In compositions from 1942 to 1949, Luigi Dallapiccola did not limit himself to the use of a single twelve-tone series in a given work. Instead, he presented a number of unique aggregate classes that may share certain features but that are not either derived from subsets of one another or related by one of the classic twelve-tone operations. During World War II, he had difficulty obtaining scores of the Viennese practitioners of twelve-tone composition, thereby frustrating his study of the technique; in his isolation, Dallapiccola was forced (as was Haydn at Eszterháza) to become original.
Although he employed the classic operations associated with twelve-tone composition such as Tn and TnI, Dallapiccola also solved compositional problems involving the concurrent presence of multiple aggregate classes in works during this period. My paper examines aspects of aggregate-class interaction in the Prologue of Dallapiccola’s second opera, Il prigioniero (The Prisoner), completed in 1948.