Francesco Paolo Frontini: Piano Music

A tribute to Sicily

This recording is a tribute to my homeland, which has produced many artists in literature, painting and music, often subsequently forgotten. Frontini is one of them: an intuitive composer whose directness invites an immediate response. His visceral, almost childlike music can touch the innermost parts of the soul. A musician should not judge it superficially, but approach it as intimate music seeking to tell its story simply.

Playing these beautiful melodies felt like receiving an entire musical inheritance: the heritage of a Sicily unfamiliar to many listeners, with its prosperous salons and an underlying folklore that animates a hardworking, melancholy people. This recording includes piano pieces that had not previously been recorded. The fourteen romances I selected come from Album de Morceaux Favoris, published between 1906 and 1908, which includes such contemporary favourites as Gondola bruna, Serenata araba and Chanson sicilienne.

Each romance suggested an operatic character, a theatrical scene, a photograph or a musical text. I therefore associated a small anecdote with each piece, hoping to guide the listener towards the lost, evocative world I imagined: Sicily at the end of the nineteenth century. These anecdotes contain historical information, places and aspects of Francesco Paolo’s life connected with his family and closest friends. I gathered that information through my friendship with Pietro Rizzo, Frontini’s grandnephew.

Where precise, reliable information could not be obtained, we used imagination while remaining faithful to the history and customs of the period. The following scenes should therefore be read as an imaginative listening guide, rather than as a fully documented account of the composer’s life. I dedicate this project to my father, the teacher Giovanni Battista Senfett, who worked with me on the booklet and wrote the anecdotes.

Frontini and his native land

Born in Catania in 1860, Francesco Paolo Frontini remained devoted to Sicily throughout his life. That attachment is reflected in a style I would describe as simple, crystalline and deeply sentimental, close to Sicilian folklore and free of unnecessary musical complexity. Frontini did not abandon his aesthetic outlook in response to the post-Romantic and Impressionist developments of his time, which he called “confusionism” in a 1911 interview.

An opera composer attached to the Italian bel canto tradition, he also collected and adapted songs from Sicily’s popular heritage. His collection of fifty songs, Eco della Sicilia, helped preserve such pieces as Sciuri sciuri and Mi votu e mi rivotu. Frontini deserves consideration alongside his contemporaries. Although he did not live in luxury, operas such as Malia brought him success, and distinguished colleagues, including Massenet and Verdi, acknowledged his gifts. His music appeared through important publishers across Europe.

Gondola bruna

Dedicated to Baroness Augusta von Kabath, a composer fashionable in the early twentieth century, the piece evokes Venice. Perhaps the lagoon city held a particular enchantment for a Sicilian listener, a memory that would not fade. Frontini and his young wife Matilde Moroni had often stayed there. The melancholy barcarolle rhythm seems to imitate a gondolier’s rowing.

Pagina d’album

The dedication is to Frontini’s close friend and pupil Giuseppe Cesare Balbo, a composer and music critic who wrote extensively about his teacher. I like to imagine them as in a photograph, sitting at a table in the Swiss pastry shop Caviezel on Via Etnea. The friends converse over a traditional ricotta cannolo, awaiting a good cup of coffee.

Serenata araba

Dedicated to Jules Massenet, the celebrated French composer, who wrote admiringly of the beauty of Frontini’s compositions and of a musical language he loved, the piece evokes the enduring relationship between Arab culture and Sicily: an underground current in the island’s soul.

To imagine only a Bedouin tent would limit the possibilities of this Arabian Serenade. Close your eyes and travel into the past to appreciate its expressive, nostalgic melody. We disappear into the rooms of the Zisa, the “beautiful” and “wonderful” Norman royal residence in Palermo, built in a distinctly Arab style. Palermo was where Francesco Paolo studied composition before moving to Naples.

Menuet

Dedicated to his niece Italia, the piece invites us to imagine the little girl playing in the sitting room beneath her uncle’s affectionate gaze. Francesco Paolo sits at the piano and the notes suddenly flow: a child’s game becomes a dance.

Souvenir de Chopin

A small black-and-white postcard has just arrived from Warsaw!

Retour au village

Also existing in a version for small orchestra, this piece is dedicated to Agatina Carnevale. The “village” is the native place to which one returns for peace of mind. Walking familiar streets and visiting friendly places, the artist finds serenity. The music draws inspiration from an old popular song that Francesco Paolo might have quietly sung as a child.

Chitarrata siciliana

Contemporary critics admired the melody’s inspiration and the accompaniment’s lightness, qualities particularly suited to its imitation of the guitar. This elegant, refined piece suggests a lover singing in the street, waiting for a sign of approval from the woman he loves. As was customary at the time, she draws back the curtains and reveals her profile at the window.

Capricieuse

Could this be a memory of a waltz at a New Year’s Eve party? The guests have gone home, but two lovers remain, dancing alone in the noble palace of the Princes of Biscari in Catania. In its great hall, they await the sun rising from the sea.

Barcarolle

A sailor’s melancholy song drifts through the harbour mist. Two lovers walk happily along the pier.

Chanson sicilienne

Dedicated to Frontini’s daughter Angioletta, a pianist and poet who cared for her six brothers after their mother’s death, this piece also gives the recording its title. It expresses Francesco Paolo’s gratitude to the daughter whose research and cataloguing preserved the historical sources that have reached us. The music gathers characteristics of the Sicilian spirit: nostalgia transforms into a joyful nursery rhyme.

Confidence amoureuse

The dedication is to Frontini’s father Martino, also a musician in Catania, with whom he began his studies. At a time when silence can stand between parents and children, it is comforting to imagine Francesco Paolo and Martino speaking affectionately and opening their hearts to one another. Music, rather than words, draws them together and deepens their intimacy.

Désir d’amour

This seems a happy continuation of Chitarrata siciliana. Love has been returned, desire has quietened and the music acquires a lighter character. The lovers whisper. Later, the pages of a diary record that their bodies no longer tremble: they are entirely exposed in their love.

Ultimo canto

Dedicated to Frontini’s beloved daughter Nellina, who died of typhus at the age of eight, the piece invites a tender, moving image: in the final moments of the child’s life, her father sits at the piano and plays for her. One last song accompanies her, easing her departure—a final embrace made of notes.

Berceuse

The memory of Nellina also inspires this piece. In a comforting lullaby, the musician recalls earlier days and his daughter’s tenderness. The father rocks his little girl, who remains alive in his memory.

Album introduction and accompanying text credited in the original booklet to Giuseppe Senfett; the introduction acknowledges Giovanni Battista Senfett’s authorship of the anecdotes. English revised for the complete online edition.