The Music Situation in Italy: The Break-Through Into Contemporary Style
by MASSIMO MILA
I
NOTHING else perhaps, in Italy, has changed so considerably in the past half century as music. And if this has been overlooked to some extent, it is only because other activities in which changes far less sweeping have taken place are of more immediate importance, and have been felt more deeply than the upheaval in music.-
Up to the turn of the century, Italy was still a land of opera in a world being won over more and more by symphony and music drama of Wagnerian origin. Although opera passed out of fashion, the Italian achievement remained. All over the world there were people ready to be moved by the characters of Puccini’s creation, people whose enthusiasm could be aroused by the vibrant melodies of Mascagni: such characters and melodies, together with a reserve of fine voices, were things only Italy was able to furnish the world. Caruso was the great symbol of this predominance.
Today, Italian achievement in opera survives solely on the glories of the past. There is no longer a Puccini or a Mascagni whose works instantly sweep the world. But Italy has regained some of the ground surrendered to the great German symphonic accomplishments of the nineteenth century, and she has assimilated the more recent advances of French impressionism and the expressionism of Middle Europe. In a word, she has fallen in step with that phenomenon known as “modern music.” Italy today is no longer a picturesque spot of local color on the geographical map of music, but a country as modern as any other. The creators of this renovation were a group of musicians whose work is now given over to history, though two of them, happily, are still composing: they were Franco Alfano (1876-1954), Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), Ildebrando Pizzetti (born in 1880), Gian Francesco Malipiero (born in 1882), and Alfredo Casella (1883-1947).
These pioneers of modern Italian music had to fight a still battle against public incomprehension and hostility. The Italians loved their traditional opera and were justly proud of the favor it found the world over. Many felt that this national glory was being destroyed by a conspiracy of ambitious, xenophile musicians. Actually, Casella, Pizzetti, Malipiero, and company were not the gravediggers of Italian opera — which died a perfectly natural death. After Verdi, one had to be content with Puccini, Mascagni, Giordano; and after them, it was clear that it was no longer possible to write works of that order in a world that had experienced two World Wars, a Russian Revolution, and such inventions as motion pictures, the radio, the airplane, and the atomic bomb. The musical generation of the '80s did the only thing open to it and drew natural deductions from the historical situation in which it found itself: it strove to give Italy modern music, in the main symphonic and instrumental.
One can now state surely that the risky operation undertaken by the pioneer generation has been successful. For many years, of course, we Italians had the impression of being the last arrivals at the banquet table of modern music. We felt that we were considered nice, promising young students. The keynotes were coming from Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and, later, America. The masters were Ravel, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Bartók.
Today, Italian music has emerged from its period of minority. This fact stood out clearly after the break in cultural and artistic activities due to World War II. When the arts of peace were resumed, foreign musical circles suddenly realized the existence of arresting music in Italy. And especially important, Italian artists felt themselves freed, as though by magic, of their inferiority complexes. Without bragging, without nationalistic conceit, it is perfectly clear today, to the few Italians who love modern music, that the tune is no longer called only from abroad. Italy has entered the mainstream of European music not only as an importer, but equally as an exporter.
This has been possible because the work of the generation of the ‘80s was not an operation against nature, but a natural growth from roots buried deep within the Italian musical tradition. Needless to say, the pioneers had a great deal to learn and accept from European instrumental music of the times: Casella was an indefatigable importer of new musical fashions. But an unerring instinct led them to revive a particular instrumental tradition, Italian and very ancient, which had been swamped beneath the flood of nineteenth-century opera. The impulse toward the past, the rediscovery of baroque and even Renaissance music, has certainly been one of the characteristic features of modern music everywhere, particularly of the strain usually called neoclassic. But perhaps nowhere has this movement been more firmly grounded in solid historical motivations than in Italy. For the new Italian musicians, leaping over the nineteenth century meant linking up with an older indigenous culture. They restored contact with the age of Vivaldi and Domenico Scarlatti, of Boccherini and Corelli, of Monteverdi and Palestrina.
In Italy as elsewhere, to be sure, many conscientious and useless suites and concerti grossi were written in scholastic imitation of the seventeenth century. But the concertante taste of the baroque age again flourished with spontaneity in contemporary Italian music, even when it. was not neoclassic in aim. In reaction to the symphonic dialectic of the nineteenth century, a concertante style was developed which is genuinely modern and makes no concessions to archaism. In particular, a taste for mixed vocal and instrumental polyphony came to the fore, having as its ancient models the dramatic madrigals of Monteverdi, but which is nonetheless entirely receptive to the latest experiments with contemporary musical language.
This predilection for the vocal, which is irresistibly winning its way against the prevailing instrumental ideal of contemporary music, has quickly become the trademark of the new Italian music. But it is no longer based on the solo voice sustained by the charms of bel canto; it is, rather, a polyphonic choral style which frequently places human voices and instruments on the same plane. And now that, since the War, twelve-tone music, running like wildfire across the Western World, has spread through Italy as well, it becomes evident that we are witnessing a repetition of that grand historical phenomenon which took place in the sixteenth century, when Italy welcomed the highly complicated contrapuntal technique evolved by the Flemish, and, without diluting it, nonetheless did temper it and make it smoother, imparting to it artistic grace and re-forming it to the specifications of a more intense expression and of a cogent vocal style. In contemporary international music circles nowadays it is common to refer to “counterpoint à l’italienne,” meaning this humanization which the Italians, through the introduction of an innate vocal art, have brought to the twelve-tone technique and to modern polyphony.
2
lUIGI DALLAPICCOLA of Florence, and Goffredo Petrassi of Rome—both born in 1904 — are the outstanding personalities of the group of contemporary Italian composers which followed the pioneer generation. They operated side by side and on an equal footing with the greatest European masters in the production and continual evolution of modern values. Dallapiccola has been the principal introducer of the twelve-tone technique in composition, creating both with broad-minded freedom and that cogency of melodic expression which is generally recognized as the Italian style. Petrassi is the leading exponent of the other trend in contemporary music, which, though it has not broken all ties with tonality, still does not evade the most rigorous stylistic discipline and the most advanced experiments — the current whose masters are Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartók. Both Dallapiccola and Petrassi are known in America, where they have taught composition at various universities.
The younger Italian composers run the gamut of contemporary musical styles. They range from the simple traditionalists, some of whom are influenced by Prokofieff or Menotti, through a middle group (Zafred, Chailly, Viozzi, Liberovici) who stem from the early Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartók, and the pioneers of Italian modernism, to composers such as Mario Peragnllo, who blends the traditional with a personal application of the twelve-tone technique. Others who have successfully explored the twelvetone technique are Riceardo Malipiero, Camillo Togni,and Antonio Veretti, while the names Ghedini, Turchi, Vlad, Marinuzzi, Negri, Fellegara, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who now lives in America, should not bo overlooked among the middle-group modernists.
And then we find young men who have embarked on the adventure of post-Webernian extremism and of electronic music. The elect ronics research laboratory set up by the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italinnu) in its Milan studios ranks with similar laboratories in Cologne, Gravesano (Switzerland) and Paris in the development of the most daring sound experiments. Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna are engaged in research and creative work which is moving at the same pace as that being carried out by Stockhausen in Germany, by Boulez in France, by Pousseur in Belgium, and by Edgar Varèse and John Cage in America. Still, even within this current of extremism — where the positions of the Viennese twelve-tone music of Schoenberg and Alban Berg have been passed and the starting point is where Anton Webern left off— it is not hard to notice the tempering presence of the Italian gift, with its unmistakable qualities of balance, vocality, and expressive warmth. Evidence of this may be found in the compositions of the Venetian Luigi Nono, a man who met with success abroad, notably in Germany, before appearing on the Italian musical scene.
3
IF THIS, with inevitable omissions, is the present situation of musical composition in Italy, what is the public reaction to it? In Italy, as in most countries, the evolution of musical expression has been more rapid than that of public taste: composers have outdistanced their listeners. As far back as 1869 Verdi put his finger on the crux of the matter when he wrote in a letter: “One can’t go on like this. Either the composers must go backward or all the others must go forward.”
The composers have not gone backward, and “all the others” have done their best to follow them. The Italian public has not kept up with the composers, but it has nonetheless made great strides. There exists today an unabashed and widespread appreciation of symphonic music, to which the ever increasing number of concert societies, flourishing even in the smaller cities, bears witness. Three great orchestras are engaged exclusively in symphonic work: the RAI orchestras of Turin and Rome and the orchestra of the long-established Association of Santa Cecilia in Rome, which, apart from having an excellent permanent chorus, also provides valuable advanced courses in every branch of music.
Then too, the permanent orchestras of the more important opera houses give symphony concerts: foremost among these are the orchestras of La Scala of Milan, and of the May Music Festival of Florence. Among chamber orchestras holding regular local concerts, particularly outstanding arc the Alessandro Scarlatti group in Naples, the orchestras of the Pomeriggi del Nuovo (“Afternoons of New Music”) and the Angelicum in Milan, and that of the Collegium Musicum in Turin. Lastly, following the famous example set by the Virtuosi di Roma, well-known in America as a result of many tours there, are numerous small string orchestras which have sprung into being and are dedicated to spreading the eighteenth-century instrumental repertoire (Vivaldi, Corelli, Scarlatti, Stradella, Tartini, Locatelli, Geminiani, etc.).
Indeed in a certain sense, the musical life of Italy seems to be flourishing more in the concert hall than in the opera house. Where opera is concerned, a trace of ennui may be detected, which is offset, in some of the larger cities, by the first-rate productions of especially resourceful and lively opera houses. To be sure, no concert or opera association is able to make ends meet without outside financial assistance. La Scala, which boasts a full house at every performance, covers just half its management expenses with box-office receipts: no other opera house does so well. The difference is made up by State subsidies drawn from funds which the Government collects on entertainment taxes. The amount of these subsidies and their distribution are presently the subject of heated discussion and of a new draft law in Parliament. A number of operas, both new and old, were produced with great success this past summer at the music festival in the old Umbrian (own of Spoleto which was organized by the Italo-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti.
The progress of musical culture in Italy is confirmed by the emergence of solo instrumentalists and chamber groups which are building world-wide reputations. Needless to say, Italian vocal achievement is still solidly in the field of opera; the world takes a lively interest in the rivalry between the sopranos Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, it acclaims tenors such as Mario Del Monaco and Antonio Di Stefano; but now, for the first time since Paganini and Busoni, Italy can also boast of frontranking places in other branches, with the pianists Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Pietro Scarpini, the violinist Gioconda De Vito, and such chamber ensembles as the Trio di Trieste, the Nuovo Quartetto Italiano, and the Quintet to Chigiano. To these names should also be added that of Guido Cantelli, whose premature death in an air crash deprived him of a brilliant career as heir to Toscanini as the world’s first orchestra conductor.
Speaking broadly, the taste of the musical public in Italy has caught up with the forerunners of modern music. The great nineteenth-century symphonists, with Beethoven ranking first, are the most popular, and in opera the favor which Wagnerian music drama is now receiving from a nonspecialized public is astounding, but Richard Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, De Falla, and the early Stravinsky are entirely within the understanding of the concert-going public. Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Le Sucre du printemps are warmly applauded; Mahler and Bruckner, too, who until a few years ago were ignored in Italy, are beginning to find their way into symphony programs. And appreciation of modern music is being helped by the everincreasing sale of phonograph records as the Italian economic situation improves.
Yet, with the mass audience there is still definite resistance to the advanced music of the last three decades. A work such as Berg’s Wozzeck, performed till now only in Rome, Naples, and Milan, has still not entered the standard opera repertoire. All of modern music traceable to twelve-tone technique is vaguely considered an incomprehensible bugbear. The Italian public particularly mistrusts its own more .advanced composers; Malipiero, IVtrassi, Dallapiccola and Luigi Nono are played and appreciated far less at home than abroad. Public incomprehension of foreign masters, however, is tempered with respect, and the most arduous compositions of Schoenberg, the later Stravinsky, Berg, Bartók, Hindemith, and even Webern are listened to with a sincere desire to understand. Apart from the regular symphony seasons (notably the radio seasons of the Third Program in Rome and Turin, which are open to the public), knowledge of these stratospheric zones of modern music is nourished by the music festivals held in Florence in May and in Venice and Perugia in the autumn. The Venetian event is devoted exclusively to contemporary music, and there works are performed which are so highly experimental that the festival may at times appear to be cut off in a curiously “arty” at mosphere. But in the long run the good effect of such courageous spadework is felt, however much one notices the gulf separating the taste of the average music lover from that of the musical intelligentsia, which in Italy is receptive to the most reckless adventures.
Not to be overlooked, in assessing the progress of Italian musical taste, is the increasing appeal of pre-nineteenth-century music: with the Italian public, Bach is now as popular as Beethoven. The Vivaldi revival rests on real enthusiasm, with The Four Seasons ranking among the best soiling records in the country, and, slowly, even the music of Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, and the sixteenth-century composers is gradually being rescued from oblivion.
Unfortunately, the situation of choral music in Italy is not as promising as that of symphonic and instrumental music. There is insufficient rudimentary technical knowledge. Music is not ordinarily taught in Italian schools. Although the world may think of Italy as the country of singing par excellence, the State does not consider it its duty to teach musical fundamentals to our children. In the secondary schools the history of literature and art is taught, but not music history. The Italian school system ignores Palestrina and Monteverdi, Rossini and Verdi. Thus elementary musical education is limited largely to private instruction.
Musical taste is affected, of course, by criticism, but this, in its journalistic forms, is often too hurried and superficial. The specialized periodicals have very few readers: the old and dignified Rivista Musicale Italiana has all but disappeared, and the Rassegna Musicale, which for thirty years has been engaged in intelligent work aimed at renovating the musical life and culture of Italy, has fallen on hard times. For some years now, reading interests have come to include books on music, but the publication of such books is scanty and they do not, fill the needs of an uninstructed public. Italian musical scholars do not have a knack for popular writing and, as is the case with public performances, a separation exists between specialists and the average cultural level of the nation.
The teaching of music as a career takes place in conservatories and in music lycées devoted exclusively to the training of future professional musicians, and there instruction is frequently on a high level, notably in the field of instrumental and vocal performance. But the teaching of harmony and music history is sometimes poor because of antiquated programs, while composition classes often suffer from a shortage of major musicians in teaching positions: a regulation of questionable wisdom bars conservatory presidents from holding professorial titles, with the result that a number of leading Italian composers are heads of conservatories but do not teach composition. An exception is the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia, in Rome, where advanced composition is taught by Goffredo Petrassi, Virgilio Mortari, and Ildebrando Pizzetti, whose opera of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral was recently done in New York. And while he was still alive, Alfredo Casella had a sizable following in the summer courses he taught in Siena at the Accademia Chigiana, which holds a brief festival each autumn, the Settimana Musicale Senese, devoted to seventeenthand eighteenth-century music. It was this festival in Siena, incidentally, which sparked the Vivaldi and Monteverdi revivals.
On the whole, the Italian musical scene is characterized by bright lights as well as by deep shadows. There has been some decline in what were at one time the indisputable fields of Italian musical success and a headlong rush into sectors which were once rather neglected. The efforts to update culture and taste have been stimulated by an avant-garde which is certainly spurring the general public on to an overly swift pace; still, the good will with which the public is responding to this impatient and at times rash urging is undeniable. Neither can it be denied that the music situation in Italy today, in spite of serious shortcomings due to ignorance of the elements of music among the general public, has life and action in it and is anything but stagnant.
Translated by Ben Johnson