Goffredo Petrassi: Canti della Campagna Romana, and Other Vocal and Piano Works

Description

It’s 1927 when Petrassi, at the age of 23, writes “Canti della campagna romana” (Songs of the Roman countryside) for voice and piano. The attention given to this repertoire pays homage to the memory of his mother and her way of singing, yet we cannot consider it only a private matter: the revival of the heritage of folk singing is A rich vein that permeates through European music of the early 20th century. Not driven by nationalism, but out of the desire to find in those unwritten, orally transmitted music pieces, passed down from generation to generation, unchanged for centuries, some inspiration, freedom, and original solutions. The interpretation by Rosaria Angotti and Tiziana Cosentino conveys, within the range of a vocally varied expression – marked and folksy, light and evocative, serious and amused, as prescribed by the many intentions required by the author – the liveliness of an episode that is anything but marginal and unique in Petrassi’s catalog, as the centenary of a title that this record reproduces in its originality and significance approaches.
Sandro Cappelletto © 2024

It may be difficult to imagine Goffredo Petrassi as an inward-looking composer, bound to the popular tradition. He, who made his debut with European audiences in Amsterdam with the sparkling Partita for orchestra (1932) conducted by Alfredo Casella; he, who was an eminent son of twentieth-century neoclassicism, raised in formal rigor (almost a “Hindemitism,” according to the eminent Italian musicologist Fedele D’Amico) and in the aspiration to great architectures, later realized in the many Concertos for orchestra or in the imposing symphonic-vocal works-from Salmo IX (1934) to Coro di morti (1941) to Noche oscura (1950) and beyond. And yet, Rosaria Angotti and Tiziana Cosentino’s operation invites us to peek right inside that neglected treasure chest of intimate, dreamy, melancholic preciousness that Petrassi, with his gaze turned to Zagarolo, the village outside Rome where he was born, chiseled throughout his life without any shyness.
In 1927 he had only two years been studying composition, and had not yet entered the Rome Conservatory to which he aspired on par with a career in music. He was, however, only a clerk in a Roman sheet music store, while at the same time cultivating a passion for the arts and literature through intense sensitivity but without any real schooling. Some pieces for voice and piano, composed in that year, are a reflection of this situation. Among them, Per organo di Barberia (For roll or Barbary organ) stands out, a piece that Petrassi wrote on a text taken from the collection Piccolo libro inutile (Worthless little book, 1906) by the ill-fated crepuscular poet Sergio Corazzini (1886-1907): «Elemosina triste / di vecchie arie sperdute, / vanità di un’offerta / che nessuno raccoglie!» («Sad charity / of old lost airs, / vanity of an offering / that no one collects!») say the first verses. In that very year, however, a curious offer was instead made to the composer by Giorgio Nataletti (1907-1972), an eclectic musician, indefatigable researcher among the fathers of Italian ethnomusicology. Petrassi was to follow him into the Roman countryside to gather the best fruits of folk singing. It was, moreover, the era of the populist nationalism of the Fascist regime (constantly rejected by Petrassi), intellectually reworked in the so-called Strapaese, that literary current led by Mino Maccari and Curzio Malaparte who, opposing all sorts of xenophilia and with a patriotic spirit, went in search of the most genuine country tradition. «We used to go with Nataletti on Sundays,» Petrassi recounts, «and by dint of wine, which was the best solvent for peasants, we made them sing some songs, the ones we later collected» (from L. Lombardi, Conversazioni con Petrassi, NeoClassica, Rome 2021, p. 42). The two transcribed and selected 24 of them to harmonize in an early 20th-century way and immediately send them to the publisher Ricordi for publication. Thus was born the Canti della campagna romana (Songs of the Roman countryside, pub. 1930), for the first time recorded in its entirety in this album. In truth, the composer confesses, «to a great extent I collected those songs from my mother who knew several of them and therefore with a very authentic version and thus had the possibility of having them repeated to me countless times, until I arrived at a “probable authentic version”» (ibid.). The intent was to be able to regain the genuineness of expression that, according to the culture of the time (still spoiled by nineteenth-century literature) could only be found in popular music. In fact, however, these songs openly and spontaneously communicate those universal feelings and affections that often only the unmediated expression of a straightforward and sonorous dialect – such as that spoken in the lands between Tivoli and Palestrina, near Rome – can effectively convey. Love, through serenade (e.g., Fiore d’ajetto, Quanno spunta lu sole) or lament (Quanno so mortu, Peno e ripeno), hope (Jò pe sta valle), the toil of manual labor (Oi su! Oi su!, E tu che sei poeta), melancholy (M’affaccio alla finestra) and amusement (Fior de ricotta), but above all the close intimacy of everyday relationships that pervades the entire collection, are the focal points toward which these songs point. The highest emblem of these expressions – because they are intimate and close from a sentimental as well as a bodily perspective – can be considered the four lullabies that open the collection (Ninna-nanna, Sonno, sonno, Fatte la ninna, Fatte la ninna nanna).
To this genre, to this expressive formula so familiar and delicate, Petrassi seemed very attached. He returned to it for the first time in 1929 with E dì nanna nanna, on a text by an anonymous 12th-century poet, the second piece in a collection of Tre arie antiche (Three ancient airs, with lyrics by Guido Cavalcanti and an anonymous 13th-century composer) that is being published in the very days when this album is being prepared. Two other occasions came in 1934: first when Petrassi dedicated the Vocalizzo per addormentare una bambina (Vocalise to put a child to sleep) to Fulvia, daughter of his friend Alfredo Casella, born seven years earlier; and later when he contributed the harmonization of O sonni sonni (O sleeps sleeps) to a collection of thirty popular Italian lullabies that the Sindacato fascista dei musicisti (Fascist Musicians’ Union) intended to donate to Umberto II of Savoy for the birth of his daughter Maria Pia – and once again we glimpse Nataletti’s hand: O sonni sonni is a lullaby from the repertoire of the village of Gallicano nel Lazio, not far from the italian capital city.
However it is to Casella that one must look if one is to understand Petrassi’s particular evolution in this inner world. The very few piano pieces written by our composer – almost all of them incisive miniatures – owe their sound and raison d’être to the neoclassical style and to Casella’s more burlesque side. They seem almost like little reflections, short mottos launched by Petrassi in a domain, that of solo piano, which he frequented only on ephemeral occasions, such as that – this is the case here – of the expression of a fleeting and very personal feeling. And so, Siciliana e marcia (1930), the only piece for piano four hands in Petrassi’s corpus, or that dissonant waltz that is Piccola invenzione (1941), or finally Petite pièce (1950, dedicated to his pupil Marcello Panni), indebted, like Siciliana e marcia, to Casella’s 11 pezzi infantili (1920), are not so much intended for the concert hall as for the drawing room of a petit-bourgeois home.
Petrassi, however, also entered the aristocratic salons. His entry occurred in the mid-1930s, again thanks to Casella but also thanks to his acquaintance with those slightly older composers (Mario Labroca or Vittorio Rieti) who saw, in him, a great hope for Italian music. Goffredo, who was no longer a clerk but an employee at the Ministry for Popular Culture, thus had the opportunity to frequent, among many others, the milieu of Countess Mimì Pecci-Blunt, organizer of the Concerti di Primavera at her sumptuous palace in front of the Campidoglio, a series of events that would bring to provincial Rome such musicians as Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud and Paul Hindemith. To carry out this and other avant-garde initiatives – such as the Galleria della Cometa, which promoted young but already very valid painters like Corrado Cagli, Mirko, Afro or Renato Guttuso – the wealthy countess enlisted the help of Libero De Libero (1903-1981), a refined poet and art critic from the Agro Pontino. Having quickly understood the latter’s spirit (as much rural as metropolitan), Petrassi set to music brightly and purely that short, antique-looking and heartbreaking poem by the Monteverdi title Lasciatemi morire (Lamento d’Arianna) (Let Me Die (Lament of Ariadne), 1936). The outcome was nothing less than a piece that, perhaps by contrast or by paradox, managed to bring him back – and to bring us back with him through a most elevated metaphor – to the essence of those ancient songs of lost love collected in the Roman countryside.
Alessandro Maras © 2024