Musical interludes and a fantastical dimension in Dino Buzzati’s Comic Poem

Abstract

Dino Buzzati’s multifaceted artistic activity extended well beyond writing and painting. From an early age, he cultivated a strong interest in music, studying first the violin and later the piano. This passion led him, in 1928, after joining the editorial staff of Corriere della Sera, to work alongside Gaetano Cesari as a music critic for the newspaper’s cultural pages.

Buzzati’s engagement with music, however, was not limited to criticism. Between 1955 and 1963, he wrote the librettos for five operas by Luciano Chailly and Riccardo Malipiero, and in collaboration with the latter produced the experimental opera Battono alla porta, winner of the Prix Italia in 1961.

It is therefore unsurprising that music plays a central role in Poema a fumetti (1969), the work that, in Buzzati’s own conception, was intended to bring together the different strands of his artistic research. The narrative itself constitutes a reworking of the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This paper examines the semantic dimension of music in the work, focusing on its modes of representation within the dual verbal and visual registers of comics language, and on its function within the mechanisms of Buzzati’s fantastic narrative.