Allesandro Longo complied the most complete edition of Domenico ...

(The Class Struggle) led to his being appointed editor of the official Socialist newspaper, Avanti!
(Forward!). Originally Mussolini was vehemently opposed to Italy’s intervention into World
War I. He soon changed his mind and began writing articles and making thunderous speeches in
favor of the war. As a result he was expelled from the Socialist Party and resigned as the editor
of Avanti!.
In the summer of 1922, under Mussolini’s direction, volunteers of the Fascist party
defeated a strike by the trade-union that the government failed to prevent. The well calculated
move by Mussolini won him tremendous favor amongst the middle class, further strengthening
him politically. Later that same year Mussolini threatened to march on Rome. The threat of civil
unrest forced the King to dispatch a compromise to Mussolini, who through this maneuver
placed himself in position to become the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history. Within a
year the King abdicated his throne and Mussolini became the first Dictator of Italy. The people
were deceived and manipulated by his flamboyancy. Tired of strikes and riots, the middle class
fell into a false sense of security in the belief that Mussolini could stabilize the economy and
restore the dignity of Italy. The Fascist party abolished Italy’s already fragile democracy in favor
of a one-party state by outlawing opposition parties, trade-unions, and the free press. The Fascist
ruled Italy from 1922 to1943 during which time it controlled all aspects of Italian life and had a
tremendous effect on music in the second quarter of twentieth-century Italy, just as Nazism
affected the music scene in Germany. Mussolini claimed “godlike omniscience in the field of
music.” 20 And he hired a well known music journalist to write a series of booklets to inflate and
praise every aspect of his musical prowess in an effort to convince the people of his claim.
In the midst of this new Fascist era, Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), Italy’s leading
operatic composer of the “The Young Italian School” known as veristi, died of throat cancer in
Brussels on 24 November 1924, leaving his last opera Turandot unfinished. The original
premiere date of the opera was April 1925. In order to preserve the earning power of the newly
deceased composer’s final work, Ricordi encouraged the belief that Turandot was essentially
finished. Nothing was further from the truth. Puccini had barely left skeletal drafts that consisted
of a few measures of music for voice and piano, some harmonic progressions, some detached
chords and the rare indication here and there of instrumentation for the final scene. Initally,
Arturo Toscanni, who was to conduct the premiere attempted to flesh out the fragments left
20 Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy. 11.
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