Franco Oppo e il «suono della Sardegna»: critica della ricezione e prospettive di studio musicologico

Franco Oppo is one of the best-known Sardinian composers of the Twentieth Century. Throughout his career, he showed a deep interest in Sardinian culture, which became a crucial identity marker of his compositions. This article aims to identify the main issues of the scholarly literature on Oppo and his strategies in the appropriation of Sardinian traditional music. Firstly, I discuss the references to Ennio Porrino in the historiographic discourse as a way to stress the new paths developed by Oppo. Secondly, I examine the authentication processes advocated by several scholars, underlining Oppo’s relationship to the coeval ethnomusicological research as well as his structuralist compositional approach. Finally, I propose potential future research paths, investigating Oppo’s primary sources, and possible connections with his pupils’ and other composers’ outputs.