Domination over the Risorgimento: Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony in Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954)

Abstract

In this article I argue that Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony assumes a pivotal role in advancing the romantically tinged narrative in Luchino Visconti’s film Senso (1954) through a politically recoded message. Visconti offers in this film a reflection upon the political climate in Venetia during the Risorgimento through the pre-eminent role of music. In particular, Bruckner’s music emphasizes the condition of the Venetians under Austrian rulers by dominating as an oppressive and overpowering force, not unlike the Austrian supremacy over the north Italians. Bruckner’s music, which relies on a decisively Wagnerian idiom, conveys throughout the film ideas of betrayal, on both the microlevel and the macrolevel. Such betrayals refer to the Christian Democracy, which excluded the Marxist partisans from governing post-war Italy. These events mirror, for Visconti, the failed revolution of the bourgeois-driven Risorgimento in the 19th century due to the idleness of the aristocracy. Interpreted through Visconti’s Marxist ideology, Bruckner is thus an indicator that the hegemony of the elite remained in place, unchanged and unaltered. As the sonic representative of the Austrian monarchy, it opposes the Risorgimento ideal of the bourgeois class and reassures the supremacy of the ruling class.