Viaggio in Italia: Two Centuries of Italian Piano Miniatures

Composer(s)

(b Padua, 24 Feb 1842; d Milan, 10 June 1918). Italian librettist, composer, poet and critic. He is best remembered for his one completed opera, Mefistofele, and for his collaborations as librettist with Verdi.

Francesco Pennisi
(b Acireale, 11 Feb 1934). Italian composer. He was born into a cultured Sicilian family, whose independent resources permitted him to develop his singular gifts in both the visual arts and music without the constraints imposed by a search for early recognition. In 1953 he moved to Rome, to study within the university faculty of arts (1954–5), and to pursue private composition lessons with Robert W. Mann (1954–9). Thereafter he taught himself, maintaining an oblique but canny view over the wilder reaches of the avant garde. In 1960 he became one of the founder-members (along with Evangelisti, Clementi and others) of the Roman new music association Nuova Consonanza. Another major source of new discoveries was the annual Palermo International New Music Week, founded in 1960, the third edition of which included the first public performance of his music (L'anima e i prestigi of 1962).

Franco Alfano
(b Posillipo, Naples, 8 March 1875; d San Remo, 27 Oct 1954). Italian composer. After studying the piano privately with Alessandro Longo, and harmony and composition with Camillo de Nardis and Serrao at the Conservatorio di S Pietro a Majella, Naples, he moved in 1895 to Leipzig, where he completed his composition studies with Jadassohn. In 1896 he went to Berlin and launched himself as a pianist, though he did not continue this activity systematically for long: in later life he appeared in public only as a song accompanist and chamber music player, mainly in his own works. From 1899 until about 1905 he was based in Paris, but travelled as far afield as Russia. He then settled in Milan, moving in 1914 to San Remo, which remained at least his summer home for the rest of his life. From 1916 he taught composition at the Liceo Musicale, Bologna, which he directed from 1918. While there (1920), he helped to found the society Musica Nova, which in some ways paralleled Casella’s more important Società Italiana di Musica Moderna. Alfano was appointed director of the Liceo Musicale (later Conservatory) of Turin in 1923, remaining there until 1939. During 1940–42 he was superintendent of the Teatro Massimo, Palermo, subsequently becoming for a few months professor of operatic studies at the Conservatorio di S Cecilia, Rome. From 1947 to 1950 he served as acting director of the Liceo Musicale, Pesaro.

Franco Evangelisti
(b Rome, 26 Jan 1926; d Rome, 28 Jan 1980). Italian composer and theorist. In 1948 he abandoned his engineering studies for music, taking lessons in composition with Daniele Paris and the piano with Erich Arndt. His move to Freiburg in 1952 led him to complete his cultural and musical education in a German context at the city’s university under Genzmer, to attend the Darmstadt summer courses until 1962, to work in the WDR studio in Cologne (1956–7) and, above all, to become a point of contact between new German music and musical life in Rome. On his return to Italy, he became a key figure in the Rome-based group Nuova Consonanza, whose stated aim at its inception in 1960 was to ‘revive’ contemporary music. He also contributed to the organization of the Settimane Internazionali di Nuova Musica in Palermo (1960–68), founded the Gruppo d’Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza in 1964 and helped to set up both Studio 7 for electronic music in Rome (1968–73) and, in 1970, a study group on ‘sound phenomenon’, co-ordinated by the engineer Lorenzo Viesi. He taught an experimental course in electronic music first at the Accademia di S Cecilia (1969) and then, on a permanent basis, at the Rome Conservatory (from 1974), where, at the time of his death, in 1980, he was a lecturer in composition.

Giacinto Scelsi (b La Spezia, 8 Jan 1905; d Rome, 9 Aug 1988). Italian composer. Scelsi's extraordinary life encompassed many aspects of the intellectual, spiritual, social and musical life of the 20th century. He was born into southern Italian aristocracy, inheriting the title Count D'Alaya Valva, and as a young man travelled extensively, moving within Europe's most elevated social circles. His English wife, Dorothy (whose nickname ‘Ty’ figures in the titles of two of Scelsi's works) was a distant relative of the British royal family; their wedding reception was held at Buckingham Palace. His music attracted a number of prestigious performances, particularly in Paris where Pierre Monteux conducted the première of Rotative in 1930. During World War II he lived in Switzerland; after the war his wife returned to England, never to contact him again. He spent the latter part of his life in Rome, where his apartment overlooked the Forum.

Much of the detail of Scelsi's life is shrouded in mystery, something he himself did much to encourage. It seems, however, that after some initial successes as a composer, he suffered a devastating mental breakdown between the composition of La nascita del verbo (1947–8) and the Suite no.8 ‘Bot-ba’ (1952). Scelsi's early compositional career had been a progression through some of the principal aesthetic tendencies of 20th-century music – futurism, neo-classicism, dodecaphony, surrealism – preoccupations fed variously by periods of private study with Respighi and pupils of Skryabin and Schoenberg, and by his friendships with Henri Michaux, Pierre Jean Jouve, Paul Eluard and Salvador Dalí. The later works reveal a new preoccupation with an obsessive reiteration of individual sounds, a legacy of the lengthy period of rehabilitation from his illness. Scelsi described how he would spend days repeatedly playing single notes on the piano, developing a new, intensely focussed mode of listening. The multi-movement form of many subsequent pieces can also be heard as an extension of this reiterative exploration – sequences of movements are intended not to provide contrast but to offer a repeated re-examination of the same sound object.

Although Scelsi's music continued to attract occasional performances in the 1950s and 60s, his career was eclipsed by the emerging Italian composers of the post-war period, and his compositional concerns, as far as they were known, were regarded as of marginal interest. It was not until the 1970s that the significance of his work began to be recognized by a new generation. Younger composers, including the American Alvin Curran, the Prix de Rome guests Grisey and Murail, and the Romanian exile Radulescu, discovered in Scelsi's work aspects of the musical world which interested them, struck particularly by the concentration on gradual timbral transformations.

At the beginning of the 1960s many avant-garde composers had begun to explore the inner life of sounds, writing music which focussed on small fluctuations within sustained sonic bands. What distinguished Scelsi's work from Ligeti or Cerha's scores of the period was the profound subjectivity of Scelsi's engagement with his material, an engagement in which abstraction seemed to play no part. In his most wholly characteristic works pitch, timbre, register and dynamics are heard as the inherent expressive potentialities of each sound, rather than as separate parameters to be controlled more or less independently. The Quattro pezzi (su una nota sola) (1959), for example, use microtonal pitch inflection, timbral transformation and rhythmic reiterations to animate the ‘note’ on which each movement is based, stretching its identity far beyond that of a mere frequency.

Subsequent works explore this plasticity of sound yet further, drawing a handful of musical strands out of an initial tone and allowing them to diverge. Usually such divergence covers an interval of no more than a third, but it makes possible a beguilingly unpredictable harmonic architecture in works of the mid-1960s such as Ohoi (1966) and the Fourth String Quartet (1964), arguably Scelsi's finest music. Inevitably, given his microscopic examination of instrumental sound, intervals derived from the harmonic series predominate. His intuitively composed work can therefore be heard to anticipate later, more systematic developments: not only the ‘spectral’ music of the Itinéraire group but also the exploration of the pitch-timbre continuum in computer music.

As word about this extraordinary, neglected music spread, performances and then recordings began to multiply. The critic Harry Halbreich was a persuasive advocate; promoters such as Adrian Jack at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Wolfgang Becker at WDR and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler at Hessische Rundfunk organized portrait concerts of Scelsi's work. The Arditti Quartet took up the string quartets, Marianne Schroeder and Yvar Mikhashoff the piano music, and conductors such as Jürg Wyttenbach the orchestral works. This period of rediscovery culminated in the mid-1980s with belated first performances of many of Scelsi's largest scores, and triumphantly acclaimed presentations of Scelsi's work during the 1986 Holland Festival and the 1987 ISCM World Music Days in Cologne.

The spiritual world of Scelsi's mature works is rooted in an exotic mix of pantheism and theosophy, derived from Gurdjieff, Blavatsky and Sri Aurobindo, but also stimulated by Scelsi's own visits to India and Nepal. Scelsi saw his work as straddling the aesthetic worlds of East and West, using the instrumental resources of the West in music whose meditative focus on individual tones has obvious links to both the monastic traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and the ison principle of Byzantine Orthodox worship. Elsewhere, particularly in the works of the late 1950s, there are elements of arabesque reminiscent of the folk music of the eastern Mediterranean. Scelsi claimed that ‘Rome is the boundary between East and West. South of Rome the East begins, and north of Rome the West begins. This borderline runs exactly over the Forum Romanum. It runs right here, through my drawing-room’. His titles offer further evidence: Aiôn (1961) is subtitled ‘Four Episodes in a day of Brahma’, Anahit (1965) is ‘A Lyric Poem dedicated to Venus’, Pwyll (1954) is a Welsh druidic term, while the title of Konx-om-pax (1969) brings together the ancient Assyrian, Sanskrit and Latin words for ‘peace’.

Scelsi's approach to composition was itself hybrid: for him music was not a communicative medium but something immanent, revealed through the creative process. His reluctance to describe his working methods as ‘composing’ stemmed from the belief that music passed through him; it was not something ‘put together’ by him. Indeed the working method of his mature years was unusual, depending primarily on the selective transcription of improvisations made in a quasi-meditative state. He would perform these improvisations generally at the keyboard, either the piano or, in later years, the Ondiola, a three-octave electronic instrument with a rotary attachment for producing microtonal inflections. Scelsi would also invite performing musicians who showed a particular affinity for his work to improvise for him, painstakingly refining their instrumental resources for the sound-world he wanted, so that works such as the Canti del capricorno (1962–72) or the cello Trilogy (1956–65) became intimately associated with their first interpreters, the singer Michiko Hirayama and the cellist Frances-Marie Uitti.

Each improvisation was recorded (the process of cataloguing the tapes was begun after Scelsi's death) and the most successful improvisations were then transcribed and realized as instrumental scores. Exceptionally, some improvisations were used more than once: the Fifth String Quartet (1984) and the amplified piano work Aitsi (1974) are both transcriptions of the same tape. The actual writing of the scores was undertaken by an assistant, working under Scelsi's direction. After Scelsi's death his most frequent collaborator, Vieri Tosatti, revealed the extent of his involvement in the making of Scelsi's scores, claiming that he had worked with Scelsi since 1947 and had written out all his major works since then. The discovery that Scelsi was not the sole author of his scores has troubled some critics who, associating it with his lack of a conventional compositional apprenticeship, have accused him of dilettantism, even of a sort of artistic fraud. Scelsi's collaborative approach was, however, consistent with his compositional philosophy, as was his reluctance to make public appearances at performances of his work, and his refusal to be photographed. By the time of his death his music had achieved an eminence which its composer resolutely rejected for himself.

Giacomo Puccini (b Lucca, 22 Dec 1858; d Brussels, 29 Nov 1924). Italian composer, son of (4) Michele Puccini. He was the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi.

The renowned Italian pianist, teacher, and composer, Gino (actually: Luigino) Gorini, studied with Lino Tagliapietra (piano diploma, 1931) and Giacomo Agostini (composition diploma, 1933) at the Venice Conservatory. He also had lessons in composition with Gian-Francesco Malipiero and in piano with Vladimir Horowitz. In 1938 he won the competition in Vienna.

Gioacchino Rossini: (b Pesaro, 29 Feb 1792; d Passy, 13 Nov 1868). Italian composer. No composer in the first half of the 19th century enjoyed the measure of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim or artistic influence that belonged to Rossini. His contemporaries recognized him as the greatest Italian composer of his time. His achievements cast into oblivion the operatic world of Cimarosa and Paisiello, creating new standards against which other composers were to be judged. That both Bellini and Donizetti carved out personal styles is undeniable; but they worked under Rossini’s shadow, and their artistic personalities emerged in confrontation with his operas. Not until the advent of Verdi was Rossini replaced at the centre of Italian operatic life.

Giuseppe D'Amico (born June 10, 1983) is an Italian double bassist and composer.

Giuseppe Verdi: (b Roncole, nr Busseto, 9/10 Oct 1813; d Milan, 27 Jan 1901). Italian composer. By common consent he is recognized as the greatest Italian musical dramatist.

Luigi Cherubini: (b Florence, 8/14 Sept 1760; d Paris, 15 March 1842). Italian, composer, conductor, teacher, administrator, theorist, and music publisher, active in France. He took French citizenship, probably in 1794, and was a dominant figure in Parisian musical life for half a century. He was a successful opera composer during the Revolutionary period, and had comparable success with religious music from the beginning of the Restoration. He was made director of the Paris Conservatoire and consolidated its pre-eminent position in music education in Europe.

Silvio Mix [Micks]
(b Trieste, 31 Dec 1900; d Gallarate, Varese, 1 Feb 1927). Italian composer. Though born in a city under Habsburg rule and into a family of Hungarian origin, he was Italian in culture and sentiment. In Florence at the outbreak of World War I, it was there, at the end of the war, that he first appeared in public as a musician. He started to frequent futurist circles, performing piano improvisations at exhibitions by a number of Futurist painters. He was subsequently involved in the Italian tour (1924) of Rodolfo De Angelis's Nuovo Teatro Futurista. In the same year he took part in the First National Futurist Conference in Milan. He was later in Rome and, at the beginning of 1926, in Paris. Poor health obliged him to hurry back to Italy, but he died on the return journey.