The composer Luigi Dallapiccola writes his own libretti. His first opera, Volo di notte (1937-39), re-writes Saint Exupéry’s work in the operatic genre, thereby redefining the use of space as pertains to a novel. The stage is no longer neutral. Examining the spatial dimension of Dallapiccola’s opera, this article demonstrates its delicate and meaningful construction, wherein technology collides with the operatic genre. This collision occurs in part because Dallapiccola adds radiotelegraphic technology to pre-existing aircraft technology. The work is staged in airmail service offices, a unique place which music enhances and yet renders invisible, between light and shadow, dreams and nightmares. The sky represents the heart of absence ; Fabien’s space, a cabin for a condemned hero, is impalpable, but it resonates, resounds and redoubles as a result of the radiotelegraph operator’s voice. Dallapiccola’s modern messenger enables the spaces to be permeated; the radio is the technological artifice symbolising distance, but which, paradoxically, appears nevertheless authentic as it epitomizes the notion of mimesis. Fabien never appears on the stage because he is embodied by a machine that absorbs the radiotelegraph operator: he is a machine-messenger. Dallapiccola thereby stages the visible and the invisible, enabling a theatrical crescendo leading to the ultimate space for the hero of the opera, a space which is fundamentally contrapuntal: this sacred sphere is the Dallapiccolian spatial prototype which came to span the composer’s entire oeuvre.