Sweet Thunder

Music and Libretti in 1960s Italy

Vivienne Suvini-Hand

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351196215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Languages

"Italian music of the 1960s is one of the most unjustly neglected areas in the arena of twentieth-century classical music. This volume pays tribute to the astounding complexity of the music and libretti of five vocal compositions by leading experimental composers of the decade: Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Giacomo Manzoni, and Armando Gentilucci. It highlights how the 'difficult' and unconventional methods of composition employed by these artists - dodecaphony, total serialism, Webernian minimalist techniques, aleatory and electronic music - displayed a refusal to compete with the market-place values of Italy's new capitalist society. At the same time, the libretti's collage arrangement of a plethora of European and Oriental literary sources dating from the sixteenth century BC onwards, reflected the contemporary Neo-avant-garde rejection of conventional literary practice, and their preference for 'organised disorder', in Umberto Eco's phrase."

Chapter 1
Twentieth-Century Italian Music in the Context of European and American Experimentalism from Verismo to the Seventies

Italian Verismo

In 1888 the publisher and director Edoardo Sonzogno advertised a competition for a one-act opera to mark the occasion of the opening of his new opera house, the Teatro Costanzi, in Rome. The competition was won by Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana (1890), based on a play of the same name by the Sicilian writer, Giovanni Verga (1840–1922). Together with Luigi Capuana (1839–1915), Verga was the main exponent of a school of literature know Verismo (Realism). Closely related to French Naturalis Verismo displayed an interest in regionalism, employed a narrative style which was objective and impersonal, and attempted, in its mixing of dialect with standard Italian, to convey the down-to-earth language of the lower social classes. The success of Mascagni’s opera gave rise to a new musical genre — Verismo — a term that eventually became synonymous with a focussing upon the gritty lives of the under-classes, sensational tales of adulterous passions and brutality, bursts of tuneful and emotional melodies, and, often, the use of popular song and dance. Cavalleria was followed by a host of imitations, notably Ruggero Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci (1892), and Umberto Giordano’s Mala vita (1892). The former combines the Veristic ‘slice of life’ approach with more complex elements. A version of the Shakespearian proverb ‘All the world’s a stage’, it is a tragicomic play within a play, with commedia dell’arte characters and masks. Giordano's Mala vita is a blunt portrayal of the ‘wretched life’ of a Neapolitan prostitute.

Continuing in the vein of high drama and memorable melodies, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), in 1893, produced his first successful opera, Manon Lescaut. However, although his name is generally attached to Veristic opera, Puccini’s material was far more wide-ranging than that of Verismo contemporaries (he touches on subjects as diverse as bohemianism, love and politics during the Napoleonic wars, orientalism, colonialism, and the Wild West); and his success lay largely in altering the Verismo genre by dispensing with its shock tactics and making echoes to the bel canto tradition. Puccini went on to dominate the musical scene with La bohème, premiered in 1896, Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), La fanciulla del West (1910), Il Trittico: Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi (1918), and Turandot (1926).

Twentieth-century Classicism

The turn of the century appeal of Verismo completely overshadowed the great Italian instrumental tradition. In recognition of this, three musicians — Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909), Giovanni Sgambati (1841–1914), and Leone Sinisgaglia (1868–1944) — set about composing exclusively for instruments and organizing concerts in an effort to pioneer instrumental music. But their efforts failed, largely because they lacked a thorough knowledge of the Italian tradition, and tended to imitate German symphonic music, particularly that of Brahms. It was left up to the generazione dell’ottanta — a number of composers born in the 1880s — to bring about a major musical revival. These composers included Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936), Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973), Alfredo Casella (1883–1947), and Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892–1965), and their names became associated with a movement known as ‘Classicism’ or ‘Neo-Classicism’.

The terms ‘Classicism’ and ‘Neo-Classicism’ are frequently used interchangeably by musicologists (the latter term is preferred here)¹. What is being denoted is an attempt, on the part of a number of composers writing particularly between the two wars, to return to the original Classical style, which incorporated anything ranging from the early seventeenth century (Monteverdi and Gesualdo) to the late Baroque (Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Scarlatti) and to the classical era proper of the late eighteenth century (Haydn and Mozart). In short, Neo-Classicism emulated the eras that had preceded nineteenth-century Romanticism, whose exaggerated gestures and formless indulgences the ‘new’ Classicists were rejecting. The Classical principles of order, discipline, balance, and structure — considered to be universal properties of music which had been swept aside during Romanticism — were favoured over the concept of music as expressing emotion and arousing emotion. Musically, Neo-Classicism brought with it a resurrection of traditional forms such as the symphony, sonata, and concerto. Small orchestras or chamber music groups were generally preferred over the huge orchestras that had been associated with Strauss or Mahler. Equally significant was Neo-Classicism’s preference for pre-nineteenth-century forms such as the suite, gigue, divertimento, toccata, fugue, passacaglia, and chaconne. In place of the rich chordal textures of Romantic and Impressionist music, the Classicists used a horizontal or linear style, with clear, sharp lines, and precise, regular rhythms. But it was not that the ‘new’ Classicists were blindly imitating the ‘old’ Classicists. One could, for example, never mistake the music of Stravinsky with that of Haydn or Mozart. Rather, the ‘new’ Classicists blended the basic tenets of the Classical tradition with their own personal styles, and with elements of experimentalism in the form of extended tonality, modality, or even atonality. For this reason, ‘Neo-Classicism' could not be regarded as nostalgic or backward-looking; on the contrary, it was decidedly progressive and modern, making it ‘difficult and even artificial to regard Neo-Classicism and postmodernism as separate except in historical sequence'.²

The three most renowned names in the field of twentieth-century Classicism are Busoni, Casella, and Malipiero. The last two will be important to the discussion of Luigi Dallapiccola (see p. 14). Before deciding to reside in Italy at the age of thirty-two, Alfredo Casella had lived abroad for nearly twenty years, studying in Paris (with Ravel under Fauré), and travelling as a harpsichordist to Russia and Germany where he met and worked with Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, and the young Stravinsky. His ‘cosmopolitan’ experiences are reflected in the music of his first ‘phase’ (generally posited as the period lasting up to 1913) which bear the influences of Fauré (in Barcarola e scherzo, 1903), the Russian nationalists, and Mahler (in his first two symphonies). When he returned to Italy in 1915, he took up the post of Professor of piano at the Liceo di S. Cecilia in Rome, and devoted himself to leading the Italian public away from the provincialism of Verismo opera, and introducing Italy to all that was new in European music in the early 1900s. According, he founded, along with a small group of composers (including Malipiero, Pizzetti and Respighi) the ‘Società Italiana di Musica Moderna’ (SIMM) which gave controversial concerts of both Italian and foreign music. Casella was, at this point in time, in the second phase of his career — the avant-garde phase, postulated as lasting from 1913 to 1920 — and completely under the spell of Schoenberg. His music of this period (notably the orchestral piece, Pagine di guerra, 1918, and the piano works, Pupazzetti, 1920, and Piano Sonatina, 1916) bears the influences not only of Schoenberg, but also of Stravinsky and Bartók. These three composers also featured largely in performances given by Casella’s new musical society — the ‘Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche’ (CDNM), created in 1923 (the SIMM having come to a demise in 1919). The CDNM, supported by D’Annunzio, aimed to bring to Italy ‘the latest expressions and the most recent researches of contemporary musical art’ (Waterhouse, The New Grove, p. 233), and the group toured throughout Italy mostly performing Stravinsky's Les noces (1923) and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, conducted by Schoenberg himself. Pierrot lunaire — a piece for a female speaker an wind and string instruments, premiered in Vienna in 1912 — was Schoenberg’s first important and highly influential atonal composition (see pp. 15–17). It was through the activities of the CDNM that the young Dallapiccola had his first contact with the Viennese avant-garde. In terms of Casella’s own personal creativity, he had, at this point in time, in a drastic change of tack, reached his third and final stage — the Neo-Classical period which lasted roughly from 1920 to 1944. His models were the Baroque masters, Vivaldi, and in particular, Scarlatti. Following the example of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1919), based on music by Pergolesi,³ Casella’s Scarlattiana (1926) for piano and thirty-two instruments takes its themes from Scarlatti’s sonatas. The composer claims this leap from the avant-garde to the Neo-Classical occurred because the Italians needed a new music which was more consonant with a ‘Mediterranean’ sensibility, and specifically to fulfil this need he wrote his Concerto for string quartet (1923–24) which he viewed as a type of Italian complement to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire:

Desideravo [...] che il Pierrot lunaire venisse accompagnato da un lavoro italiano che valesse a dimostrare quanto la nostra sensibilità, la nostra tradizione fossero indipendenti dall’arte del maestro viennese.⁴

[I wanted Pierrot lunaire to be accompanied by an Italian work whose worth lay in demonstrating how much our sensibility and our tradition were independent from the art of the Viennese master.]

As intimated in the quotation, Casella’s Classicism was also bound up with feelings of intense nationalism which in the 1930s led him to identify with Fascism: his 1937 opera, Il deserto tentato, was written in praise of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. But his frenzy for ‘romanità’ (evident as far back as 1926 in his ‘Neo-Classical' Concerto romano) did not, however, prevent him from supporting performances of foreign music, as evinced by the 1937 programme for the Festival di musica contemporanea della Biennale di Venezia, directed by Casella himself, which features a performance of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic Suite, 1921-23 (See New Grove, p. 234). Malipiero’s name is nearly always linked to that of Casella for the manner in which, during the twenties, he assisted him in modernizing Italian music, and weaning the Italian public off what he considered to be the shallow sentimentality of Puccini and late nineteenth-century opera. He collaborated with Casella on the activities of both the SIMM and the CDNM. If he is often referred to as a Neo-Classicist, it is because of his abiding interest in seventeenth and eighteenth century music — particularly that of Monteverdi and Vivaldi. From 1926 to 1942 he edited Monteverdi’s entire works in sixteen volumes,⁵ and after his retirement from the Liceo Musicale di Venezia where he was a professor of composition, he proceeded to edit the complete instrumental works of Vivaldi.⁶ In addition, he wrote book-length studies and essays on both Monteverdi and Vivaldi, and on a plethora of other composers and musical subjects.⁷ The influence of the Baroque is strongly felt in his musical compositions, especially those operas composed between the two wars. In San Francesco d’Assisi (1920–21) the Monteverdian arioso combined with Gregorian chant endows the work with what Waterhouse calls a ‘Giottoesque calm’ (New Grove, p. 699); while the use of baroque counterpoint, together with archaic modes (forms of scales prevalent in the middle ages) in Filomena e l'infatuato (1925) and Merlino mastro d’organi (1926–27) lends both operas a distinctly archaic flavour. But the archaic in all of these compositions is also fused with a pronounced experimentalism. The experimentalism of Malipiero’s music lies in the manner in which it assimilates various musical tendencies and movements — Impressionism, Expressionism, atonalism, and occasionally in the later works, dodecaphony — but identifies with none of them. Thematically too, Malipiero’s operas are innovative and distinctly avant-garde, making often cryptic, symbolic statements about music itself. For example, in Merlino mastro d’organi (a sequel to Filomena e l’infatuato, where ‘the infatuated one’ literally cannot live without the sound of Filomena’s singing), ‘l’infatuato’ has become Merlino who is possessed by Filomena’s soul which proceeds to take vengeance on all men in whom music inspires love. Merlino attracts such men by his organ playing, and then kills them with his ‘orge sonore’ (‘sonorous orgies'). He himself, however, is eventually killed by a deaf and dumb traveller, but the soul of Filomena survives, and a new singer is born. Malipiero’s most important compositions after 1930 are the seven (‘anti-’) symphonies written between 1930 and 1950 which rejected all German principles of thematic development and recapitulation, replacing these with a more deliberately open, fluent, and improvisatory style.

Schoenberg and Atonal Music

Although the ultra-modern operas of Malipiero were composed, in part, as a reaction against Puccini’s operas and their lowbrow popularism, Malipiero's criticism of Puccini is not entirely justified, for even Verismo composer, in his later works, shows signs of having been affected by the musical avant-garde. Puccini’s Turandot, composed between 1920 and 1924, has in fact little in common with tonal ‘Realism’. A psychological piece, concerned (like Malipiero's La morte delle maschere, 1922) with masks and identities, Turandot is also often tonally ambiguous, with dissonant sounding chords (ninths and elevenths played in parallel sequences), and an advanced use of harmony. Such musical innovations were clearly influenced by the gradual erosions in tonality which first became pronounced at the end of the nineteenth century, and which eventually culminated in the radical innovations brought about by Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an Austrian composer who worked in Germany, and then, from 1933, in the USA (having been driven out from Germany by the Nazis for being a Jew and a composer of ‘decadent’ music). Tonality in European music was based on the principle that in the twelve tones that make up a scale, seven belong to the key, while five lie outside it. Gradual the distinction between these seven diatonic tones and the five chromatic one began to disappear, and major and minor tonalities fused and combined into a single chromatic scale. While still remaining within the boundaries of the key, Wagner (1813–83) stretched chromaticism as far as possible, and questioned the necessity of returning to the key-note or tonic. Schoenberg took the process one step further. In his three pieces for piano, entitled Drei Klavierstücke nos 1–2, written in 1909, he completely jettisoned traditional methods of composition — dispensing with tonal centres, key signatures, and the traditional application of harmony — in favour of one where all the twelve notes in the chromatic scale were given equal importance, and regarded as being related freely to each other, rather than to a central key-note. Atonal music was born, although the term did not meet with approval by Schoenber...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Twentieth-Century Italian Music in the Context of European and American Experimentalism from Verismo to the Seventies
• 2 Luigi Dallapiccola's Ulisse (1960-68)
• 3 Luciano Berio's Laborintus II (1965)
• 4 Armando Gentilucci's Strofe di Ungaretti (1967)
• 5 Giacomo Manzoni's Parole da Beckett (1970)
• 6 Bruno Maderna's Ausstrahlung (1971)
• Conclusion
• Libretti
• Bibliography of Works
• Critical Bibliography
• Index