A folkdance of southern Italy also used in art music. It derives its name from Taranto (the ancient Tarantum) in Apulia. It is now a kind of mimed courtship dance, usually performed by one couple surrounded by a circle of others, accompanied by castanets and tambourines held by the dancers; occasionally the onlookers sing during the dance, usually a regularly phrased tune in 3/8 or 6/8 that alternates between major and minor mode and gradually increases in speed. Ex.1 shows a traditional Italian tarantella.
The tarantula (Lycosa tarentula) also derived its name from the town of Taranto, a coincidence that may have given rise to the popular but repeatedly discredited legend that the dance (sometimes called ‘tarantula’ in literary references) was a cure for the mildly toxic bite of the spider. A disease known as tarantism, prevalent in southern Italy from the 15th century to the 17th, seems to have been more a form of hysteria than a consequence of the bite. Athanasius Kircher included eight songs used to cure tarantism in the early 17th century in his Magnes (1641; iii, chap.8), remarking that these tarantellas were ordinarily ‘rustic extemporizations’. All but one are in simple duple metre, unlike the traditional tarantella, and all have regular phrases made up of eight beats with a caesura after the fourth and a point of repose on the seventh or eighth. Melodic figures characteristic of the tarantella include repeated notes, the alternation of a note with its upper or lower auxiliary, scalic motion, leaps and arpeggios. Like some early 17th-century correntes which are notated in simple duple metre, Kircher’s tarantellas might have been altered in performance to accommodate the dance’s characteristic patterns; in fact, the music of Kircher’s compound duple tarantella (ex.2) is similar to the typical early 17th-century corrente. Seven 18th-century tarantellas, both Spanish and Italian, are reprinted by Schneider, all in compound metres and all structurally similar to Kircher’s examples (for a further 18th-century example, said to have been used to cure a case of tarantism in Torre Annunziata near Naples, see ‘Tarantella’ in Grove5).
The tarantella was revived as a concert piece in the 19th and 20th centuries, perhaps because of the enthusiasm for its frenzied energy evinced by such writers as Goethe and Rilke. Cairon, writing in 1820, spoke of the violent and untutored movements of those dancing the tarantella; nonetheless, he discredited the tarantula connection as a ‘ridiculous idea’. Tarantellas for piano, normally in 6/8, are marked ‘Presto’, ‘Prestissimo’ or ‘Vivace’, and are often virtuoso showpieces. The salient features of the folkdance music are reflected in the piano tarantella: phrase structure tends to be regular, and the melodic devices are like those of the dance, although the dance’s diatonic scales are frequently replaced by virtuoso chromatic scales. Sectionality is emphasized by modulation and by the use of contrasting tempos. Good examples of the concert tarantella are those by Chopin (op.43) and Liszt (Venezia e Napoli, 1859, no.3); less virtuoso are those by L.M. Gottschalk (op.67), Stephen Heller (op.85), Anton Rubinstein (op.82), Rachmaninoff (op.17) and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (op.156).
A tarantella-like movement may also appear as the final movement of a sonata, symphony or suite. Weber used the driving rhythm of the tarantella in his Piano Sonata op.70; Richard Strauss introduced Italian themes, including a tarantella, in Aus Italien op.16. Mendelssohn headed the finale of his Italian Symphony op.90 ‘Saltarello’, but Tovey quoted Rockstro as saying that the legato running theme so prominent in the development is a tarantella; the saltarello and tarantella rhythms of the finale are differentiated by their melodic styles and qualities of movement (ex.3). The concert tarantella has also been parodied: the finest is Rossini’s Tarantelle pur sang (avec traversée de la procession), where the furious tarantella is twice interrupted by a religious procession featuring bells and a harmonium. William Albright’s Gothic Suite (1973) for organ, strings and percussion closes with a ‘Tarantella demente’ marked ‘Presto furioso’.
MCL
MGG1 (Marius Schneider, A. Würz)
A. Kircher: Magnes, sive De arte magnetica (Rome, 1641, 2/1643)
S. Storace: ‘A Genuine Letter from an Italian Gentleman, Concerning the Bite of the Tarantula’, Gentleman’s Magazine, xxiii (1753), 433–5 [incl. music ex.]
A. Cairon: Compendio de las principales reglas del baile (Madrid, 1820)
Marius Schneider: La danza de espadas y la tarantela (Barcelona, 1948)
A.G. Bragaglia: Danze popolari italiane (Rome, 1950)
B. Galanti: Dances of Italy (New York, 1950)
ERICH SCHWANDT