1951 and 1956). In 1931, he began teaching piano in Florence, and in 1940, began teaching composition there, as well. He trained many compsers there, including Luciano Berio. Later, he would be appointed as an Accademico at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. During his travels, which he fought to continue in the first years of World War II, he met Berg, Webern, Milhaud, Poulenc, and, outside of musical circles, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who allowed Dallapiccola to use his novel Night Flight for the libretto of his first opera, Volo di Notte, which premiered in 1939 in an atmosphere of generalized confusion.

Although Dallapiccola had many connections, he nevertheless occupied a unique position in twentieth century music, which can be explained by his relative isolation in aesthetic terms: neither the Italian music world, which at that time was dominated by neoclassicism, nor the political situation in Germany favored the dissemination or theoretical understanding of atonal composing. Dallapiccola’s attraction to the twelve-tone technique, to which he was exposed in the works of Alban Berg and especially Anton Webern, whose Konzert Opus 24 Dallapiccola heard in Prague in 1935, led him to a highly personal exploration of the technique’s possibilities, without any radical break in his basic style. Dallapiccola was also inspired by his reading of modern literature (particularly Proust and Joyce). These, he said, nourished his thinking on the evolution of music. His later “neo-madrigals,” Cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il giovane (1933-1936) and Tre Laudi (1937) bear the traces of his first experiments with serial music. This period of “gradual immersion” continued with Canti di prigionia (1938-1941), in which his newer vocabulary found its way into a strongly diatonic universe, in which tonal suggestion remained highly present with an increasingly refined use of the principles of serial polyphonic composition - complex canons, layered counterpoints. The lyricism and drama of these works on imprisonment gave his work immediate force and harrowing expressivity; they were a deeply humanist cry that sounded out just as Italy’s fascist government, for which Dallapiccola had felt some sympathy early on, was beginning its inexcusable rapprochement with Nazy Germany. Dallapiccola’s Liriche greche (1942-1945) was his first piece composed entirely in a twelve-tone style, while his ballet Marsia (1942-1943), composed during the same period, was resolutely diatonic. Il Prigioniero (1944-1948), a short opera he began composing during the War, is a nod to Schoenberg’s Erwartung, a solemn testimony to human anguish in the face of the horrors of war. The piece, written for large orchestra, choirs, organ, brass, and an offstage carillon, also makes use of loudspeakers to intensify its force.

After the war, Dallapiccola cultivated a sparser, sometimes austere, and often transparent style that broke with the passionate and deeply lyrical style of his earlier work. Starting with Quaderno musicale di Annalibera and all the way up to his last composition, Commiato, written in 1972, his work was strictly serial, marked in equal parts by a strictly Webernian style and by the aesthetic writing of Ferruccio Busoni – Dallapiccola oversaw a new edition of his work in 1954 – as one hears in Cinque canti (1956) or his last major opera, Ulisse (1959-1968), based on Homer’s epic poem.

He was a contributor to the Florentine journal Il mondo europeo and worked for the rehabilitation of Italian composers abroad, notably through their readmission to the ISMC. As the flow of international artistic exchanges picked up again, his work began to be played abroad. The first concert entirely devoted to his composition took place in Mexico. In 1951, Koussevitzky invited Dallapiccola to teach at Tanglewood, heralding the beginning of what would become his wide renown in the United States: Due liriche di Anacreonte and Il Prigioniero were both performed in New York city, and Dallapiccola met Varèse several times, as well as teaching for several semesters at Queens College New York starting in 1956. In 1953, Goethe-Lieder premiered in Germany and Dallapiccola was appointed to the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich.

Dallapiccola died in Florence in 1975, having compiled his lectures and writings into a book titled Appunti, incontri, meditazioni.