Country in Europe.
NINO PIRROTTA/PIERLUIGI PETROBELLI (I, 1–4), ANTONIO ROSTAGNO (I, 5, 6(v)), GIORGIO PESTELLI (I, 6(i–iv)), JOHN C.G. WATERHOUSE/RAFFAELE POZZI (I, 7), TULLIA MAGRINI (II)
The length and mountainous nature of the Italian peninsula, and its historical vicissitudes, have given its regional segments significantly different ethnic and linguistic profiles. Similar differences existed in the local ‘dialects’ of Western plainchant that developed during the early Middle Ages and continued in use until the imposition of Gregorian chant throughout most of Italy by the 11th century. In some areas of the peninsula, the Greek liturgies were followed, notably in the south where the Byzantine rite was celebrated in the old Basilian monasteries; Eastern practices are also known to have existed during the early medieval period in the Greek monasteries in Rome and in cities, such as Ravenna, that were once governed by Byzantium.
Traditionally, the origins of Roman chant were ascribed to Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), who, according to legends dating from the Carolingian era, composed the basic melodic repertory and established the Schola Cantorum as the model for the correct performance of liturgical music in the Western Church. However, there is no contemporary evidence to suggest that Gregory was particularly concerned with chant and it is now thought that the Schola Cantorum was founded in Rome during the second half of the 7th century. The repertory that bears his name – Gregorian chant – probably derives from the late 8th century, when the Carolingian kings attempted to introduce Roman chant into the Frankish lands. Whether Gregorian chant was actually sung in Rome at this time, however, is unclear and it has been suggested that it represents a ‘reworking’ of the genuine Roman repertory by Frankish cantors (see Plainchant, §2(ii)). The earliest extant notated manuscripts from Rome, dating from between the 11th and 13th centuries, present a body of melodies that is clearly related to Gregorian chant but which consistently differs in certain details. The performance of this repertory, known as Old Roman chant, was brought to an end in Rome when Pope Nicholas III (1277–80) officially suppressed it in favour of Gregorian chant.
During the Carolingian era many of the local Italian repertories were replaced by Gregorian chant as part of an attempt to establish liturgical uniformity; by the 11th century only Rome and Milan maintained their indigenous musical traditions. The Aquileian Church, which had formerly followed its own rite, adopted the Gregorian use during the reign of Charlemagne (d 814); almost nothing of its melodic repertory survives. Beneventan chant, however, which developed in southern Italy during the 7th and 8th centuries, was not fully suppressed until 1052 and a significant amount of its music survives in notated sources. The only tradition that successfully resisted the imposition of Gregorian chant was that of Milan. Its survival was undoubtedly helped by the prestige of St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (374–97), who was traditionally credited with the creation of the chant repertory. Ambrose is known to have introduced the singing of psalms and hymns to strengthen the resolve of his flock when they were beseiged in the Basilica Porziana by Aryan persecutors, and at least four of the many hymn texts attributed to him are genuine. However, there is no evidence to associate him with the composition of ‘Ambrosian’ melodies. The melodies of the Milanese rite were first written down in the 12th century in pitch-specific notation and are still performed today in Milan and in some churches in the diocese of Lugano (see Ambrosian chant and Ambrose).
From the 10th century, several different kinds of neumatic notation were used in Italy, and the diversity began to decrease only when the various scriptoria adjusted their neumes to the staff perfected by Guido of Arezzo (d after 1033) and adopted shapes which became those of square notation (see Notation, §III, 1). Guido is also credited with the invention of solmization, a teaching method for reading neumes and producing the corresponding pitches. Less easily assessed are other Italian contributions to the further development of liturgical and paraliturgical singing. Although sequences, either belonging to an international repertory or of local origin, were sung at an early date, only a few, which survived the rigours of the Council of Trent, are well known: Dies irae, Lauda Sion and Stabat mater, the melodies of which are respectively attributed to Thomas of Celano (d c1250), St Thomas Aquinas (d 1274) and Jacopone da Todi (d c1306); the only other surviving sequences are Victimae paschalis laudae and Veni sancte spiritus. The production of tropes seems to have been modest, but liturgical dramas were performed in various places, and the music of four at Cividale and six at Padua survives. The latter group (dating from the late 13th century, with 15th-century additions) includes pieces for two equal voices, a type of polyphony (cantus planus binatim) of which other examples have recently been found, suggesting a widespread practice of polyphonic elaboration of plainchant. Two-part organum had already been described in Guido’s Micrologus as a current practice; and many melodies were prescribed to be sung cum organo (i.e. in polyphony) in 13th-century ordines of the churches of Siena and Lucca. Simple, essentially punctus contra punctum polyphony appears to have lasted until the Renaissance and even later, with more cultivated types. Some of these two-part compositions were internationally known, others used only locally. In any case, performances of this type of polyphony in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries are attested by several recently discovered sources.
Information concerning secular music is scant until the 12th century, and even then it consists of descriptions of performances and texts of songs, but no music; the few exceptions (some historical complaints, a vigil song of Modenese sentries and the well-known pilgrim song O Roma nobilis, to the simple tune of which the more profane O admirabile Veneris ydolum was also sung) all belong to the 9th century and to ecclesiastical circles, to which they owe their survival. Among the earliest documents of poetry in the vulgar tongue, some jongleur songs addressed to bishops show that the traditional condemnation of jongleurs and mimes had subsided by the 12th century. Dance-songs in a popular vein and in ballata form (often entitled danze) survive in notarial acts of the 13th century and early 14th century; the way in which they were sung in alternation between a leader and the chorus of dancers is described in a Latin epistle by the grammarian Giovanni del Virgilio. Ballata form was also used for solo songs unconnected with dancing.
Troubadour lyrics were performed and composed during the 13th century at the courts of feudal lords in northern Italy, in bourgeois circles in Bologna and Tuscany and at the court of the Emperor Frederic II (1197–1250; King of Sicily, often engaged in wars throughout the peninsula) both by visiting troubadours and by local poets also using the Provençal language; among the latter were Sordello da Goito (c1200–c1270) and the Genoese Lanfranco Cigala (d c1274) and Bonifacio Calvo (d after 1274). In this regard it is worth noting that most extant sources of troubadour poetry are of Italian origin; they seldom contain any music, however, and it is hard to say whether this is due to the compilers’ exclusive interest in the texts or to the fact that the melodies were usually transmitted orally. The same applies to the vernacular poetry of the so-called Sicilian and Tuscan schools, the former centred on Frederic II and his sons, the latter with Guittone of Arezzo (c1225–c1294) as its main representative. For the later dolce stil nuovo it can only be surmised that the increasing length and the philosophical bent of its poems conflicted with a increasing floridity of the settings. Dante (1265–1325) had some of his canzoni and ballatas set by musician friends (e.g. Casella); yet he asserted (De vulgari eloquentia, ii, 8) the self-contained verbal musicality of the canzone and argued that music would better suit the ‘mediocre’ style of the ballata. After him there was a split: because of the feeling that profound poetic thoughts had little to gain from the ornament of music, canzoni and the most sophisticated ballatas were no longer set to music, while shorter ballatas, madrigals and cacce began to be written specifically as poesia per musica.
Frequent references to the singing of ballatas persist during the 14th century, indicating a widespread use of this most versatile form as a dance-song, aristocratic or popular, and as a vehicle for lyrical expression. Music survives, however, only for the religious counterpart of the ballata, the lauda; and even then, only two lavishly decorated laudari contain music, while many simpler ones are without it, suggesting that notation (which did not, anyway, show the rhythm of the songs) was more an ornament than the answer to a real need. The penitential singing of laude spread from Franciscan Umbria around 1260 and became a devotional custom practised by lay fraternities all over Italy, a practice which survived well into the 18th century, often through the adaptation of secular melodies and folktunes to texts of devotional character, thus continuing the medieval practice of contrafactum. The alternation of soloist and chorus, involving all those present in the singing of the choral refrain, had been borrowed from the dance-song. An early 14th-century manuscript of Umbrian origin (I-CT 91) contains simple melodies of touching directness, while a slightly later Florentine repertory (I-Fn Magl.I.I.122) already shows a pronounced tendency towards florid vocalization.
Notation is a natural need of a polyphonic art and explains the impressive array of manuscripts containing music of the Italian Ars Nova, which, however, was the expression of only a small minority and had a much more limited diffusion than monophonic music. It is thus deceptive to see it as representative of Trecento music. Polyphonic singing, probably taken over from the private entertainment of ecclesiastics, began to be fashionable at the courts of the Scaligeri and Visconti, in Padua, Verona and Milan during the early 14th century; later it also gained favour in literary circles in Florence. Accordingly, its composers, most of them ecclesiastics or lawyers, divide into a northern group, whose main figures are Jacopo da Bologna and, later, Bartolino da Padova (both significantly from places with famous universities), and a larger Florentine group, including Francesco Landini (d 1397). The role of lesser places, such as Perugia, Rimini, Caserta, Teramo and Lucca, is unclear. Over 600 extant works, datable from about 1335 to about 1420, include madrigals, ballatas, a small number of cacce and a scattering of motets. The madrigal and caccia were the oldest forms, apparently created by polyphonists from both the musical and the literary point of view. The madrigal’s short, descriptive, epigrammatic or celebratory texts (some of them by Petrarch, Boccaccio and Franco Sacchetti) were set for two, seldom three, texted parts, with effusive figuration in the upper one, often to mark the beginning or end of a poetic line or verse. Madrigals set in canon were called ‘cacce’, but that musical term (a musical synonym of the later fuga) soon suggested longer, metrically irregular descriptions of open-air scenes (hunting, fishing, marketing etc.), whose onomatopoeic animation, rendered by the voices in canon, often required the support of a third, non-canonic instrumental part. Ballatas were at first set monophonically even by polyphonists (two manuscripts contain a small number of such settings), but began to be set for two or three parts after 1360; as the lyricism of their upper voice-parts (often supported by lower, instrumental parts) appealed to somewhat larger audiences, they gradually supplanted madrigals and cacce. This explains the particular renown enjoyed by Landini, whose works are mainly ballatas.
With its special forms and special system of notation, codified in the 1320s by Marchetto da Padova (himself a composer), Italian secular polyphony was related to, yet independent from, the contemporary French Ars Nova. Its learned supporters, however, began gradually to indulge in subtilitas, mostly identifying it with the imitation of French contemporary models; in time, and particularly during the great schism following the return of the popes from Avignon to Rome, various artists were induced to embrace a French style. As a counterpart, some foreign composers who were active in Italy, among them Johannes Ciconia (d 1412) and later Du Fay, set Italian texts and showed their appreciation of the original flavour of the Italian polyphonic style. A distinguishing feature of 14th-century Italian polyphony was the motet celebrating a state or religious occasion, whose text (always in Latin) mentions not only the event itself but also the personalities involved and, in some cases, the composer.
Historians have been puzzled by the sharp contrast between the apparent brilliance of 14th-century polyphony and the emptiness of that of the 15th century. Actually, the Ars Nova is magnified by its splendid manuscript tradition; when its thin support was all too easily washed away by a wave of humanistic distrust for all that smacked of scholasticism, secular society simply reverted entirely to kinds of music that were mainly committed to oral tradition. Such a humanistic attitude is epitomized by Leonardo Giustiniani (d 1446), a Venetian nobleman, who set out to recapture the spell of ancient music by singing dialect songs in a popular style. A whole class of songs came to be called giustiniane after him; his music is completely lost, however, as is that of many singers a liuto or alla viola, some professional, like Pietrobono of Ferrara (c1417–1497) and Serafino Aquilano (1466–1500), others amateur, like Lorenzo de’ Medici and many members of his retinue. Their techniques may also have included some kind of simple polyphonic accompaniment to the voice. Virtuoso playing on the lute or keyboard was also increasingly admired.
Many churches had organs and organists, but only a few had singers, most often foreigners, who sang and taught polyphonic music; S Pietro in Rome seldom had more than four. Sacred polyphony fared better in the cappella papale (papal chapel), particularly under Martin V (1417–31) and in the first years of the reign of his successor, Eugene IV; it then declined, mainly because of the latter’s drive for ecclesiastical reforms and austerity, which, however, may have inspired Du Fay to compose his remarkable cycle of hymns. Du Fay, who had previously been connected with the Malatesta family, was a papal singer, with some interruptions, from 1428 to 1437; in 1436, while in Florence with the cappella he composed the motet Nuper rosarum flores for the dedication of Florence Cathedral during the visit of the Pope. But after Du Fay no composer of stature entered the cappella until late in the century, when a renewal of interest (which was to culminate under Leo X) brought Weerbeke (1479), Orto (1484) and Josquin (1489). The cappella established in Naples in 1442–3 by King Alfonso I of Aragon, the most famous member of which was Johannes Tinctoris, a Netherlander, served as a model for a few other courtly cappelle; the most important among them were those of Ferrara and Milan, the former created by Leonello d’Este (d 1450), who employed English musicians, and later strengthened by Ercole I (1471–1505), and the latter founded in 1473 by Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Josquin was associated with Cardinal Ascanio Sforza and the ducal court in 1484–9). In nominally republican Florence, the Medici did not have a cappella but encouraged and exploited for their private use the presence of polyphonists in various Florentine churches, including Heinrich Isaac.
Numerous manuscript collections of the late 15th century indicate a more widely spread and intensified interest in polyphony, the extent of which is even more eloquently stressed by the appearance in 1501 of music printing, started by Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice and soon imitated elsewhere in Italy and abroad. Petrucci’s output, evidently addressed to a rapidly growing public of lesser nobility and upper bourgeoisie, mainly consists of secular music. His Odhecaton and two other collections of Franco-Flemish pieces, seemingly intended for instrumental performance, were soon followed by a series of 11 books of typically Italian pieces, whose markedly chordal (and possibly instrumental) accompaniment to a main vocal line apparently continued and developed previously unrecorded practices (two more of his prints contain similar pieces in arrangements for voice and lute). In addition to frottolas and strambotti, a more literary class of text – sonnets, ode, capitoli, Petrarchan canzoni and madrigals, as well as Latin poems – were also set in this style. These compositions, printed by Petrucci – and others preserved in contemporary manuscripts – clearly reflect and, in some cases, actually preserve in written form the oral practice of music-making from previous centuries in Italy. Bartolomeo Tromboncino and Marchetto Cara are the best known among the composers, many of whom served the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino and Rome. Also included in the prints are settings of mascheratas, certainly intended for courtly entertainment and requiring choral rather than solo singing; their Florentine equivalents, canti carnascialeschi, survive in manuscript form.
Early in this outburst of a new vitality two trends began to appear, both of which arose from a humanistic concern for the text but led to different conclusions. On one hand, the demand for higher literary standards and the revival of Petrarchism typical of the first decades of the century led to settings that concentrated on the effective delivery of the text by the upper voice, unobstructed by the subdued, basically chordal support of the other parts, often one or more instruments. On the other hand, the general interest in all artistic activities, also spurred by humanistic ideals, suggested that the literary refinement of the texts be matched by the musicians, summoning up all the resources of contrapuntal polyphony. The latter attitude gradually prevailed, leading to the madrigal (an old name for a new coalescence of poetic forms) becoming the main vehicle through which the composers set out to interpret musically the poetic content of their chosen or given texts; hence the recourse to so-called madrigalisms, a repertory of partly spontaneous, partly contrived associations of poetic and musical images, which, however, had its roots in the international motet style of the turn of the century. Madrigals were often intended to be performed in connection with the meetings of the academies, as musical interludes or to conclude learned speeches or discussions.
Early madrigals by Verdelot, Costanzo Festa and Arcadelt generally achieve a balance between recitative-like clarity and contrapuntal activity. Later a sharper alternation of contrapuntal writing and chordal passages developed, while a keen spirit of experimentation led to the faster rhythms of the madrigals a note nere, or (fostered by Vicentino’s speculations on the genres of ancient music) to Rore’s exploitation of dissonance and chromaticism for the expression of deep poetic feelings. The whole gamut of expressive resource, ranging from dramatic moods to sunny enthusiasm or to pastoral levity, was displayed at its best towards the end of the century by Marenzio, while extreme emotional tensions dictated Gesualdo’s sudden shifts from exaggerated chromaticism to melodious diatonicism. None of this ever completely erased the predominance of the upper part, as is also shown by performing practices; for although polyphony was now issued in partbooks – all provided with text – contemporary sources indicate that all-vocal performance could often be replaced by combinations of voice and instruments (even title-pages speak of ‘madrigali da cantare e da suonare’). Furthermore, frottolas and strambotti, dropped by the printers about 1530 (although they continued to be sung), were soon replaced by new popular genres, such as the villotta, the three-voice villanesca alla napoletana and later the canzonetta. Midway between the madrigal and the lighter genres are Striggio’s witty madrigalian narratives (e.g. Il cicalamento delle donne al bucato), to which Vecchi’s and Banchieri’s so-called madrigal comedies and other musical entertainments are related.
Less venturesome, and yet the main field of activity for many famous composers of madrigals, sacred music continued to be international in style and repertory. So too were many of the performers, including Verdelot, Arcadelt, Jacquet of Mantua, Jacquet of Ferrara, Nasco and Werrecore, whose church positions made them specially apt to influence new generations of musicians; in the 1530s, when the devastations of war were over, newly formed cappelle based on the model of the Cappella Giulia at S Pietro, designed in 1513 by Julius II, began to teach boys. Often, however, foreign musicians were so much involved in the Italian way of life as to become deeply italianate. The most relevant example is Willaert, who, after sojourns in Rome, Ferrara and Milan, succeeded Petrus de Fossis, also a Fleming, as maestro di cappella of S Marco, Venice, in 1527; during his 35-year tenure Parabosco, Vicentino, Rore, Zarlino, Andrea Gabrieli and Costanzo Porta were among his colleagues and pupils. With the pupils succeeding their masters, it became exceptional for foreign musicians (such as Rore, Wert or Victoria) to occupy leading positions in the second half of the century. From the combination of Willaert’s powerful personality and the standards of magnificence set by the Venetian government for its official church, the main features for which the Venetian school became one of the principal models of Italian (and foreign) church music were established: richness of sound, polychoral writing, colourful use of the organ (S Marco constantly used at least two) and later of other instruments and finally a relative lack of concern for all debates on the future of church music. Following a century-old tradition, motets were composed to celebrate important state festivities, as in the works of the great Venetian composers such as the Gabrielis. Contrasting with the open attitude in Venice, the leading Roman institution, the cappella papale, was slowly evolving a guarded attitude, partly protecting old privileges under the shield of tradition, partly reacting to mounting criticism of church polyphony from both outside and inside the Catholic church. Without being a conservative, Palestrina continued and brought to consummate refinement stylistic trends that he had come to know from his French teachers in the cappella of S Maria Maggiore. It is significant, too, that he usually based ‘parody’ masses either on his own motets and madrigals or on French models of the 1530s. Mounting concern that the Council of Trent might banish the use of polyphony from the liturgy led Palestrina and his Roman colleagues to write masses paraphrasing plainchant (or even treating it in chorale-like fashion); above all, however, they were careful to avoid polyphonic complexity that might obscure the liturgical text. Finally, while the organ accompanied the singing in most Roman churches, the model of the cappella papale, where purely vocal performance was traditional, suggested moderation in the use of instruments. Thus, while the Venetian school followed a course that was to lead to the concertato style of the next century, the stage was set in Rome for the concept of stile antico. However, the church music of Palestrina’s successors at S Pietro also reveals clarity of declamation and the use of vertical sonorities found in the works of their Venetian colleagues.
Music printing, of which Venice was the main centre, soon reflected a demand for instrumental music. In 1507 a series of prints containing vocal pieces (mostly secular, but also sacred), dances and ricercares in lute tablature was started by Petrucci. A privilege granted to him to publish keyboard music was assumed instead by Antico for his Frottole intabulate da sonare organi (Rome, 1517; see fig.3; printers always referred to all keyboard instruments as organi). The most famous performers and composers of lute music were Francesco da Milano and, later, Vincenzo Galilei; lute transcriptions of polyphonic works were performed by university students during the Renaissance. Organists were much more numerous, because of their church employment. Their music was sometimes printed in score to make performance by a group of instruments possible, but instrumental music was practised to an even greater extent simply by use of the vocal repertory; favoured instruments were recorders and viols (for which tutors were published) and the whole family of cornetts. A great variety of instruments, combining or alternating with voices, was also displayed in the spectacular intermedi performed between the acts of comedies or pastoral plays, the most famous of which were those given at the Florentine court in 1589 to celebrate a ducal wedding (see fig.5). A remarkable 16th-century collection of instruments is still housed in the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona.
An intense theoretical activity often led to debate. The most heated controversy was between supporters of a tuning similar to just (or harmonic) intonation, which was first taught at Bologna by the Spaniard Ramos de Pareia (b c1440), and defenders (including Gaffurius) of the traditional Pythagorean system, better suited to the needs of monophony. The former were later joined by Zarlino (1517–90), whose works cover a much wider range of philosophical, historical, aesthetic and compositional problems. Ancient theory was often summoned in support of tradition and as a justification for daring harmonic experiments in the direction of the ancient genera; further, it also helped critics of the current polyphonic style to foster the ideal of a new, essentially melodic, expressive immediacy. Vincenzo Galilei (d 1591) was the most outspoken critic, and yet it is an over-simplification to see his theoretical and musical works, as well as the discussions held from about 1575 in the Camerata of Count Bardi in Florence, as prime factors of a stylistic change to which many other elements contributed. Many of Galilei’s arguments – that polyphony obscured the perception of the text and that its imagery singled out individual words but lost sight of the real poetic message, so that its artistry reached no deeper than the ear – had been anticipated in the discussion on the fate of church music; his suggestion that music should emulate the intensity of reciting actors had precedents in such madrigals (often called ariosi) as aimed to recapture the pathos of popular singers of epic verse. In any event, emotional intensity was not the only issue. More difficult to explain was the ideal of a melodic spontaneity, which was not (as in successful villanesche and canzonettas) attained simply by playing on instruments all parts but one of a polyphonic piece, for the resulting vocal line did not have the poise and balance of a real melody. The latter depended, paradoxically, on deep-seated harmonic feelings and on the fulfilment of expectations aroused by its harmonic implications.
The new style ‘invented’ about the turn of the century by Giulio Caccini consisted of vocal melodies unconditioned by any contrapuntal interplay and supported by a bass line that was subservient to them – the continuo – to be sparingly realized as full chords by the accompanying instrumentalist (possibly the singer himself). This combined the advantages of harmonic function and flexible adjustment to the expressive needs (sprezzatura) of the singer’s rendition. Caccini correctly claimed that what is called accompanied monody was the same as the stile rappresentativo or recitativo used by Peri, his colleague and rival at the Florentine court, in the first operas (pastorali tutte in musica), Dafne (1598) and Euridice (1600; fig.6). In both cases the composer set out to ‘represent’ the emotions of characters reacting to dramatic situations, although those of Caccini’s madrigals and arias were merely hinted at by the texts. In fact this kind of dramatic projection through a chamber recital, which had had many precedents in the polyphonic madrigal, now became typical and often adopted the striking, emotional harmonies of Peri’s and Monteverdi’s operas. In time this extremely popular genre, fostered by many composers, evolved into an even larger production of cantatas.
Operas, on the other hand (of which the recitative aspects are now given too much emphasis over the melodious singing, choruses and instrumental colour), were connected with infrequent court events. In Florence, where they began, there was often a reversion to spoken plays with intermedi, or to spectacles, ‘tutti in musica’, of a choreographic rather than dramatic nature, after the model set in the 1590s by Cavalieri. After the Mantuan performances that included Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Arianna (1607–8), both court events, the lead was taken by Rome, especially with the custom instituted by the Barberini family, relatives of Pope Urban VIII (1623–44), of holding operatic performances in their palaces during Carnival. The opening of the first public opera house in Venice in 1637 was a turning-point; within a few years operas were offered from December to Lent, and again in the spring, by four or five theatres in Venice, while the custom quickly spread to Bologna, Milan, Genoa, Lucca and Naples, and even in Rome opera was given in semi-private theatres (against the will of various popes). Although the tradition of performance at court was never completely broken, opera in the 17th century was practised either as an entertainment in the academies (thus continuing the Renaissance tradition of music at such events) or in smaller centres, performed by touring companies in connection with local celebrations. Already in the Barberini operas the plots, drawn from Tasso’s epic poetry or from saints’ lives, had begun to expand and sharpen the distinction between recitative sections (in the modern sense) and self-contained arias and choruses. Later librettos, starting with Busenello’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) for Monteverdi, drew freely from the whole range of history, juxtaposing in a cavalier fashion highly dramatic moments, arbitrarily inventing amorous effusions and scenes of ludicrous comedy. The music, however, often succeeded in making all incongruities plausible with a flexible, far from formalized, handling of recitative and aria, the former attaining on occasion highly dramatic effects, the latter avoiding stagnation in the compelling drive of the plot. The most effective and widely performed operas were those of Cavalli (1602–76). Towards the end of the century a new ornamental style of singing led to the appearance of virtuosos who practised what became known as bel canto. At the same time the comic element disappeared from operatic plots, leading to the appearance of the intermezzo, performed by actors who were also singers, at the beginning of the 18th century.
Lesser genres, such as extended cantatas or serenatas, expressed their dramatic content through purely auditory means, as also did opera’s sacred counterpart (usually given in Lent), the oratorio, born from the spiritual exercises of Philippine oratories, from which the genre acquired its name. Cavalieri’s allegorical Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo, fully staged in Rome at the Oratorio del Crocifisso in 1600, was an exception; more typical were G.F. Anerio’s dialoghi, published in his Teatro armonico spirituale (1619), in which a choral narrative introduced the words of the main characters sung by soloists. This type, using vernacular texts, had a wide diffusion through the Philippine congregation, showing, however, a tendency to assimilate dramatic techniques from opera, with more emphasis on solo recitatives and arias and developing more complex plots. Giacomo Carissimi (1605–74), who wrote his works (historiae) on Latin texts with a greater display of choruses and instruments, represents a somewhat different trend established by the Jesuits. As a teacher at the Jesuit Collegio Germanico in Rome, Carissimi had considerable influence on German composers.
In the oratorio, to a greater extent than in the opera, accompanied monody was often incorporated in the new stile concertato which had developed from earlier polyphony, giving much greater differentiation to the various elements and a pointed expressive and sonic distinction to each, be it a voice, an instrument or a choral or instrumental group. The stile concertato had had its first important representative in Venice with Giovanni Gabrieli (c1554–7–1612), followed by Monteverdi, who used it at first in sacred pieces (beginning with the Vespers of 1610) and later in a number of madrigalian works. Instruments tended to be more sparingly used in the Roman school, where the stile concertato often took the shape of large-scale polychoral pieces supported by organs, the most representative being those by Orazio Benevoli (1605–72). These stylistic trends also characterize much of the sacred music composed at this period.
The free play of harmonic feeling to which both accompanied monody and concertato music instinctively tended did not open the way to an immediate assertion of the so-called tonal system. In the first place, the new vogue for harmonic surprise based on chromaticism, used (and abused) for emotional purposes, had to take its full course. Composers still relied on elementary harmonic functions, or on such traditional basses as the romanesca and passamezzo, or on new ones, such as the descending Dorian tetrachord and its many variants. Whole compositions, sometimes the most dramatic arias, could be based on a ground bass of some sort. Only gradually did the precise feeling of how each chord related to the tonal centre of its key begin to take shape. It had become clearly outlined in the operas and oratorios of Alessandro Stradella (1639–82) and even more so in those of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) and in the instrumental works of Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), although theoretical treatises still continued to expound the system of the church modes.
Instrumental practice, increasingly flourishing and autonomous, may have played a greater part than vocal music in the development of modern harmony with a language richer in figurations outlining full chords. Furthermore, at least part of it had inherited the elementary but powerful tonal drive of dance music. The warm, brilliant sound of the new violins built by famous makers in Brescia and Cremona lent itself to accompanied monody in the form of solo sonatas with continuo, such as those of Biagio Marini (c1587–1663). Most instrumental music, however, belonged to the concertato type. Here, too, the variety of instrumental colours in Giovanni Gabrieli’s canzonas in eight to 15 parts (published in 1597 and 1615) gradually gave way to an almost absolute prevalence of strings. A most successful combination proved to be that of two violins with continuo (the latter doubled by a violone or cello), the sonata a tre of which Corelli’s opp.1–4 were to become the best-known and most influential examples. Corelli was the first significant composer to devote himself entirely to instrumental music. His works became the model for string compositions in the first half of the 18th century. In larger ensembles recourse was first made during the second half of the century to an interplay of a group of soloists and a larger tutti; from it developed the concerto grosso, best represented, once more, by Corelli, in his op.6, most of which had been composed for performance during Roman festivities at least 25 years before its publication in 1714. The canzona per sonar was a composition of some length, alternating contrapuntal sections and chordal or melodic ones, generally played during Mass; in time (by about 1650) such pieces were called sonatas and were more sharply divided into various movements, so called from their changing time signatures and tempos. Canzonas and sonatas were also used for secular entertainment, and many were given titles referring to the noble dedicatees for whom they had been played. Only late in the century was a distinction made (though seldom stated) between sonatas da chiesa and da camera, which was probably meant to indicate the inclusion in the latter of dance movements rather than works specifically destined for either church or chamber.
The distinction is hardly clearer in keyboard music, although the transfer of organ pieces to the harpsichord was much more likely than the performance on a church organ of partitas (variations) or dance suites intended for harpsichord. Composers of organ music reacted to the general trends of the time in peculiar ways. Expressive goals, analogous to those that had led to accompanied monody, were achieved in pieces of the toccata type, with their abrupt changes of texture, unexpected harmonic turns and, above all, the agogic flexibility of performance as emphatically recommended by Frescobaldi in his prefaces, especially that to his second book of toccatas. The organ had only limited potential as a concertato instrument; but contrapuntal pieces like the ricercare, elaborating on themes of more pointed individuality and secular flavour than those of the preceding period, slowly evolved towards the tonal fugue.
Theoretical writing was on the whole less intensive and polemical during the 17th century than in the Renaissance. It was essentially concerned with the practical consideration of problems of composition or performing practice; the works of Banchieri (1568–1634) and Cazzati (1616–78) are particularly valuable as a source of information about the views and criteria adopted by musicians in a time of rapid change.
Italy, §I, 5: 18th century art music
18th-century Italian music appears to have well-defined chronological limits: at one extremity stand Corelli and Zeno's operatic reforms, at the other the late works of Boccherini. This historical construct contains a measure of truth but is also misleading. The idea that the revolutions at the end of the 18th century released a spirit of artistic renewal was ideologically motivated: during the period of the Risorgimento critics condemned 18th-century music because of its hedonistic functions and as the expression of an élite class, and De Sanctis and Carducci judged Metastasian opera in the same light. Nevertheless, as early as the 19th century the music of Sammartini and 18th-century Venetian composers caught the attention of such theorists as Carpani, Gervasoni, Lichtenthal, Picchianti and Ruta. Asioli (1832) identified the counterpoint of Corelli and Marcello as instructive models of a style that was scholarly but not dry, but in doing so undervalued its purely aesthetic value. This view, a symptom of inadequate historic awareness, was repeated by Verdi's pupil, Emanuele Muzio, when he described Corelli's music as ‘tough food to digest’, but as a useful subject for study because it was ‘full of science’.
The re-evaluation of 18th-century instrumental music was the work of the 20th-century musicologists Torchi, Chilesotti, Vatielli and Torrefranca, followed by the composers Casella and Malipiero. In contrast, the genres of oratorio and cantata, more concerned with a specific function, aroused no interest in an intellectual environment so heavily influenced by Benedetto Croce. In recent decades, however, research into 18th-century Italian opera has afforded greater insight into its codes of communication and its system of production. The definition of 18th-century Italian music as an abstract, stylized art, a hedonistic diversion for a society which the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) consigned to the margins of history, has thus declined.
Three broad categories of places where music was performed in 18th-century Italy can be identified: the public, private and ecclesiastical, which correspond in general terms to the three genres of opera, instrumental and chamber music (including cantatas) and liturgical music. There was an uninterrupted growth in the number of opera houses, which took on the character of civic institutions and became points of reference in the layout of a city. The old system of court theatres was progressively replaced by one of theatres run by impresarios for profit. Instrumental concerts (‘academies’) were mostly given in private homes; since it did not involve the commercial mechanisms of the theatre, instrumental music was the exclusive province of the upper classes. Cathedrals and their chapels were affected by the opera house: performers often worked both in church and the theatre, and the idiom of liturgical music grew increasingly similar to that of opera.
The three genres have in common a diffused habit of inattentive listening: it was only with considerable effort that the idea of listening to music as a work of art became established in Italy, and for this reason many musical compositions go no higher than the level of ornamental, extemporary and occasional work. The ephemeral nature of musical expression entailed a high degree of improvisation in all three genres: from the opera house (where the singer improvised in the da capo sections of arias, and, as Giardini and Galeazzi document, orchestral players sometimes did likewise) to the church, where the organist had carte blanche to improvise, and private entertainments (in 1787 Hadrava describes an improvisation on ‘composed’ music, such as that by Mozart).
As the century progressed, music, without distinctions between genres, became the prevailing artistic expression in the daily life of the upper middle class: ‘the Italians may, perhaps, be accused of cultivating music to excess’ (Burney). The high rate of consumption led to greater conventionalism and periodic changes in taste: ‘musical taste in Italy changes at least every ten years’ (De Brosses, 256). With the spread of ‘profit-making’ opera houses, and the increased tendency to celebrate public occasions with music, the social range of consumers widened. This broadening of the social base of the ‘leaders of taste’ guided the choice of musical genres: the only really classless genre was opera, particularly comic opera after 1750. Although Stendhal, writing in 1817, still saw Italy as the land of music par excellence, this supremacy had diminished in the last decades of the 18th century, as can be seen in the exodus of players abroad and opera composers' search for success in the great capitals outside Italy.
In the middle of the century music started to be reconsidered aesthetically, no longer viewed as something ephemeral and occasional, but an art form with its own expressive worth. Algarotti, Tartini and Muratori, and later Baretti, Galeazzi and Carpani document the passage from a scientific concept of musical composition to an aesthetic one; from music as one of the liberal arts to music as one of the fine arts; no longer a craft (as Saverio Mattei was still maintaining in 1785), but an expression of character and affetti, a direct imitation of nature (Tartini/Algarotti).
Italy, §I, 5: 18th century art music
Musicians were educated within the family circle, in the case of the professional musical families, or in the few institutional schools in Italy: these were the conservatories in Naples and Palermo (the famous ospedali for girls in Venice did not, with a few exceptions, prepare their pupils for a profession), the chapels of the great cathedrals like S Petronio in Bologna or, for 16th-century counterpoint, the Roman chapels and the Santuario della Santa Casa in Loreto. Lastly there was private teaching, the greatest example of which is provided by Tartini, ‘teacher to all the nations’, as well as the instances of Hasse with Scarlatti and Galuppi with Lotti. According to De Brosses (p.598), ‘the best seminaries of maestri di cappella are in Naples. … For voices, the best school is in Bologna; Lombardy excels in instrumental music’, and this is confirmed by Josse de Villeneuve (1756). Naples, where the majority of Italian composers were educated, had four conservatories: the Poveri di Gesù Cristo (closed in 1743), S Maria di Loreto and S Onofrio (which merged in 1797), and S Maria della Pietà dei Turchini. It is estimated that each conservatory had an average of about 100 pupils in a city of about 250,000 inhabitants. The subjects taught were counterpoint and figured bass (partimenti), while operatic and instrumental composition were learned orally and by imitation, a distinction between the educational and the professional (theory and practice) that remained unchanged until Verdi's day.
After completing his education, the young composer could make his début with short comic operas, liturgical pieces, or by writing arias for insertion into operas by others. After he made himself known, he could aspire to opera seria and the great theatres: the determining factors at this stage were the family ties and contacts of his own teacher. However, it was difficult to guarantee an income and regular work in writing for the theatre. Instrumental composition offered the composer two lucrative possibilities: a dedication to a member of the nobility, rewarded with a one-off gift, or in private sales of an independently printed work. Another possible employment was as maestro al cembalo (harpsichordist) in a theatre, as was probably the case with the young Galuppi at the Teatro S Angelo in Venice. As well as these personal sources of income a composer usually also held a permanent post in service to the nobility, in the church, or as a teacher. In these cases, too, the remuneration was modest. A composer in the mid-18th century being thus active in all genres meant that there was a continual stylistic cross-fertilization between them, a situation criticized by Tartini.
There are various examples of singers being born into professional musical families, such as the Mingotti, Ristorini, Baglioni and Laschi families. The greatest number of singing teachers is recorded in Bologna, although no institutional school of singing with a local stylistic identity was ever established there. In Rome the Collegio Germanico and the Seminario Romano, both Jesuit foundations, exported their pupils all over Europe. Because of the papal ban on women performing either in church or in the opera house, many castratos, often from humble backgrounds, began their careers in Rome.
Singers who did not succeed in entering the extensive operatic scene, which had its centre in Bologna, contented themselves with posts in the cathedrals. The first performers to reap the benefits of the nascent star system were singers, on whom every category of musical performance depended; they were thus the first element operatic administrators had to consider, and they were the highest paid, commanding up to ten times the fee of the composer. Later on, the composer also entered the open market: for example, Piccinni in 1770 could choose where to work according to the pay on offer. This was the point at which the composer became a cornerstone in the mechanism of opera production, and began his social ascent.
Italy, §I, 5: 18th century art music
Opera was the most widespread artistic form; no other cultural expression had the same capacity to reflect social life, the same cultural prestige or comparable turnover. Opera as a whole had a double social and cultural function: its social function was as an instrument of moral and civil education (Zeno), the vehicle of the dominant ideology (Metastasio), and as social critique (comic opera); its cultural function was to disseminate ‘high’ culture and language and to convey classical subjects or, later on, otherwise unknown ones from fiction. Hence Strohm's assertion (1991, p.19) that ‘Italian opera, good and bad, was a school for the nation, precisely as cinema and television are today’. At the beginning of the century opera divided into two genres: opera seria (dramma per musica) and comic opera (intermezzo, commedia per musica, dramma giocoso per musica, opera buffa). This division made it possible for opera to be widely disseminated and carry out multiple functions. The two genres constituted two alternative systems with mechanisms of production, performance and reception that rarely intersected, but which influenced each other to a great extent in dramaturgy, versification, musical language and structure.
Max Fehr and Hermann Abert were the first to recognize that the men of letters rather than the composers played the leading role in the ‘reform’ of 17th-century Venetian opera into the rational dramma per musica. The first reformers, besides Zeno, were Silvio Stampiglia, Girolamo Frigimelica Roberti, Antonio Salvi and Pietro Pariati, who all shared the same Arcadian ideals. Another member of the Accademia dell'Arcadia was the poet Metastasio, the most pervasive figure in the history of 18th-century opera.
The first Arcadian operas were created in Venice: La forza della virtù by Domenico David to a libretto by Zeno (1693), and Gli inganni felici (1695) and Lucio Vero (1700) by C.F. Pollarolo, also to librettos by Zeno. At first literary reform had little influence on the music: Alessandro Scarlatti, Giovanni and Antonio Bononcini and Gasparini continued the 17th-century legacy of contrapuntal writing, concertante instrumental parts, and arias accompanied only by basso continuo. The spread of Arcadian and rationalist opera coincided with Metastasio's first libretto (Didone abbandonata, 1724, Naples) and the first operas by the composers of his generation: the Neapolitans Porpora, Feo, Pergolesi, Leo, Hasse and Vinci (the first ‘classical’ composer, according to De Brosses, Algarotti, Burney and Grétry), and the Venetians Albinoni, Orlandini, Caldara and Vivaldi. The anti-Baroque reforms of Zeno and Metastasio covered a number of elements: the revival of the Aristotelian unities, the elimination of comic elements, marginal episodes and spectacular stage effects, and a reduction of the number of scenes from 60 or 70 to between 20 and 30. The composition followed the dramatic form, divided into repeated sequences of recitative (or multiple recitatives) and da capo aria. The recitatives, generally dialogues for up to five characters, set up the motivation for the subsequent aria, in which the character stepped outside the real time of the action for a personal, reflective reaction. At the end of the aria, the character left the stage. This recitative and aria structure remained dominant until 1770 and suited the ‘tyranny of the text’ over the music. Such a word-centred concept was in line with the classical idea of tragedy in which events did not take place on stage but were referred to by characters who brought their personal reactions on stage instead. The 19th century's charges against Metastasian opera derived in large part from an inability to understand these assumptions, which have their roots in the Enlightenment.
During the Metastasian period (by extension, from 1700 to 1770) only the drama was a work of art, the music having a simple auxiliary value. The ‘author’ was thus the dramatist, while it was the responsibility of the singer to create the performance; the composer had a subordinate role, vaguely comparable to that of the modern-day director. This is the reason why in 18th-century Italy it was the libretto, not the score, that was printed, and on the title-page, as on the theatre poster, the name of the composer was not given (in 1842 the title-page of the libretto of Nabucco still gave only Solera's name, not Verdi's). This also explains the practice of continual resetting of the same Metastasio librettos: Didone abbandonata was set to music about 60 times; Olimpiade about 50, Achille in Sciro about 30. Opera seria, at least until the last quarter of the century, was an established genre and the tendency was for each musical and dramatic realization to be a one-off, a costly undertaking incompatible with the emerging commercial nature of opera.
During the 1750s even faithful supporters of Metastasio such as Hasse and Jommelli reacted against the ‘tyranny of the text’. At this time the text had a conservative function and a high prestige stemming from tradition, while the music had a contrasting evolutive function: arias broke free from the da capo form, the overture acquired greater interest (as in Piccinni's Catone in Utica), and accompanied recitative became predominant (Traetta, Ifigenia in Tauride). Sacchini, Traetta (Antigona) and Salieri (L'Europa riconosciuta) show in different ways the influence of French tragédie lyrique in the increasingly spectacular nature of opera and the greater use of chorus and orchestra. Another evolutionary impulse came from opera buffa, especially in the use of ensembles: in Artaserse (1749) Galuppi brings together in a final quartet what the Metastasio original had as a sequence of five separate arias. Dance became a source of new subjects: with Noverre and Angiolini in Milan from the 1770s onwards, the ‘ballo pantomimo’ proved more popular than opera, prompting lamentations from Metastasio. Of all the 18th-century trends in opera, only the reform of Gluck and Calzabigi had no great effect in Italy, except in those states with Habsburg connections.
In the last third of the century many new librettists (no longer autonomous playwrights like Metastasio) came to the fore, including Calzabigi, Da Ponte, Coltellini, De Gamerra, Sografi and Verazi. During this phase it was the composers who made operatic history: Anfossi, Sacchini, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Tritto, Zingarelli (the ‘late Neapolitans’), Sarti, Salieri, Paer and Mayr. Metastasian opera was based on a range of conventions which were utterly clear to his contemporaries: the post-Metastasian phase (1770–1800) was multiform, sometimes experimental, but the tendency was towards an acceleration of the dramatic rhythm. New subjects and a new vocabulary implied new metres, with frequent breaks and a preference for lines with an even number of syllables. New types of scene were introduced (dungeons, oracles, executions, cemeteries, eerie forests, ghosts and skeletons), and there was greater dependence on spectacular effects and the use of the chorus even during arias (Traetta's Ifigenia in Tauride, Paisiello's Elfrida and Cimarosa's Gli Orazi ed i Curiazi). The orchestra acquired greater importance: in his Nitteti (1756) Metastasio had already imagined the ‘din of tumultuous symphonies’ in the battle scene. The number of arias was reduced and the scenes were extended: sequences of solo scenes were transformed into ensembles (like the final sextet of Cimarosa's L'olimpiade): this brought about a reduction of exit arias, and Paisiello, for example, wrote only four exit arias in Elfrida and none at all in Elvira. The same composer reached a new level in Pirro in 1787; contemporary periodicals (Gazzetta Universale and Gazzetta Toscana) and direct documentation (G.G. Ferrari, Hadrava) reveal how much the dramatization of the solo scenes and the elaborate ensemble finales were admired. Singers were asked to interpret with greater realism and fidelity, as Burney documented when he praised the Florentine Guarducci for his expressivity and because he ‘adds but few notes’ to the melody.
Comedy, which had been banished from opera by Zeno's reform, began a history of its own. The first comic operatic forms were the commedia per musica and the intermezzo, neither of them popular art forms – indeed, in some cases, they were quite erudite – and they shared in the same anti-Baroque reaction as Zeno's reforms. The intermezzo, which grew out of the comic scenes in 17th-century opera, sprang from collaborations between the librettist Pariati and Gasparini and Albinoni and the buffo bass G.B. Cavana in Venice (the first printed librettos date from 1707). Cavana is responsible for the intermezzo being exported from Venice to Naples, where it was taken up by Scarlatti, Leo, Sarro, Vinci, Hasse and Pergolesi. The most frequently performed intermezzo of the century was Bacocco e Serpilla by G.M. Orlandini (1715, Verona). But posterity remembers the intermezzo (suppressed in Naples by royal decree in 1736) only by Pergolesi's La serva padrona (1733, Naples), which sparked the Querelle des Bouffons when it was performed at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris in 1752. There were some forward-looking elements in the style of a typical intermezzo: music which stays close to the text, short, unadorned vocal phrases, a simple plot with two or three characters, a recognition scene set as a duet, and middle-class, popular subject matter.
The commedia per musica had a more complex genesis: in Naples, after the private experiment of La Cilla (1706), the Teatro dei Fiorentini organized the first public season of commedeje pe' museca, all in Neapolitan dialect, in 1709. There were companies active in Rome performing Neapolitan commedie, and in 1717 Florence saw a scholarly attempt to revive the 17th-century ‘civili e rusticali’ operas of Moniglia and Villifranchi, while the librettist, impresario and composer G.M. Buini had a company working in Bologna and Venice. Only Neapolitan comedy, translated into Italian, went on to long-lasting success; the buffo bass Francesco Baglioni was responsible for the genre's decisive step forward in popularity, in Rome. Here in 1729 there were performances of La costanza (from Vinci's Li zite 'ngalera) and La somiglianza (from Leo's Lo simmele) at the Teatro Capranica; in 1738 La finta cameriera (Latilla) and La commedia in commedia (Rinaldo di Capua) were given at the Teatro Valle. La finta cameriera had been performed more than 20 times in northern Italy by 1750. Neapolitan opera buffa continued on its way in Florence, where it was performed by the singers Pertici, Laschi, Brogi and Querzoli. Goldoni was living in Florence until 1748; when he returned to Venice his collaboration with Galuppi produced the two examples of dramma giocoso per musica, L'Arcadia in Brenta (1749; see fig.11) and Il filosofo di campagna (1754), the first pan-Italian comic operas.
The golden age of opera buffa lasted from 1770 until about 1820, significantly, from Piccinni to Rossini. Although more ambitious in scope, the genre has similarities with the intermezzo: the various characters are stylized in music that has a new, imitative quality; each text was set only once, and operas were frequently revived, but the text was not printed, as yet; ensembles are used and secco recitative retained in response to the need to present the action as succinctly as possible; multiple musical forms and linguistic registers are employed, from dialect to Latinate Italian for parody purposes, and a range of vocal writing from parlando to the decorative melismas of opera seria; many more voice types are used, and the leading role is always taken by a buffo bass (the famous performers were G.B. Cavana, Gioacchino Corrado, Filippo Laschi, Pietro Pertici, Francesco Baglioni and Antonio Lottini) while the higher voices are expected to be more actors than virtuoso singers. In 1760 La buona figliuola by Piccinni, to a libretto by Goldoni, marked the change to a pathetic, sentimental genre; the success of this work can be measured both in the influence it had on opera seria and in the dissemination of some of its techniques, such as the rondo finale.
Venice was the centre of the operatic market both for its high rate of consumption and because it provided the link to posts in northern Europe; Bologna was where the agencies that looked after the engagements of singers, composers and designers were concentrated, and Naples was the centre for the training of operatic composers. This division, already clear to De Brosses (1799) and Archenholz (1787), reflects the system of Italian opera production, based not on permanent service, as in the courts of northern Europe, but on itinerant singers, composers, designers and choreographers. The mobile work force was coordinated by the impresarios, who belonged to the urban middle class, and who directed the theatres with public and private money. The great cities had many theatres: usually the political authority controlled and financed the leading theatre, devoted to opera seria for celebrations and during the Carnival seasons (averaging two new operas a year), and occasionally a minor theatre, giving commedie or opera buffa; these two organizations had the characteristics of civic institutions. For example, in Naples the leading theatre of S Bartolomeo (S Carlo from 1737) was linked to the Fondo; in Milan the Ducale (La Scala from 1778) was associated with the Cannobiana; in Turin the connected theatres were the Regio and the Carignano, and other financed theatres were found in Rome, Genoa, Bologna, Florence, Parma and Reggio nell'Emilia. Many smaller theatres were not subsidized and were in competition with one another: the Fiorentini and Nuovo theatres in Naples, for example, and many others in Venice, Rome, Bologna and Florence; smaller cities, finally, were connected to the dominant centres by the impresario network (in 1785 about 80 cities had a theatre). The private minor theatres favoured comic opera, which meant that impresarios could economize on the production and choose operas with a wider audience appeal. In these cases it was more economical to revive tried and tested scores. The smaller business corresponded to more moderate payment to the singers; opera buffa was performed by more or less stable companies when the market in opera seria was already operating on an individual basis (this could be a practical reason why there are more ensembles in comic opera). The business of the leading opera seria theatres involved greater outlay, but survival was guaranteed by government support: the business of the minor theatres was subject to the risks of the free market: this contrast reveals another aspect of the bourgeois nature of opera buffa.
In opera seria the long survival of castratos (Guadagni, Farinelli, Senesino, Caffariello and Gizziello) and the stardom of the great virtuosos (Bordoni, Gabrielli, Cuzzoni, Raaf and Carlani) meant that the profession never became one transmitted from generation to generation (in fact, singing was considered extremely specialized); in comic opera, in contrast, skills were passed down through entire family trees (descendants of the Laschi and Baglioni families appeared in the first performances of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni). The abstract, idealized tone of opera seria allowed unnatural voice types to survive for quite some time; the realistic, middle-class tone of opera buffa required only natural voices and the entire range of voice types to differentiate between the characters.
When it first appeared, comic opera was musically and dramatically progressive, but the financial basis on which the opera house was organized meant that within 30 years the situation was reversed. Being less exposed to market forces, opera seria had greater freedom to experiment and develop, while opera buffa, subject to public approval, maintained its original features up to the 19th century; for this reason, the eclecticism of opera seria from the 1780s onwards (in the work of Paisiello, Sarti, Paer and Mayr) enabled it to develop continually, while the growing success of opera buffa meant that it became a conservative genre.
Italy, §I, 5: 18th century art music
Foreign travellers such as De Brosses, Burney, Coyer, Lalande and Hadrava were struck by the amount of music performed in Italian churches. Burney, in particular, paints a picture of much sacred music, often of poor quality, being composed and performed for a non-class-specific audience. The principal causes for its weakness were the quasi-operatic character of the music, and the demands of composing quickly to order. Besides this ‘consumer’ output, the visitors also noted a rigorous ‘Palestrina’ style of strict counterpoint with or without instrumental accompaniment, unconnected with consumption or changing taste. Burney in 1770 indicates its use not only in Rome in the famous Cappella Sistina and Cappella Giulia and at the Chiesa Nuova, but also in Florence and Venice.
The stylistic colonization of sacred music, in particular of oratorio, by opera reflects the latter's economic dominance. The connection between the two is suggested by the title of Arcangelo Spagna's essay Oratorii overo melodrammi sacri (1706), in which he proposes that the lessons of contemporary opera should be taken on board to alleviate the monotony of oratorios. The oratorio of the early 18th century was divided into two sections with a total of 400 lines, split into recitatives and da capo arias. The most active librettists in Italian oratorio, apart from those who were also patrons, Benedetto Pamphili and Pietro Ottoboni, were Stampiglia, Zeno (from 1718) and Metastasio (from 1730).
Rome was the centre of oratorio: the Oratorio del Crocifisso, where Alessandro Scarlatti worked and Corelli was leader of the violins, was the home of oratorio in Latin until 1710; other locations were S Girolamo della Carità, S Maria in Vallicella, Chiesa Nuova, Seminario Romano Gesuita, Collegio Clementino, the Confraternita della Morte and the Confraternita della Pietà dei Fiorentini, and the many noble homes which hosted performances of oratorios and cantatas in Italian by Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel and Caldara. From 1720 Durante, Leo, Porpora, Jommelli, Piccinni, Cimarosa, Paisiello, Anfossi and Zingarelli worked at the Oratorio dei Girolamini, Naples; here a debate on sacred music saw the supporters of Durante (‘durantisti’), who wanted to distinguish between modern composition and the style of Palestrina, line up against Leo's supporters (‘leisti’) who looked instead for a fusion between the two. In Venice oratorio continued to be in Latin, cultivated first by Lotti, Gasparini and Vivaldi, then by Bertoni, Sacchini and Galuppi. In Bologna, the second papal city, Vitali, the Predieri family, Perti and his pupil Giovanni Battista Martini provided works for the cathedral of S Petronio and the academies: degli Unanimi, degli Anziani and delle Belle Lettere. Sammartini and Marchi worked for Milan Cathedral, where in 1724 there was a performance of the composite oratorio La calunnia delusa by ten local composers, in the manner of the operatic pasticcio. There is documentation of the fashion for such composite oratorios in Florence as well.
In the mid-century the papacy also made concessions to the prevailing operatic style: Pope Benedict XIV's encyclical Occasione imminenti Anni Sacri (1749) hopes for a middle way ‘inter cantum ecclesiasticum et scaenicas modulationes’. Teachers like Durante and scholars like Padre Martini safeguarded the strict Palestrina style. In his polemic with Eximeno, Martini takes Pergolesi's Stabat mater to task for paying little attention to sacred style, and in so doing Martini demonstrates an abstract idea of strict counterpoint that is at a remove from the actual music, and thus anachronistic.
Italy, §I, 5: 18th century art music
For a long time instrumental music was also held to be a functional adornment which could be altered according to the occasion. The composer did not yet consider his own work to be an absolute ‘text’. The evidence for this lies in the details of for whom, and for what occasions, sonatas or concertos were composed: Corelli for private celebrations of Roman patrons, Vivaldi to provide music for teaching, Tartini for the solemn functions at the basilica of S Antonio in Padua, Sammartini ‘for the entertainment of those citizens who for amusement come to the ramparts [of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan] on summer evenings’ (Carpani). In the middle of the century there was a reaction against the predominantly lightweight nature of instrumental music in the period: Algarotti heard ‘motives’ and ‘subjects’ derived from Petrarch in Tartini's works; Tartini himself attributed to instrumental musical expression the natural imitation of ‘characters’ and ‘affects’, often clarified in short Metastasian verses placed at the head of the piece of music. Despite their differences, the two attitudes indicate the movement from a scientific concept of music (applied science) to the aesthetic idea (expressive fine art).
At the beginning of the century Rome and Venice were the leading centres: Burney saw in the Venetian school around Vivaldi (Albinoni, Alberti and Tessarini) ‘a light and irregular troop’; on the other hand, the Roman school formed by Corelli (Locatelli, Geminiani and Valentini) provided ‘the greatest performers and composers for the violin which Italy could boast during the first 50 years of the present century’. Historical distance, however, shows a proximity between the two, encouraged by the Borghese and Ottoboni families. In 1905 Schering established Corelli's thematic influence on Vivaldi; he saw Vivaldi's op.3, L'estro armonico, as an eclectic collection embracing both conventional Venetian elements and contemporary Roman elements taken from Corelli's pupil Valentini. There were two responses to Corelli's position as the archetype: for some his work was a model from which to develop according to the composer's own sensibilities: these include Vivaldi, Veracini and Tartini. Others took a more conservative approach and followed the Corellian forms of sonata and concerto to the letter; examples of this are his pupil Geminiani, Locatelli and Handel.
The basic compositional element for Corelli is variety, the juxtaposition of contrasting elements. The op.6 collection of concerti grossi brings together paratactic elements written at different times and on different occasions, assembled as constructional building-blocks according to the basic criterion of contrast (counterpoint–harmony, tutti–concertino, cantabile–virtuosity, slow–fast, sonata da chiesa–sonata da camera).
While the form of the Corelli sonata with a prelude and two or three movements spread quickly to the Venetian school (Caldara, op.2, 1699; Albinoni, op.3, 1701), there are some differences between the two schools when it comes to concerto writing: the make up of the ensembles is different and Vivaldi tended to establish a uniform style of writing in five parts (principal violin, first and second violin, viola and cello/basso continuo). The concerto for one or more soloists was developed much more in Venice, and the Venetians reduced the formal variety of the Roman concerto to the form Allegro–Adagio–Allegro.
The Corelli model was disseminated not only through his influence in Venice but also by his pupils: Locatelli and Geminiani brought the Italian concerto grosso to the Netherlands and England, Somis (in Rome from 1703) began the Turin school of violin playing which led to Giardini, Pugnani and Viotti, and lastly, for Tartini the starting-point was a Roman source in a Venetian manner.
It was Tartini, with his work after 1735, who exceeded the bounds of the Corelli tradition. In his concertos for violin and strings the three movements are planned tonally and have four tutti sections alternating with three solo interventions. Tartini's sonatas, on the other hand, follow a scheme of increasingly fast tempos (Lento, Allegro, Vivace), and are in a two-part form – tonic-dominant–retransition. The slow movements demonstrate the ‘instrumental cantabile which constitutes the real achievement of Tartini's art’ (Petrobelli).
De Brosses (1799), while recognizing Tartini's eminence, had a high opinion of the Lombard instrumental school, which benefited from the region's political links with Vienna. There were many composers active in Milan, with G.B. Sammartini at their head, who wrote ‘sinfonie’ (works for four-part strings, also known as ‘ouverture’ or ‘sonate’): Brioschi, Scaccia, Giulini and Lampugnani (who also composed operas). Sammartini's sinfonie, from the 1740s, constitute a model which J.C. Bach, Boccherini, Haydn and Mozart must have looked to. The key to Sammartini's mature symphonic style is rhythmic organization and his ability to maintain an intense musical flow giving rise to continuity of structure: this gives his style an eminently logical and dynamic structure which is also to be found in Tartini, distinct from the static-architectural conception of the late-Baroque concerto. In his Dictionnaire de musique (1768) Rousseau signals Tartini as an exemplary composer of Adagios, Sammartini of Andantes and Locatelli of Allegros.
With Boccherini the diaspora of Italian instrumentalists became evident. Boccherini sums up the history of Italian instrumental music: from the neo-classical composure of Corelli assimilated during his student year in Rome (1757), to the Tartini style which he came to know through his teacher G.B. Costanzi and his collaborators Nardini and Manfredi, all pupils of Tartini, and the symphonic style of Sammartini, with whom he collaborated in person in 1765. Boccherini unites this Italian legacy with an eclectic international experience that ranges from Gluck to Gossec to the Mannheim school. But his assimilation of such elements was consciously directed towards a ‘stylistic originality’ (Degrada) that would support his authoritative role and individual creativity (‘I would not be Boccherini if I had written as you advised’).
Keyboard composition shows less vitality. The harpsichord was used principally to realize basso continuo, as can be read in the treatise L'armonico pratico al cimbalo by Gasparini (1708) and in Burney's documentation (1771). While Zipoli, organist of the church of the Gesù in Rome in 1716, and Durante introduced a distinction of timbre and idiom between organ and harpsichord, this came to fruition only in Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas, a personal development which has few connections with the Italian experience.
In 1711 in the Giornale de' Letterati d'Italia Scipione Maffei announced the construction of the first pianoforte by Bartolomeo Cristofori, harpsichord builder to the grand ducal court of Tuscany; but the new instrument was slow to become established. Sonata composers in the Venice area, Pescetti, Platti, Alberti, Galuppi, Paganelli, remained tied to harpsichord thinking. Some melodic ideas, however, and a broad use of functional dynamic accompaniments to suit the new melodic manner (the ‘Alberti bass’) show some evidence of interest in the new instrument. Here we can see a model for that ‘singing Allegro’ which became widespread in Europe for several decades. The Neapolitan school shows individual features in keyboard music too: Rutini, Paradies and Vento became famous abroad in particular (in England especially) more as harpsichordists than as opera composers. One of the flood of Italian composers who travelled to London was Clementi, and it was due to him that the piano became completely independent from earlier instruments. His sonatas op.2 (1773) display a modern, independent thematic style while introducing a whole range of pianistic techniques which remained in use up until the time of Schubert.
(v) Cultural systems and aesthetics.
Italy, §I, 6: 19th century art music
The multifarious activities of the previous century slackened at the beginning of the 19th and concentrated on musical theatre, where a code of communication between the composer and the Italian audience was firmly established. Whereas in the rest of Europe Romantic aspirations were expressed through instrumental music, in Italy this spirit was entirely manifested in opera; in fact the melodramma mirrored the behaviour of Italian society, in the manner of the novel in France, England and Russia. The middle classes began to rule the country even at the level of musical life, and publishers (such as Ricordi in Milan) and impresarios (such as Barbaia, Jacovacci, Lanari and Merelli) were the arbiters of operatic life. There was no place in the new century for a learned scholar like Padre Martini; his heirs, Padre Mattei at Bologna, Bonifazio Asioli at Milan and G.B. Baini at Rome, were restricted to a narrower sphere of activity. Men of culture were less important, while the clever impresario (often of humble origins) and the efficient publishers grew in power as they began to employ the medium of newspapers or new industrial techniques. Revolutionary opera, with its contemporary social implications, had little following in Italy. In his preface to the libretto of La congiura pisoniana (1797, Milan), F.S. Salfi presented an opera that aimed at ‘instruction’, at ‘the heart’ as well as ‘the ear’; but such purposes would have required a freer form like the opéra comique or the Singspiel, foreign to taste in Italy where opera sung from beginning to end was a deep-rooted tradition. The revolutionary storm shipwrecked many composers of the old school. Cimarosa and Paisiello led turbulent lives under revolutionary and Bourbon governments, and the peaceful life of the second half of the 18th century ended in a period of great confusion. Significantly, after starting conventional careers in Italy, the two greatest Italian composers of the age, Cherubini and Spontini, worked abroad and wrote operas in foreign languages. At the same time, at least in northern Italy, the scene was dominated by a foreigner, Simon Mayr, who introduced a type of serious, carefully orchestrated opera influenced by Gluck.
The Restoration period was brightly illuminated by Rossini, whose star rose in 1813 just as that of Napoleon was about to set. Rossini’s comic operas perfectly mirror the ‘average Italian’, with his disillusioned view of existence and his refusal to accept extreme solutions; similarly, the distinction between the Neapolitan and Venetian schools, between south and north, ended after 1815, when Barbaia summoned Rossini to Naples for Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra. As his operas were produced throughout Italy, many composers such as Mayr, Pietro Generali and Nicola Vaccai, who a few decades earlier would have scored a deserved success in their respective centres, were eclipsed by Rossini; those who, like Pacini and Mercadante, competed with Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti on the one hand, and Verdi on the other, suffered even more from the comparison.
The musical unification of the country achieved by Rossini soon bore fruit; Bellini, a Sicilian, triumphed in Milan, while Donizetti, a Lombard, conquered Naples and Rome. Italy seemed smaller and more united, its boundaries increasingly connected by modern means of transport, its roads travelled by political exiles from one end of the country to the other. The number of major theatres was smaller than in the 18th century, but their prestige grew in inverse proportion, and La Fenice at Venice, La Scala at Milan, the Pergola at Florence, the Apollo and Argentina at Rome and the S Carlo at Naples were renowned throughout Italy. The export of Italian music, checked by the flourishing Romantic movement at the beginning of the century, was revived by Rossini; connections with Paris were renewed, and Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi followed in Rossini’s footsteps, while for nearly the whole of the century France acted as the channel through which English and German literature reached Italy.
Italian opera, though still based on the supremacy of the voice, was no longer a self-sufficient and united world. It had to adapt itself to Romantic ideals. One of the first results was the waning popularity of comic opera after the peak reached by Rossini. Works in the style continued to be written (for instance by Valentino and Vincenzo Fioravanti at Rome and Naples), but after Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (1832) the next comic masterpiece in Italy was Verdi’s Falstaff (1893). Meanwhile new sources were discovered in European fiction and literature and particularly in English history (after the downfall of Napoleon such subjects became very popular); they were treated with a modified form of Romanticism, as for instance in the librettos of Felice Romani, who remained faithful to classical rules of plot construction. However, a new feeling for specific environment and a new interest in the development of the emotions produced new forces in opera, directed essentially towards the creation of dramatic tensions by musical means. Principally in pursuance of this aim, the plots drawn from novels were reduced to stock situations, allowing the music to come into its own. Significantly, no major composer set Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, the greatest Italian novel, whose complexity of events and non-tragic dénouement found no echo in operatic forms.
Though intrinsically less perfect than his comic works, Rossini’s serious operas contained greater potential for development. A fine thread connects Piccinni’s Cecchina and Paisiello’s Nina to the Desdemona of Rossini’s Otello and through her to the heroines of Bellini and Donizetti, in whose operas love – a love thwarted by outside circumstances – forms the nucleus of the plot. Rossini also pointed the way to action through music, by the regular transference of the ensemble from comic into tragic opera. All these composers aimed, in different ways, at dramatic consistency. Bellini’s dramatic sense, particularly strong in Norma, was not allowed to prejudice the supremacy of bel canto but permeated and combined with the great voices of the epoch, Pasta, Malibran and above all Rubini, for whom Bellini wrote the first typical Romantic tenor roles (e.g. Gualtiero in Il pirata, 1827). Donizetti and Mercadante, from 1835 onwards, reflected their concern for action and consistency in trenchant and pithy thematic material and in a melodic line immediately responsive to expressive demands; they, rather than Bellini, were the direct precursors of early Verdi.
The literary polemics between classical and romantic conceptions were also applied to music, dissolving into a series of artificial antitheses long current in Italian musical circles: melody (exclusively the heritage of Italy) and harmony (an oltremontana, i.e. German, quality), voice and orchestra, bel canto and canto declamato, idealized history and everyday reality. The debate between the traditionalists (who included men of letters such as Carlo Botta, Giuseppe Carpani and Felice Romani) and the innovators was still going on in 1836, when Giuseppe Mazzini published his Filosofia della musica, which proclaimed the ‘emancipation from Rossini’, the birth of a music-drama based on stronger moral principles, with greater chorus participation, and the decline of the typical situation drama with its soprano and tenor lovers separated by the baritone. The debate was echoed in 1847 by the poet Giuseppe Giusti, who advised Verdi, after the production of Macbeth at Florence (where the first Italian performances of Robert le diable and Der Freischütz had been given in 1840 and 1843 respectively) to leave such fantastic plots to northern artists.
The renewal of musical theatre advocated by Mazzini was achieved in the art of Verdi, who perfectly expressed the ideals of the second half of the century. Verdi triumphed in Milan at a time when La Scala was dominated by Bartolomeo Merelli and the power of Ricordi was increasing through the absorption of smaller firms and the foundation (in 1842, the year of Nabucco) of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano. Verdi learnt from Rossini, in particular from the choral grandeur of Mosè, which in hastier style and with more pressing rhythms he transferred to the Risorgimento operas Nabucco, I lombardi alla prima crociata and La battaglia di Legnano (the last named was performed in 1849 at Rome, which had been abandoned by the pope and was governed by the republicans Mazzini, Armellini and Saffi).
The years 1848–9 were a watershed in 19th-century Italian music, and not only because of the death of Donizetti. The war against Austria produced a crisis in theatrical life; fewer people attended, the number of performances decreased, and celebrated singers like Erminia Frezzolini and Eugenia Tadolini either worked abroad or lost confidence in the managements. The failure of the national revolution led to a neglect of heroic themes in favour of individual dramas in which conflict raged in the soul and not on the battlefield. This tendency achieved perfection in Verdi’s operas Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata, produced at Venice and Rome between 1851 and 1853. The primacy of the individual seemed to herald a revival of the stories about individual characters such as had been treated by Bellini and Donizetti, but the ordering of events was no longer in the hands of a librettist such as Romani. The learned Salvadore Cammarano, librettist of Lucia di Lammermoor, could not understand the characterization of Azucena conceived by Verdi in Il trovatore; a librettist like F.M. Piave, willing to follow the composer’s wishes in supplanting the aria with the scena, was more useful. This broadened conception is realized in all three operas, but the subject of La traviata, with its contemporary setting, best illustrates the spirit of the 1850s, although it was considered a bad influence by the leaders of the Risorgimento, who preferred high-minded subjects and saw a dangerously complacent sentimentality in the choice of a fashionably consumptive courtesan as heroine.
Verdi’s ascendancy over Italy throughout the second half of the century is significantly based entirely on public acclaim; intellectual and cultural circles were not won over until much later (through the influence of Toscanini around 1920). The ‘classicists’ considered Verdi’s early operas ‘noisy’ because of their abuse of the chorus and of martial rhythms. In the middle years of his career, the writers Giuseppe Rovani and Carlo Dossi, from the Milanese milieu that formed the cradle of Verdi’s art, continued to prefer the operas of Rossini. The critic Basevi, who found Rigoletto’s physical deformity unacceptable, showed that strong classicist prejudice remained even in 1859. After about 1860 Verdi aroused opposition less in the traditionalists than in the younger generation, interested in the novelties of European music and attracted to the cultural and technical ambitions of Meyerbeer, the elegant precision of Gounod and the dramatic ideals of Wagner (whose music was still little known in Italy, apart from the overtures to Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser).
During its early years (1861–70), the newly formed kingdom of Italy had naturally to stand comparison with other European countries and to discover by how much it lagged behind in the cultural and artistic fields. In spite of Verdi, there was much talk of decadence in opera and of the reforms needed in the management of theatres and schools. Musical education became a national responsibility, developing from seeds planted in northern Italy by the short-lived Napoleonic governments at the beginning of the century. The Milan Conservatory, which maintained high standards, was instituted in 1807 and set the pattern for conservatories founded in mid-century in Florence, Turin, Rome, Palermo, Venice and Bologna. It was a difficult time financially; in 1867 theatrical subventions were curtailed and taxes imposed on contracts and profits; the following year Broglio, the minister for education, drew up a scheme for an association to administer and direct the conservatories, with Rossini, then in the last year of his life, in Paris, as president. A similar commission, with Verdi as president, was set up in 1871 to reform the musical institutions. Even so, many young people felt that Italy could not satisfy their thirst for knowledge, and in 1861 Arrigo Boito and Franco Faccio went abroad with scholarships – a significant reversal of the trend that since the Renaissance had led students and scholars towards Italy.
As the music schools multiplied, there was a growing interest in chamber and symphonic music, mostly German; Germany, the country of technical excellence, was much admired by Italy in the 1870s, while political events caused a growing coldness towards France. In 1870 the critic Filippo Filippi published six reports in La perseveranza on the Wagner operas he had seen at Weimar; the following year at Bologna Angelo Mariani conducted Lohengrin, the first Wagner opera heard in Italy, which immediately aroused enthusiastic and polemical reactions throughout the country. A long-standing rivalry between Verdi and Wagner ensued. Essentially it was an extension of the traditional rivalry between opera and music drama, between voice and orchestra, between Italian and German music; unlike the otherwise similar dispute between Piccinni and Gluck, it was not carried on with 18th-century chivalry but, especially in the case of the rivalry between the two publishing houses Ricordi (Verdi’s publisher) and Lucca, with the insensitive hostility of modern business methods. The firm of Francesco Lucca, established in 1825, benefited greatly from the energies of Giovannina Strazza, wife of the founder. In opposition to Ricordi she too started (in 1847) a newspaper, L’Italia musicale; in an attempt to find an alternative to Verdi, she supported Mercadante, Pacini and other minor figures, including Salvi, Ricci and Petrella, and also zealously introduced into Italy the works of foreign composers, from Gounod, Halévy and Meyerbeer to Wagner.
Meanwhile, the more progressive of the generation of composers that followed Verdi and considered him outdated (though without specifically saying so), began to appear. The manifesto of this new movement, outlined by Boito in two articles that appeared in La perseveranza (1863–4), was summarized in four points: ‘the complete elimination of formula; the creation of form; the realization of the largest possible tonal and rhythmic development; the total embodiment of drama’. The practical realization of these aims was more tame, as was exemplified by Faccio’s Amleto (1865) and Boito’s Mefistofele (1868). Boito was a man of wide culture, the first Italian composer who was also an intellectual, and an adherent of the ‘Scapigliatura’, a forward-looking literary movement active in Milan. But in musical matters the ‘Scapigliati’ were Rossinians, while Boito’s modernism was largely intellectual; his covert antagonism to Verdi, therefore, changed quite naturally to sympathy and from 1881 to collaboration. Verdi, faced after 1860 with a transformation in Italian musical life, adopted two different attitudes – one a public resistance to innovation, the other a secret absorption of new ideas into his own operas, written at increasingly long intervals. After La traviata his choice of subjects, no longer confined to love, became much wider. Don Carlos, composed for Paris in 1867, is a more progressive work than either Amleto or Mefistofele, and its protagonist reflects more clearly than either of theirs the hectic excitement of the ‘Scapigliati’. Later the Messa da Requiem won over the Wagnerians, through Bülow. In his final operas, Otello and Falstaff, both on texts by Boito, Verdi banished all traces of closed form; in them he again confronted the basic myth of Romanticism, Shakespeare.
Verdi had no pupils and no real imitators. The opera composers who attempted, during the first years of Italian unity, to establish themselves in the small area left free by Verdi, all achieved one dazzling success that had no sequel. Filippo Marchetti’s Ruy Blas (1869) was produced at 60 theatres within two years; Il Guarany (1870), by the Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes, was admired by Verdi himself; after I goti (1873), Stefano Gobatti was for a short time hailed as ‘the new Verdi’; and Ponchielli’s La Gioconda (1876) was received, more justifiably, with exceptional enthusiasm that lasted longer. But none of these inaugurated a successful career for its composer, and all of them, despite a superficial similarity of dramatic content, differed from Verdi’s works in their ostentatious, neo-Romantic style or in their insistently picturesque detail. Even further from Verdi’s realism were those operas based on a different kind of plot: Antonio Bazzini’s Turanda (1867), coloured by the fairy-tale surrealism of Carlo Gozzi; Luigi Mancinelli’s Isora di Provenza (1884), produced at Bologna, the Wagnerian stronghold; and Loreley (1890) and La Wally (1892) by Alfredo Catalani, Bazzini’s pupil at Milan. In all these, and particularly Catalani’s, the spirit of northern fantasy crossed the Alps, and under the auspices of Wagnerian harmony it at last established a precarious foothold in Italian opera.
Wagner himself came to be better known; in 1883 the touring company managed by Angelo Neumann brought the Ring to Venice, Florence, Rome, Turin, Milan and Trieste. In 1888 the publishing house of Ricordi took over that of Lucca, and little by little the taste for novelty diminished. During the 1876–7 season Italian theatres still put on about 40 new operas, but public interest increasingly centred on successful works of the recent past, which were now the basis of the repertory. Innovation was regarded with scepticism, a sign of the decline of opera, at least in the sense of a common language uniting the musician and society, such as had prevailed at the beginning of the century. In the years immediately before the appearance of Puccini, the true face of the Italy of the time can be seen not in large-scale operas on historical subjects (which continued to appear, however) but in the salon song, a genre cultivated by refined singing teachers like Gaetano Palloni and Filippo Marchetti at Rome, Gaetano Braga at Milan, and the greatest of them all, Paolo Tosti, the darling of Roman aristocratic society until he settled in London in 1880. In his songs Tosti caught the flexible intimacy, the sentimental sheen characteristic of the age of King Umberto I behind its façade of pomp and grandeur (which inspired, for instance, the building of the Teatro Costanzi at Rome in 1880).
Italy, §I, 6: 19th century art music
Church music was the least popular genre for the 19th-century Italian composer. Certainly a large quantity was written, not only by minor composers, for use in worship, but also, less prolifically, by most of the major figures; but its prestige in Italian society reached a low level during the century, and began to rise again only with Perosi. The explanation lies partly in the ‘religiosity’ of Romanticism, hostile to codified systems and more sympathetic to secular forms such as opera, where monasteries, convents and religious choruses are frequent elements; and partly in the particular circumstances of Italy, where political and cultural progress, inspired by the laity, found an obstacle in the Church of Rome, no longer the symbol of a universal religion but a state within a state. This accentuated the growth of two different styles, both already apparent in the previous century: the academic and the theatrical. The stronghold of the academic style was still the Cappella Sistina, where first Baini and then Alfieri maintained the tradition. It continued in current practice for even longer, although increasingly as a means of learning composition, or as a student’s exercise useful for winning a scholarship (as Catalani and Puccini did) to Milan, the capital of opera. Above this didactic level, the adoption of operatic language and vocal style was customary. The most prolific writers of church music were often opera composers who had withdrawn from the theatrical battlefield, like Generali, Vaccai or Carlo Coccia, who produced mainly masses with orchestral or organ accompaniment; while the sacred masterpieces of the century, including Cherubini’s masses (in particular the two Requiem masses written in Paris), Rossini’s Stabat mater and Petite messe solennelle and Verdi’s Requiem, were all written by the leading opera composers.
It is symptomatic that in 1838 Pope Gregory XVI invited Spontini, rather than Baini or any other member of the Cappella Sistina, to compile a report on the decline of sacred music in Italy. The pervasive influence of the operatic style even penetrated the field most firmly closed to outside interference, organ music, as the works of Giacomo Davide of Bergamo and V.A. Petrali show. No consciousness of a need for reform or for the preservation of early church music was apparent until the last decades of the century, when in 1877 G. Amelli, inspired by the Cecilian movement, founded the periodical Musica sacra and the Associazione Italiana di S Cecilia.
Italy, §I, 6: 19th century art music
Instrumental music, although to a lesser degree, also served primarily as a training ground for those composers aspiring to operatic success, while the instrument typifying 19th-century Romanticism, the piano, was the chief medium through which opera reached a large section of the public, in transcriptions, fantasias, variations and arrangements of the most popular numbers. The influence of operatic style was paramount here as well. Until 1850 aspects of the 18th-century situation persisted to some extent, with the greatest composers working outside Italy. Milan was still a centre for instrumental music, but the only figure of international repute based in Italy was Paganini, who was self-taught and was a native of the north, where the traditions of violin-playing were strongest. While Paganini’s activity led him all over Europe between 1828 and 1834, other violinists returned to work in Italy after the Napoleonic era; they were second-rate composers, who had benefited from an exposure to European culture during long periods abroad, and it was due also to F.A. Radicati (in Bologna), Ferdinando Giorgetti (in Florence) and G.B. Polledro (in Turin) that the taste for chamber music did not die out altogether.
The decade from 1850 was the emptiest as regards instrumental music, the revival of which from about 1860 thus seemed to start from nothing. The various Italian court cappelle, whose activity was already much reduced, were swept away soon after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (1861). They were succeeded by the philharmonic societies and other private associations founded by members of the aristocracy or the middle class, which became the centres of an instrumental culture. As if aware that a great deal of lost territory needed recovering, this culture began with the works of Beethoven, which did not become generally known throughout the country until the 1860s, a delay of 50 years that had far-reaching consequences. To meet the new demand, Ricordi published several major collections, including La biblioteca del pianista and L’arte antica e moderna. Meanwhile a network of quartet societies rapidly spread over Italy, reaching Florence in 1861 (after the Beethoven concerts promoted by Basevi), Milan and Turin in the 1860s, Palermo in 1871 and Bologna in 1879. The growing interest in symphonic music (at Florence the publisher Guidi printed early pocket scores) led to the foundation of the Società Filarmonica at Naples in 1867, the Concerti Popolari at Turin in 1872 and the Società Orchestrale Romana in 1874. It was a natural, although over-simplified, consequence to ally this ferment of activity to the Wagnerian and progressive schools and to see it as an alternative to the Italian operatic tradition; so another rigid barrier, supported by the authoritative voice of Verdi, for whom Italian music was naturally ‘vocal’, was erected between operatic music, favoured by the vast majority, and instrumental (or ‘classical’) music, preferred only by a minority but associated with the qualities of culture and progress.
Celebrated soloists, including the violinist Camillo Sivori, the cellist Alfredo Piatti and the double bass player Giovanni Bottesini wrote chamber music or concertos for their own instruments in the intervals between concert tours abroad. Bazzini, after many years in Leipzig and Paris, settled in Milan; although he too chiefly composed music for the violin, or chamber music, he also attempted the symphonic style in the overtures Saul and Re Lear. Stefano Golinelli (at Bologna, from 1840), whose Studi op.15 were praised by Schumann, and the brothers Disma and Adolfo Fumagalli (at Milan), composers of many small pieces, studies and operatic fantasies, all concentrated on the piano; the two leading instrumental composers of the period, Giovanni Sgambati (in Rome) and Giuseppe Martucci (at Bologna and Naples), were also trained as pianists. Probably the first 19th-century Italians to eschew opera without exhibiting an inferiority complex, they attempted all forms of chamber and symphonic music, as well as songs; their works for solo piano in particular include, especially in the case of Martucci, pieces that surpass the dimensions of ‘album leaves’ and attempt extended forms. In spite of frequent references to the early Romantics (more than to Wagner and Brahms, whom they knew personally and intended to imitate), Sgambati and Martucci undoubtedly mark an important stage in the renascence of Italian instrumental music.
Italy, §I, 6: 19th century art music
The attempts to re-establish ties with European musical culture were also fruitful in historical studies. Basevi’s critical activities at Florence; Angelo Catelani’s research into Renaissance and Baroque music in the archives at Modena; the historical compilations by Francesco Florimo on the Neapolitan and by Francesco Caffi on the Venetian schools; the foundation, in 1894, of the Rivista musicale italiana; Oscar Chilesotti’s editions of lute and guitar tablatures; Amintore Galli’s Estetica della musica, an ambitious attempt to realize an Italian history of music through analyses of works; and the output of Gaetano Cesari, whose research on the origin of the madrigal was the first of a series of basic studies on Italian music and who was the leading figure behind Ricordi’s publication of Istituzioni e Monumenti dell’Arte Musicale Italiana: all are signs that Italian culture had begun to observe its musical past in a new, historically conscious perspective.
Italy, §I, 6: 19th century art music
In the age of Rossini the dominant musical aesthetic was neo-classicism, informing the writings of Gervasoni, Majer, Carpani, Asioli and Leopardi, and encapsulated by Rossini himself in 1868. At the root of this lay the concept of the bello ideale, the ‘beautiful ideal’, which embraced a number of ideas: the predominance of melody (‘cantilena’); aesthetic pleasure, with the composer’s goal being to ‘please in music’ (Carpani); music as a ‘moral atmosphere’ in which the characters represented the action (Rossini) or as a generic expression of emotions, but not as a concrete expression of the drama; and ‘symmetries’ of forms (Asioli): the melodic line did not have the power to adapt to ‘characteristics’, ‘moods’, ‘action’ or ‘concepts’, but had an architectural value, serving as the principle that justified formal conventions.
The Romanticism of the Risorgimento and the era of Mazzini shattered this aesthetic edifice: from the 1830s onwards Victor Hugo’s Cromwell, Hernani and Le roi s’amuse were interpreted as spurs to political redemption. In his La filosofia della musica (1836) Mazzini put forward a series of statements which summed up the historical moment: the ‘committed’ composer cannot restrict himself to writing ‘notes and chords’, but must ‘understand the vast influence which [opera] could exercise on society … not renounce the idea in favour of the form’; ‘progressive’ operatic music must abandon the rigid rules of the classicists, to take on characteristic tinte and ‘historical reality’; the idea of opera as entertainment must change to one of opera as a mission; the chorus, which portrays the people, must be used more. Mazzini’s Filosofia reflected the state of Italian opera in the 1830s: new subjects taken from Schiller, Hugo, Shakespeare, Byron and Dumas père; the expansion of formal conventions, replacing ‘ideal singing’ with ‘declaimed singing’; and the contrast between the individual and the chorus.
According to Mazzini, Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, Marin Faliero and Lucrezia Borgia were the greatest examples of ‘social opera’. In his preface to Lucrezia Borgia, the librettist Felice Romani provided a snapshot of the cultural conditions of the years before the appearance of Verdi: extremes (‘physical [and] moral deformity … dark subject matter’), violation of the Artistotelian unities, mixed genres, characteristic verbal (but not yet musical) language (‘the Poet must conceal himself and let the characters speak their own language’), distortions of form and of versification in accordance with the musico-dramatic ‘metre and outline’.
In the revised edition of his Filosofia (1861) Mazzini substituted Meyerbeer for Donizetti as the representative of ‘social opera’. During the same period Basevi recognized in Meyerbeer ‘the living expression of the new requirements’. In his Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (1859) Basevi defined the new trend in Italian musical aesthetics as ‘eclecticism’: the fusion of foreign influences and national tradition, of which Verdi was the greatest exponent, despite his proclamations of self-sufficiency. In the years around 1860 musical criticism received a boost, with the trenchant writings of Boito, Basevi, Filippi, Biaggi, Mazzucato, D’Arcais and Depanis actively influencing composers in their search for a ‘new ideal’.
After the 1860s this eclecticism was linked to the desire for a greater knowledge of musical history and of music from abroad: the effect was a multiplication of styles and techniques in opera, from the comic to the tragic, great public scenes to the intimate display of private passions, from Meyerbeer’s technique of recurring themes to Berlioz’s réunion des thèmes and techniques derived from Wagner and Massenet. Linked to this diversity of styles were plots with an all-embracing, epic sweep: the greatest example is La forza del destino, but the same tendencies can be seen in Mefistofele, La Gioconda and Carlos Gomes’s Il Guarany. The inclusion of scenes incidental to the main plot has suggested a parallel with the discursiveness characteristic of the 19th-century novel.
A contemporary of Italian grand opera in the 1860s and 70s was the Scapigliatura movement in Milan, to which Boito, Faccio, Ghislanzoni and Giulio Ricordi were all linked. To Boito goes the credit for having established an openness to European culture and a new historical awareness, but one can also see in him the reaction of a cultivated man to the popularizing trends typical of the new Italy. In this phase new artistic and intellectual currents did not always run in parallel with the tastes of the broader public, dedicated to the consumption of repertory opera. Cultural exclusivity, the distance from an audience to which the artist no longer feels instinctively bound, gave rise to the idea of the ‘avant garde’; this is the source of Boito’s denial of traditional ‘formulas’.
In the last three decades of the century musical taste seems to have been led by the increasingly affluent middle class. But those who really set new trends belonged to a small professional élite, in particular the ‘Milanese monopoly’ of the publisher Ricordi who in 1888 took over his rival publisher Lucca. Newspapers of the day contrasted the ‘mass success’ of Meyerbeer against the ‘élite success’ of Wagner; Verdi’s operas from Ernani to Aida were popular successes, while Otello did not escape the charge of intellectualism (which in part reflects Verdi’s own desire). Works of value were not directly subject to public judgment, as Verdi, with false ingenuousness, wished, but were now selected by a new professional class made up of intellectuals (Boita, Filippi and others) and businessmen (Ricordi, Sonzogno).
Popularization and specialization: this aesthetic duality was seen, on the one hand, in the growth of bands, of amateur choirs, the advent of operetta (after 1870) and grandiose stage productions; and, on the other, in the increase in concert-giving and the aestheticism of cultural fashions. The difficulty of bridging this dichotomy has condemned many works created in the last 30 years of the century to oblivion: it is not surprising that between Aida and Otello the only two operas to have remained in the repertory are Mefistofele and La Gioconda, representing the outer limits of the symbiosis between the two; the first tending towards intellectualism, the second towards popular appeal. The Giovane Scuola and so-called verismo opera were a success because of this aesthetic eclecticism and not as a popular reaction against it: while its components can still be identified as symbols of an Italian musical nature, their success rests on an intensive assimilation of foreign influences. The ‘international’ Puccini is the interpreter of the profound weakness of the Italian educated classes, who unconsciously found themselves dependent on foreign cultures. The reconstruction of an Italian cultural and musical identity, never before really questioned, was the principal goal of the earliest musicologists (Torchi, Chilesotti, Torrefranca) and the composers of the Generazione dell’Ottanta – the generation of the 1880s.
The development of Italian opera around the turn of the century was affected by continued rivalries between influential publishers. After the absorption of Lucca in 1888, Sonzogno quickly became the new rival of Ricordi, especially after Mascagni’s spectacular success with Cavalleria rusticana (1890). Other young Italian composers taken up by Sonzogno included Leoncavallo, Giordano and Cilea, and the firm also brought important new foreign operas to Italy, starting with the Italian première of Carmen (1879). Ricordi responded not only by competing for the works of Sonzogno’s ‘discoveries’ (publishing, for example, Mascagni’s Iris) but above all by launching and supporting Puccini. All these composers were influenced by their publishers’ rivalries, and there were others less fortunate who, by failing to win adequate support from either firm, were deprived of the opportunity for operatic success in Italy: victims of such ostracism included Smareglia (a gifted Wagnerian) and Wolf-Ferrari, whose vivacious comic operas became far better known in Germany.
The opera composers supported at this time by Ricordi and Sonzogno are often referred to as the veristi. But relatively few of their works in fact followed the fashion for verismo subjects set by Cavalleria rusticana: even Mascagni’s own subsequent output, in its search for variety of subject matter at all costs, typifies, instead, that ‘poetica del diverso’ reflected also in the strong contrasts between successive Puccini operas. In Luigi Baldacci’s words, ‘for Donizetti and the young Verdi the idea of opera corresponded to a precise and direct demand from society. In Mascagni’s time, however, the demand no longer came directly from society but from the publicity business, which had to astound the public with a continuous series of theatrical ‘sensations’ – thus combating audiences’ tendency to rest content with successful operas from the recent past. Puccini, alone among the Italian opera composers who became prominent in the 1890s, had enough imagination and personality to turn the situation to his advantage: the others did not adequately follow up their early successes, but he continued to develop creatively and receptively until his death.
There were no unifying features in Italian opera in the decade before World War I. While naturalism and verismo were in decline, there emerged a spirit of pluralism that embraced the later works of Puccini (La fanciulla del West, 1910; Il trittico, 1918), Giordarno’s Mese Mariano (1910) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1915), the restless eclecticism of Mascagni (Le maschere, 1901; Lodoletta, 1917) and the Goldoni-based regionalism of Wolf-Ferrari (Le donne curiose, 1903; I quatro rusteghi, 1906). Through the pervasive influence of Gabriele D’Annunzio, elements of French decadence (sensualism, aestheticism, exoticism and archaism) gained broad currency in Italian opera of the period. The D’Annunzian taste for archaism influenced the revival of pre-19th-century Italian instrumental music and stimulated the growth of Italian musicology. The first Italian chair in the history of music was created at Rome University in 1913. The nationalist ideology underpinning the view of Italy’s musical past was also revealed in Torrefranca’s anti-Puccini pamphlet Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale (1912) and in the series Classica della musica italiana (1917), established with the participation of G.F. Malipiero and D’Annunzio.
Meanwhile Italian instrumental music was still gaining in importance after being marginalized in the 19th century, and was relatively free from the commercialization that affected opera, since it addressed mainly the select audiences of the orchestral and chamber music societies. By 1900 the composing careers of Sgambati and Martucci were almost over, culminating in Martucci’s Second Symphony (1904), which G.F. Malipiero called ‘the starting point of the renascence of non-operatic Italian music’. Before the composers of the ‘generazione dell’ottanta’ (the generation born around 1880) became established, various other instrumental composers were active. Marco Enrico Bossi drew on both the contrapuntal traditions of his native Bologna and the 19th-century German symphonic tradition, while Leone Sinigaglia wrote the earliest significant Italian works systematically based on folk music. Notable, too, are the orchestral and chamber works of Giacomo Orefice, Amilcare Zanella, Francesco Paolo Neglia and Alessandro Longo. The most widely successful non-operatic compositions during these years were, however, Perosi’s naive and eclectic oratorios. More progressive trends usually met with apathy or open hostility in Italy, and few Italian musicians born before 1875 shared Puccini’s receptivity to new ideas. Symptomatic of the situation was the predicament of Busoni, by far the most adventurous Italian composer of the time: in 1913, after many years abroad, he became director of the Bologna Liceo Musicale, hoping to lead a revolution in Italian music; but he found himself surrounded by indifference and obstructive bureaucracy and soon gave up the struggle, resigning himself to permanent exile.
By then, however, a new generation of Italian artists was already groping towards new ideals, some of which were foreshadowed in the many-sided activities and interests of D’Annunzio. The most aggressive and notorious of these newcomers were the futurists, who achieved more in literature and (especially) the visual arts than in music, though Luigi Russolo’s ‘noise machines’ have a notable place in the prehistory of musique concrète. The innovatory trends centring on the Florentine cultural periodical La voce (1908–16), with which Pizzetti and Giannotto Bastianelli were associated, were less barren where music is concerned. But the main sparking-point for new musical developments came in 1915, with the return to Italy from France of Alfredo Casella, who then for over two decades remained the leading figure (though not the most important composer) in the modernization of Italian music. Casella’s Società Italiana di Musica Moderna (1917–19) provided a platform for young composers of widely varying aims, including most of the main members of the ‘generazione dell’ottanta’: Pizzetti, Respighi, G.F. Malipiero, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Gui and even the seemingly traditional Zandonai (regarded by Ricordi as Puccini’s heir-apparent), were all members of the society, although they never in the full sense formed a ‘school’. Later, indeed, they tended to drift apart until, on 17 December 1932, Pizzetti, Respighi and Zandonai joined with various lesser composers in signing the notorious ‘Manifesto dei dieci’ attacking the progressive trends of the time. Meanwhile, undeterred by the break-up of his first circle of collaborators, Casella (together with Malipiero and Labroca, with enthusiastic encouragement from D’Annunzio) founded the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche (1923–8), which aimed to bring to Italy ‘the latest expressions and the most recent researches of contemporary musical art’ – promoting performances of, for example, Pierrot lunaire (conducted by Schoenberg) and Stravinsky’s The Wedding in many Italian cities. It was appropriate that the organization soon became closely bound up with the ISCM.
The creative results of this ferment of new developments range from the archaic nobility of Pizzetti’s choral pieces and the picturesque orchestration of Respighi’s tone poems to Casella’s aggressively dissonant ‘second manner’ and Malipiero’s hauntingly idiosyncratic theatrical experiments. It becomes increasingly clear, with historical perspective, that Malipiero was the most original of these composers, for all his unevenness (Dallapiccola even called him ‘the most important personality that Italy has had since the death of Verdi’). Moreover, his close involvement with early Italian music, which bore musicological fruit in his complete edition of Monteverdi (1926–42) as well as influencing his style, is the most conspicuous example of that preoccupation with the remoter past which also affected other composers of the time. This growing awareness, thanks to the recent research of musicologists, that Italian music had once been far more versatile, and less dominated by a frankly popular opera tradition, than it had become by the 19th century, was an important stimulus to the ‘generazione dell’ottanta’ in reacting against their immediate predecessors.
Under fascism the modernization of Italian music was to some extent held back by political pressures. But there was never a systematic censorship of the arts on Nazi lines (apart from the banning of works by Jews when Mussolini adopted Hitler’s race policies in 1938); and the press was as likely to attack music for being insufficiently Italian as for being radical in idiom. More new organizations were created to promote new works and to revive early music; notable among these were the Teatro di Torino (1925–31; established by G.M. Gatti), the Venice Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea (1930), the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (1933) and the Teatro delle Novità in Bergamo (1937). Italy’s relative cultural freedom, even in the very year of the Pact of Steel, is well illustrated by the fact that Casella, though a naively convinced fascist himself, could prominently feature Schoenberg’s music at the 1937 Venice Festival. Moreover, an exceptionally open-minded and informative periodical, founded in 1920 by Gatti as Il pianoforte and renamed La rassegna musicale in 1928, provided a crucially important antidote to narrow-minded provincialism. Nevertheless, a recognizably mussoliniano spirit of assertive, rather bombastic optimism, which represents a retrograde step after the promising developments of a few years earlier, undeniably found expression in certain works of the time, including Casella’s Concerto romano (1926) and Malipiero’s Inni (1932). In the 1920s a strain of petit-bourgeois sentimentality contributed to the popularity of operettas by such composers as Mario Costa, Giuseppe Petri and Virgilio Ranzato.
Public responses to this rapidly changing scene were variable: as in most countries, the mass of the musical population turned its back on modern developments and continued to support established favourites. In the 1930s opera declined in popularity as audiences turned to the cinema for entertainment. The progressive musical idiom and dramaturgy of works such as Malipiero’s Torneo notturno (1929) and Casella’s La donna serpente (1932) had no lasting influence, and the majority of operas, including Respighi’s La fiamma (1934) and works by Franco Alfano, Giuseppe Mulé, Adriano Lualdi, Luigi Ferrari Trecate, Felice Lattuada, Licinio Refice and Ludovico Rocca, adhered to traditional styles and techniques. But a new, more cultivated and receptive audience was growing up, and the extreme hostility which had surrounded the activities of the Società Italiana di Musica Moderna gradually subsided, though the audience for modern music, and for serious music of any kind other than opera, remains smaller in Italy than in some other countries. (Here a persistent reluctance, by the devisers of school and even university curricula, to give music an adequate place in a normal education outside the conservatories has much to answer for.) Among music publishers, Ricordi has retained a dominating position in Italian musical life; but the firm’s former overwhelming preoccupation with popular operatic success had by the 1930s given place to a more open-minded policy. Meanwhile relatively new publishing houses like Carisch and (especially) Suvini Zerboni became increasingly associated with contemporary music; and the growing importance of the radio as an outlet for music of all kinds helped to put Italian composers into a situation very different from that of their predecessors at the turn of the century. However, a great disadvantage, impeding their progress on the international scene, has been the limited resources and extreme caution of Italian record companies: the exceptional paucity of Italian commercial recordings of modern music, and a seemingly incurable dilatoriness in their distribution (even at home, let alone abroad), has been one of the most important reasons why so many recent Italian composers have failed to win world reputations commensurate with their stature.
The generation of composers who appeared in the 1930s reaped many benefits from the achievements (both creative and practical) of the ‘generazione dell’ottanta’. Composers who made their mark at this period included Vittorio Rieti, Antonio Veretti, Virgilio Mortari, Mario Pilati and Sandro Fuga. Much the most important of these newcomers were Dallapiccola and Petrassi, though Salviucci might have risen to comparable eminence but for his early death, and the rather older Ghedini reached a belated, highly individual maturity in his best music of the 1940s. Dallapiccola has won greater international renown than Petrassi, thanks partly to the powerful human appeal of ‘protest’ works like the Canti di prigionia (1941) and Il prigioniero (1948) and partly to his outstandingly sensitive adaptation of 12-note technique in terms of Italian sensibility. Petrassi, however, has in the long run proved the more adventurous composer: after 1955 drastic stylistic developments brought him unexpectedly close to the post-war avant garde.
As the 1940s progressed, several slightly younger composers, including Riccardo Nielsen, Riccardo Malipiero, Roman Vlad, Gino Contilli and the former disciple of Zandonai, Mario Peragallo, turned with varying strictness to 12-note technique, as did other, still younger men (Togni, Nono, Maderna) who were to become prominent post-war radicals. In turning to dodecaphony, these composers were inspired partly by Dallapiccola’s example and partly by a need to reject the more parochial aspects of the music of the fascist period. An important milestone in Italy’s reception of 12-note technique was the first Congresso Internazionale per la Musica Dodecafonica, held in Milan in 1949. From this time thoroughgoing post-Webern and other avant-garde trends attracted growing followings among Italian musicians. Encouraged by an exhilarating sense of release, after the constrictions of the fascist and war years, many young composers visited, or drew inspiration from, such centres of new musical enterprise as Cologne and Darmstadt, and before long comparable ventures were launched in Italy. In 1955 Berio and Maderna founded the Studio di Fonologia Musicale attached to the Milan branch of RAI, and Maderna in particular played a major part (as teacher and conductor as well as composer) in making new methods and creative attitudes known south of the Alps. The development of electronic music in Italy began with the work of the RAI Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan. In 1960 the composer Pietro Grossi founded the S2FN sound studio in Florence; and computer music centres, generally within universities, subsequently appeared in Pisa (CNUCE, 1969), Milan (IJM, 1975), Padua (Centro di Sonologia Computazionale, 1979), where the composer Alvise Vidolin, among others, has worked, and Naples (ACEL, 1979), where the physicist Giuseppe di Giugno, who has worked at IRCAM in Paris, and the composer Fausto Razzi have been active. Berio founded the Tempo Reale centre in Florence in 1987, while the AGON laboratory was established by Luca Francesconi in Milan in 1990. A new festival (the Settimana Internazionale di Nuova Musica), which specialized more specifically in avant-garde music than Venice did, was held at irregular intervals at Palermo from 1960 to 1968; and the Nuova Consonanza performances at Rome, presided over by Evangelisti from 1961, were another important platform for adventurous composers, both Italian and foreign.
Only a very small number of works of the new Italian avant garde of the 1950s and 60s has entered the repertory of the concert-giving institutions, which remain rooted in the music of the past. Those that have done so include Berio’s Folksongs (1964), Sinfonia (1969) and some of his Sequenzas (from 1958). Scores like Nono’s Il canto sospeso (1956), Maderna’s Serenata no.2 (1957), Clementi’s Informels (1961–3), Donatoni’s Puppenspiel (1961) and theatrical works such as Berio’s Passaggio (1962), Nono’s Intolleranza 1960, Manzoni’s Atontod (1965), Bussotti’s La passion selon Sade (1965–6), Evangelisti’s Die Schachtel (1966) and Guaccero’s Rappresentazione et esercizio (1968) remain important examples of a phase in Italian music that has been largely neglected by the country’s muscial institutions.
Like their predecessors, the leading members of this new generation are individualists, who have never in any full sense formed a ‘school’, despite certain shared techniques and attitudes. Their total achievement ranges wide, from the colourful, very Italian lyricism of Maderna and the restless, dynamic textures of Franco Donatoni to the kaleidoscopic capriciousness of Niccolò Castiglioni, the provocative, idiosyncratic extravaganzas of Bussotti and the outwardly static yet subtly shifting ‘continuum’ techniques of Aldo Clementi.
The new musical avant garde has required new performers. From this point of view Italian composers have benefited from the work done by performers interested in and sensitive to new music such as Pietro Scarpini, Sergio Panazzi, Cathy Berberian, Severino Gazzelloni, Bruno Canino, Antonio Ballista, Maurizio Pollini and Giancarlo Cardini. After the student revolts and social protests of 1968, the 1970s saw the encouragement of the new avant garde, linked to the growth of the PCI (Italian Communist Party), which supported its development.
New ventures and festivals dedicated to contemporary music were founded in the 1970s and 80s, among them Musica nel Nostro Tempo in Milan (1975), the Settembre Musica and Festival Antidogma in Turin, the Festival Pontino in Latina (1977), the Festival Nuovi Spazi Musicali in Rome (1978), the Festival G.A.M.O. in Florence (1980) and the Festival Spaziomusica in Cagliari (1982). The RAI supported the output of new music through its four symphony orchestras (Turin, Milan, Rome, Naples) and the Third Programme on the radio. Composers who emerged at this period include Francesco Pennisi (La lune offensée, 1971–2; Carteggio, 1976), Armando Gentilucci (Canti di Majakovskij, 1970; Trama, 1977), Salvatore Sciarrinio (… da un divertimento, 1970; Amore e Psiche, 1973) and Adriano Guarnieri (Mystère, 1978; Poesia in forma di rosa, 1979).
The 1980s saw a renewed interest in opera and the creation of theatrical works by leading figures such as Aldo Clementi (Es, 1981), Berio (Un re in ascolto, 1984) and Nono (Prometeo, 1984), in addition to operas by composers born in the 1950s such as Lorenzo Ferrero (Mare nostro, 1985) and Marco Tutino (Cirano, 1987). The latter represented a postmodern neo-Romantic outlook, violently opposed to the values of the avant garde and committed to re-establishing communication between composer and audience and to the fertilization of art music by popular music.
In the 1980s and 90s the public sector in Italy progressively retreated from involvement in contemporary music, with the closure of the RAI choirs and orchestras in Naples, Rome and Milan, a reduced amount of new music in RAI programming and the closure of many local ventures. After Casa Ricordi was taken over by BMG (1994) and reorganized, the company’s commitment to contemporary music was much diminished. Despite this negative picture, however, Italian music at the start of the 21st century is represented by a lively group of composers with an international reputation, foremost among them Giorgio Battistelli, Mauro Cardi, Marco Di Bari, Stefano Gervasoni, Ivan Fedele, Luca Francesconi, Giuseppe Soccio, Alessandro Solbiati and Marco Stroppa.
See also Ancona, Aquileia, Assisi, Bari, Bergamo, Bologna, Brescia, Cagliari, Casale Monferrato, Catania, Cividale del Friuli, Cremona (i), Faenza, Ferrara, Florence, Genoa, Livorno, Lucca, Mantua, Messina, Milan, Modena, Naples, Padua, Palermo, Parma, Perugia, Pesaro, Piacenza, Pisa, Pistoia, Rome, Savoy (i), Siena, Spoleto, Trent, Treviso, Trieste, Turin, Udine, Urbino, Venice, Verona and Vicenza.
ES (G. Prosperi and others)
FellererP
PirrottaDO
SartoriD
StiegerO
P. Gianelli: Biografia degli uomini illustri della musica (Venice, 1822)
G. Fantoni: Storia universale del canto (Milan, 1873)
F. Testi, V. Terenzio and others: Storia della musica italiana da Sant’Ambrogio a noi (Milan and Busto Arsizio, 1969–)
F. Regli: Dizionario biografico (Turin, 1860/R)
M. Scherillo: L’opera buffa napoletana durante il Settecento (Naples, 1883, rev. 2/1916/R)
A. Ademollo: ‘Bibliografia della cronistoria teatrale italiana’, GMM, xliii (1888), 317–18, 327–8
G. and C. Salvioli: Bibliografia universale del teatro drammatico italiano, i (Venice, 1894–1903)
H. Goldschmidt: Studien zur Geschichte der italienischen Oper im 17. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1901–4/R)
A. Solerti: Le origini del melodramma (Turin, 1903/R)
A. Solerti: Gli albori del melodramma (Palermo and Naples, 1904/R)
A. Bonaventura: Saggio storico sul teatro musicale italiano (Livorno, 1913)
H. Kretzschmar: Geschichte der Oper (Leipzig, 1919/R)
L. Blareau: Histoire de la création et du développement du drame musical particulièrement en Italie depuis l’‘Euridice’ de Peri, jusqu’à l’‘Orfeo’ de Gluck (Brussels, 1921)
A. Della Corte: L’opera comica italiana nel’ 700 (Bari, 1923)
G. Bustico: Il teatro musicale italiano (Rome, 1924)
E. Wellesz: ‘Die Oper in Italien im 17. Jahrhundert’, AdlerHM
G. Monaldi: Il melodramma in Italia nella critica del secolo XIX (Rome, 1927)
A. Bonaventura: L’opera italiana (Florence, 1928)
K.P. Bernet Kempers: De Italiaansche opera: haar onstaan en ontwikkeling van Peri tot Puccini (Amsterdam, 1929; Eng. trans. 1949)
G. Bustico: Bibliografia delle storie e cronistorie dei teatri italiani (Milan, 1929)
M. Fuchs: Zur Entwicklung des Finales in der italienischen Opera buffa vor Mozart (diss., U. of Vienna, 1932)
R. Monterosso: La musica nel Risorgimento (Milan, 1948)
U. Manferrari: Dizionario universale delle opere melodrammatiche (Florence, 1954–5)
F. Schlitzer: Cinquant’anni d’opera e balletto in Italia (Rome, 1954)
F. Schlitzer: Mondo teatrale dell’Ottocento (Naples, 1954)
T. Serafin and A. Toni: Stile, tradizioni e convenzioni del melodramma italiano del Settecento e dell’Ottocento (Naples, 1954)
E. Surian: A Checklist of Writings on 18th-Century French and Italian opera (excluding Mozart) (Hackensack, NJ, 1970)
A. Ziino: Antologia della critica wagneriana in Italia (Messina, 1970)
F. Lippmann: ‘Der italienische Vers und der musikalische Rhytmus’, AnMc, no.12 (1973), 253–367; no.14 (1974), 324–410; no.15 (1975), 298–333 (It. trans., Versificazione italiana e ritmo musicale: i rapporti tra verso e musica nell’opera italiana dell’Ottocento, 1986)
R. Strohm: Italienische Opernarien des frühen Settecento (1720–1730), AnMc, no.16 (1976)
G. Pestelli, ed.: Il melodramma italiano dell’Ottocento: studi e richerche per Massimo Mila (Turin, 1977)
Italian Opera Librettos 1640–1770 [Anthology of facsimiles] (New York, 1978–84)
F. Degrada: Il palazzo incantato: studi sulla tradizione del melodramma dal barocco al romanticismo (Fiesole, 1979)
R. Strohm: Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert (Wilhelmshaven, 1979; It. trans., enlarged as L’opera italiana nel settecento, 1991)
C.E. Troy: The Comic Intermezzo: a Study in the History of Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera (Ann Arbor, 1979)
A. Ziino: ‘Luigi Romanelli ed il mito del classicismo nell'opera italiana del primo Ottocento’, Chigiana, xxxvi (1979), 173–215
J. Nicolaisen: Italian Opera in Transition 1871–1893 (Ann Arbor, 1980)
W. Weaver: The Golden Century of Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini (London, 1980)
A. Giovine: Bibliografia dei teatri musicali italiani (Bari, 1982)
A. Nicastro: Il melodramma e gli italiani (Milan, 1982)
G. Rostirolla, ed.: Wagner in Italia (Turin, 1982)
Il centenario della morte di Metastasio: Rome 1983
R. Celletti: Storia del belcanto (Fiesole, 1983)
J. Black: The Italian Romantic Libretto: a Study of Salvadore Cammarano (Edinburgh, 1984)
P. Gallarati: Musica e maschera: il libretto italiano del settecento (Turin, 1984)
J. Rosselli: The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi (Cambridge, 1984)
E. Tamburini: Il luogo teatrale nella trattatistica italiana dell’Ottocento: dall’utopia giacobina alla prassi borghese (Rome, 1984)
S. Balthazar: Evolving Conventions in Italian Serious Opera: Scene Structures in the Works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, 1810–1850 (Ann Arbor, 1985)
R. Verti: ‘Dieci anni di studi sulle fonti per la storia materiale dell'opera italiana dell’Ottocento’, RIM, xx (1985), 124–63
V. Bernardoni: La maschera e la favola nell’opera italiana del primo Novecento (Venice, 1986)
D. Pistone: L’opéra italien au XIXe siècle: de Rossini à Puccini (Paris, 1986)
L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli, eds.: Storia dell’opera italiana, iv: Il sistema produttivo e le sue competenze (Turin, 1987)
J. Budden: ‘Wagnerian Tendencies in Italian Opera’, Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. N. Fortune (Cambridge, 1987), 299–332
H. Sachs: Music in Fascist Italy (London, 1987; It. trans., enlarged, 1995 as Musica e regime)
L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli, eds.: Storia dell’opera italiana, v: La spettacolarità (Turin, 1988)
L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli, eds.: Storia dell’opera italiana, vi: Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi (Turin, 1988)
J. Joly: Dagli Elisi all’inferno: il melodramma italiano tra Italia e Francia dal 1730 al 1850 (Florence, 1990)
M.F. Robinson: ‘The Da Capo Aria as Symbol of Rationality’, La musica come linguaggio universale, ed. R. Pozzi (Florence, 1990), 51–63
D. Kimbell: Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1991)
C. Sartori: I libretti a stampa dalle origini al 1800 (Cuneo, 1991)
J. Rosselli: Singers of Italian Opera: the History of a Profession (Cambridge, 1992)
L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli, eds.: Storia dell’opera italiana, ii: Lo spazio europeo (Turin, 1993)
F. Della Seta: Italia e Francia nell’Ottocento (Turin, 1993)
J. Maehder and J. Stenzl, eds.: Zwischen Opera buffa und Melodramma: italienische Oper im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1994)
S. Scardovi: L’opera dei bassifondi: il melodramma ‘plebeo’ nel verismo musicale italiano (Lucca, 1994)
I. Fenlon and T. Carter: Con che soavità: Studies on Italian Opera, Song, and Dance 1580–1740 (Oxford, 1995)
A. Basso, ed.: Musica in Scena: storia dello spettacolo musicale, ii: Gli italiani all’estero: l’opera in Italia e in Francia (Turin, 1996)
L. Baldacci: La musica in italiano: libretti d’opera dell’Ottocento (Milan, 1997)
M. Marica: L’opéra-comique in Italia (1770–1830): traduzioni, rappresentazioni derivazioni (diss., U. of Rome, 1998)
FellererP
C. Burney: The Present State of Music in France and Italy, or the Journal of a Tour through those Countries, undertaken to collect Materials for a General History of Music (London, 1771, 2/1773)
J.W. von Archenholz: England und Italien (Leipzig, 1787)
C. de Brosses: Lettres historiques et critiques sur l'Italie en 1739 et 1740 (Paris, 1799)
C. Gervasoni: Nuova teoria di musica (Parma, 1812/R)
Istituti e Società musicali in Italia: statistica (Rome, 1873)
F. D’Arcais: ‘L'industria musicale in Italia’, La Nuova Antologia, xv/ix (1879), 133–48
G. Masutto: Maestri di musica italiani del nostro secolo (Venice, 1880)
L. Mastrigli: La musica del secolo XIX (Turin, 1889)
G. Masutto: Della musica sacra in Italia (Venice, 1889)
L. Torchi: ‘La musica strumentale in Italia nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII’, RMI, iv (1897), 581–630; v (1898), 64–84, 281–320, 455–89; vi (1899), 255–88, 693–726; vii (1900), 233–51; vii (1901), 1–42; pubd separately (Turin, 1901/R)
G. Pasquetti: L’oratorio musicale in Italia (Florence, 1906, 2/1914)
D. Alaleona: Studi sulla storia dell’oratorio musicale in Italia (Turin, 1908, 2/1945 as Storia dell’oratorio musicale in Italia)
G. Cesari: Die Entstehung des Madrigals im 16. Jahrhundert (Cremona, 1908; It. trans. as ‘Le origini del madrigale cinquecentesco’, RMI, xix (1912), 1–34, 380–428
F. Novati: ‘Contributo alla storia della lirica musicale italiana popolare e popolareggiante dei secoli XV, XVI, XVII’, Scritti varii di erudizione e di critica in onore di Rodolfo Renier (Turin, 1912), 899–980
La vita musicale dell’Italia: Turin 1921
G. Roncaglia: La rivoluzione musicale italiana nel secolo XVII (Milan, 1928)
F. Torrefranca: Le origini italiane del romanticismo musicale: i primitivi della sonata moderna (Turin, 1930/R)
J. Wolf: ‘Italian Trecento Music’, PMA, lviii (1931–2), 15–31
W. Korte: ‘Contributi alla storia della musica in Italia, l: la musica nella città dell’Italia settentrionale dal 1400 al 1425’, RMI, xxxix (1932), 513–30; pubd separately as Studien zur Geschichte der Musik in Italien im ersten Viertel des 15. Jahrhunderts (Kassel, 1933)
E. Li Gotti and N. Pirrotta: Il Sacchetti e la tecnica musicale del Trecento italiano (Florence, 1935)
A. Schlossberg: Die italienische Sonata für mehrere Instrumente im 17. Jahrhundert (Paris, 1935)
J. Wolf: ‘L'Italia e la musica religiosa medievale’, RMI, xlii (1938), 269–93
D. de’ Paoli: La crisi musicale italiana (Milan, 1939)
F. Torrefranca: Il segreto del Quattrocento (Milan, 1939)
A. Casella: I segreti della giara (Florence, 1941; Eng. trans., 1955, asMusic in my Time)
C.G. Anthon: Music and Musicians in Northern Italy during the 16th Century (diss., Harvard U., 1942)
K. Jeppesen, ed.: Die italienische Orgelmusik am Anfang des Cinquecento (Copenhagen, 1943, enlarged 2/1960)
M. Mila: Cent’anni di musica moderna (Milan, 1944, 2/1981)
E. Li Gotti: Poesie musicali italiane del secolo XIV (Palermo, 1944)
C.G. Anthon: ‘Some Aspects of the Social Status of Italian Musicians during the Sixteenth Century’, JRBM, i (1946–7), 111–23, 222–34
I. Pizzetti: La musica italiana dell’Ottocento (Turin, 1947)
R. Lunelli: ‘Nuove ricerche sulle origini della musica organistica italiana’, RMI, xlix (1947), 249–63
G. Pannain: Ottocento musicale italiano: saggi e note (Milan, 1952)
G. Vecchi, ed.: Poesia latina medioevale (Parma, 1952)
N. Fortune: ‘Italian Secular Monody from 1600 to 1635: an Introductory Survey’, MQ, xxxix (1953), 171–95
C. Moretti: L’organo italiano (Cuneo, 1955)
G. Barblan and A. Della Corte, eds.: Mozart in Italia (Milan, 1956)
R. Lunelli: Der Orgelbau in Italien in seinen Meisterwerken vom 14. Jahrhundert bis zum Gegenwart (Mainz, 1956)
R. Allorto and C. Sartori: ‘La musicologia italiana dal 1945 a oggi’, AcM, xxxi (1959), 9–17
M. Labroca: L’usignolo di Boboli: cinquant’anni di vita musicale italiana (Venice, 1959)
A. Damerini and G. Roncaglia, eds.: I grandi anniversari del 1960 e la musica sinfonica e da camera nell’Ottocento in Italia (Siena, 1960)
M. Bortolotto: ‘The New Music of Italy’, Contemporary Music in Europe, ed. P.H. Lang and N. Broder (New York, 1965), 61–77; also pubd in MQ, li (1965), 61–77
L. Pestalozza: Introduction to La rassegna musicale: antologia (Milan, 1966)
N. Pirrotta: ‘Music and Cultural Tendencies in 15th-Century Italy’, JAMS, xix (1966), 127–61
G. Colarizi: L’insegnamento della musica in Italia (Rome, 1967)
J.C.G. Waterhouse: The Emergence of Modern Italian Music (up to 1940) (diss., U. of Oxford, 1968)
M. Bortolotto: Fase seconda: studi sulla nuova musica (Turin, 1969/R)
A. Gentilucci: Guida all’ascolto della musica contemporanea (Milan, 1969, 8/1990)
G. Camajani: ‘Hospital Music of 18th-Century Italy’, Music Journal, xxx/9 (1972), 15, 60
A. Gentilucci: Introduzione alla musica elettronica (Milan, 1972, 2/1975)
S. Martinotti: Ottocento strumentale italiano (Bologna, 1972)
J.G. Wieckowski: The Role of Music in the Humanistic Academies of the Late 16th and Early 17th Century in Italy (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1972)
G. Pestelli: ‘La musica strumentale’, Storia d’Italia, v: I documenti (Turin, 1973), 1097–140
G. Stefani: Musica barocca: poetica e ideologia (Milan, 1974)
L. Bianconi and T. Walker: ‘Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: storie di Febiarmonici’, RIM, x (1975), 379–454
G. Stefani: Musica e religione nell’Italia barocca (Palermo, 1975)
M. Padoan: ‘Pensiero romantico e melodramma italiano’, Quadrivium, xvii/2 (1976), 41–67
G. Vecchi: ‘Le idee estetiche musicali in Italia nel primo Ottocento e l’estetica di Lichtenthal e di Boucheron’, Quadrivium, xvii/2 (1976), 5–39
Die stylistische Entwicklung der italienischen Musik zwischen 1770 und 1830: Rome 1978 [AnMc, no.21 (1982)]
Musica italiano del primo Novecento: Florence 1980
Le polifonie primitive in Friuli e in Europa: Cividale del Friuli 1980
P. Santi: ‘Archaimi e folclorismi nella musica italiana del primo novecento’, Chigiana, xxxvii, new ser. xvii (1980), 73–80 [pubd 1985]
F. Nicolodi: Gusti e tendenze del Novecento musicale in Italia (Florence, 1982)
M.S. Milner: ‘Wagner, Wagnerism, and Italian Identity’, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. D.C. Large and W. Weber (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1984), 167–97
F. Nicolodi, ed.: Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Florence, 1984)
A.A. Rosa, ed.: Teatro, musica, tradizione dei classici (Turin, 1986) [incl. P.L. Petrobelli: ‘Poesia e musica’, 229–44; F.A. Gallo: ‘Dal Duecento al Quattrocento’, 245–63; G. Cattin: ‘Il Quattrocento’, 265–318; L. Bianconi: ‘Il Cinquecento e il Seicento’, 319–63; R.S. Benedetto: ‘Il Settecento e l'Ottocento’, 364–401; S. Sablich: ‘Il Novecento: dalla “generazione dell '80” a oggi’, 411–37]
G. Tomlinson: ‘Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: an Essay on Affinities’, 19CM, x (1986), 43–60
F. Nicolodi: Orizzonti musicali italo-europei: 1860–1980 (Rome, 1990)
L. Alberti: ‘Compositori italiani in e out: note attorno a una sintomatica antologia novecentesca di Fedele D'Amico’, Musica senza aggettivi: studi per Fedele D’Amico, ed. A. Ziino, ii (Florence, 1991), 685–704
M. Anesa: Dizionario della musica italiana per banda (Bergamo, 1993–7)
Accademie e società filarmoniche: Trent 1995
N. Pirrotta: ‘“Maniera” polifonica e immediatezza recitativa’, Monteverdi: recitativo in monodia e polifonia: Rome 1995, 9–22
G. Salveti, ed.: Musica strumentale dell’Ottocento italiano (Lucca, 1997)
A. Rostagno: La musica per orchestra nell’Italia dell’Ottocento (diss., U. of Rome, 1998)
Oral musical traditions were first studied in Italy in the 19th century. The earliest scholars to approach this repertory were folklorists (including Costantino Nigra, Alessandro D'Ancona, Antonio Casetti, Vittorio Imbriani and Giuseppe Ferraro) who made extensive collections of song-texts, suggested the first classifications of genres and prevalent metrical forms and occasionally provided some musical examples. The first half of the 20th century saw the appearance of some noteworthy studies of specific musical repertories by Alberto Favara, Giulio Fara, Luigi Colacicchi, Giorgio Nataletti and Alfredo Bonaccorsi, among others, but it was only after World War II that comprehensive documentation of the oral musical tradition got under way. Fieldwork initiated in 1954 by Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella and carried out throughout the entire country by several scholars during the following decades has led to the production of about 200 LPs and CDs since 1954. In the 1950s Ernesto De Martino undertook important research into the rituals of funeral mourning in Lucania and tarantism in Puglia, which marked the establishment of musical anthropology in Italy. But it was only from the 1970s that a body of scientific literature developed in Italy exploring various aspects of the traditional repertory and musical life.
It goes without saying that while the research was being undertaken, profound changes in musical life were taking place in tandem with fundamental changes in the country’s social and economic conditions. Growing industrialization led to the abandoning of many traditional farming and pastoral activities and an increase in urbanization; more recently immigration from other European countries, North Africa and Asia has occurred. Many traditional music practices became obsolete, entire repertories fell into disuse, and where music was preserved, it was often associated with the shoring up of cultural identity in individual communities and the need to hold on to alternatives to mass-produced music. Unlike other European countries, Italy saw the appearance of no broad initiatives, either in the mass media or under state auspices, to promote oral musical traditions, nor is there any folk music genre or idiom that is felt to express national identity. The musical picture is one of great diversity and creative independence; there is a rich variety of types of expression, which generally highlight specific regional quality. In summarizing these conditions it is worth examining the main elements of the various musical practices, keeping in mind that under discussion here are the principal repertories for which there is documentation, regardless of their current state of survival.
First of all, vocal repertories are differentiated in linguistic terms by their texts. Three different linguistic levels are used in songs: Italian (a highly literary, courtly version, far removed from the current spoken language, as evidenced in printed publications from the end of the 15th century), and generally reserved for public repertories, such as canto in ottava rima or the Maggio drammatico; dialect (generally not the local dialect, but an artificial language which draws elements of the regional dialect into the local version), and mainly used for private pieces such as lullabies and dirges; and a mixed Italian-dialect language, used in many repertories. Still on a textual level, many types of metre are in use, with lines of 11 syllables prevalent in central-southern Italy, and the epic-lyric metre (with a variable number of syllables organized in two hemistiches, one plain, and the other truncated) in the northern ballad repertory. Poetic forms are generally strophic, and display a wide variety of different ways of elaborating the text, many of them highly sophisticated, with the occasional inclusion of added elements (refrains, nonsense syllables).
As to the relationship between the verbal and musical text and the processes of production and performance, two different systems can be observed. The first is based on the composition, transmission and performance of poetic-musical entities which can be defined as ‘songs’ in the strictest sense, possessing an identity and completeness that is both verbal and melodic. These ‘songs’ are not tied to a place and a distinct group of performers, but can be found in different areas and among different communities; performers who absorb them into their own repertory can elaborate them and create variant forms. In contrast, the second system does not recognize identifiable poetic-musical entities that can be circulated as such; instead it is based on creative actions that make an impromptu union of text and music, using a ‘way of singing’ specific to a social group or geographical zone, or both, whose realization is based on principles shared by the whole community. A wide variety of texts can be performed according to such ‘ways of singing’, which are improvisatory in character. Neither system is specific to a single song genre, and each can be employed alternately by the same performers, but in general the first is prevalent in the north, the second in the south. As to instrumental music, a further division can be observed between a musical idiom based on closed forms and organized into more or less regular harmonic and melodic phrases (typical of northern Italian violin music, for example), and one based on open, improvisatory forms, where the musical discourse uses a series of processes including repetition, variation and the connection of elements which may have no phrase-like character (as can often be found in southern instrumental music and, in particular, in the repertory of the launneddas).
Several scholars have attempted to classify Italian folk music by area, from the point of view of vocal style and musical idiom (Lomax 1955–6; Leydi 1973, 1980, 1990), but as knowledge has increased of the many vocal styles, instrumental traditions, musical idioms and vocal polyphonic practices to be found in the country, it has become more and more difficult to define areas of substantially similar characteristics. For this reason material is treated here according to genre, stressing the content, use and function of musical practices, with some indications of musical characteristics and geographical location. The distinctive music of Sardinia, however, is treated separately.
Several principal narrative repertories can be identified: the ballad in the oral tradition, traditionally a major presence in the north, becoming increasingly rare towards the south; the broadside ballad (found in the north and centre); the narrative song in ottava rima (in central Italy); and the southern storia. Some types of religious songs, like the orazioni and Sicilian orbi songs, are also narrative pieces.
The repertory which has received the most attention, starting with Nigra's classic Canti popolari del Piemonte (1888) is that of the ballad, whose links to the great European repertory extend even to the inclusion of some examples in variant forms. The Italian ballad is cast in epic-lyric metre (unusually, in central to southern Italy, in lines of 11 syllables), it is strophic (using many different forms), specific texts and melodies are closely linked, and there are variant versions. Ballad narratives have the following main features: the action is stripped to its essentials, concentrating only on the most salient episodes with details omitted, the approach is emotionally detached, there is a non-linear presentation of time, action is dramatized (sometimes giving rise to theatrical presentation, in the Pavia Apennines, Canavese and Loranzè), much use is made of dialogue and the focus is on a number of principal themes, dealing with relationships between men and women.
In Italy ballads have been documented as an essentially female repertory, and the very circulation of ballads and creation of variants can be linked to the mobility of women under the virilocal system found in the north, the fact that women lived together within multiple family households in the old peasant society, and the practice of singing during women's collective work. Ballads can thus be considered the product of a totally female way of representing and interpreting reality, expressing women's perceptions of themselves and how they relate to the world. In peasant society in the past, ballads both had a strong educational role in transmitting models of values and behaviour, and helped to develop imaginative activity. Italian ballads essentially present women's stories, and through these symbolic tales they represent the woman's world view in past peasant society, which stresses female weakness in the face of strength, violence and authority of men, honour as the main socially recognized value of women, death as the likely consequence of legal and moral transgressions. The narratives concentrate on a small number of principal themes: 1. Violence done by a man to a woman (e.g. Gli anelli, Nigra 6); 2. Women betrayed by men (e.g. Cecilia, Nigra 3); 3. Forbidden love (e.g. Fior di tomba, Nigra 19); 4. Virtuous girls (e.g. La prova, Nigra 54); 5. Women who break the law (e.g. Donna lombarda, Nigra 1, the most famous of all Italian ballads).
Musical analysis suggests that in the past the ballad repertory was dominated by the practice of two-voice singing; the music examples given by Nigra in 1888 suggest that this was already commonplace in the 19th century. Not only have ballads sung by two voices in parallel 3rds been documented (ex.1), but a large repertory exists of melodies that derive from singing in 3rds where only the lower part, ending on the tonic, or the upper part, ending on the third degree of a major scale, has been retained. As well as this repertory, linked to collective performing practice, there are also ballads that are clearly monodic, often based on a minor scale, or, in rare cases, on a different mode (ex.2). Monodic and polyphonic ballads also differ in vocal style. Monodic ballads use a contained delivery in the central register and a declamatory style of singing that focusses on communicating the text; in polyphonic ballads the voice is louder, the melody often moves in a higher register, and the performers are clearly more interested in singing in itself. In both cases, however, the ballad retains its character as an identifiable poetic and musical entity, belonging to the first system of music production and transmission outlined above.
From the 1950s, women's ballads saw a progressive decline in the wake of massive migration from the countryside into cities and the disintegration of multiple families into scattered families; this marked the end of collective occasions for singing and exchanges among women. Moreover, from the end of the 19th century, peasant women in the north became increasingly involved in the new form of seasonal work as rice-weeders. This brought profound changes as much to their lives and the imagery they commanded – they were living apart from their families for the first time, had freer relations with men and could earn an income of their own – as to their repertory of songs and style of singing (linked to choral performance, tense and high-pitched). A repertory of rice-weeders' songs came into existence, preserving only a few of the old ballads (sometimes in altered versions), but giving rise to new songs that bore directly on the women's work experience.
A male song practice, which shares points of contact and exchange with the female practice of ballad singing, has also been documented. Men's songs are predominantly choral and associated with musical entertainment in the classic male gathering-places, chiefly the inn. The male choral repertory is mixed, and may include social, Alpine, comic and risqué songs, as well as some ballads. The unifying element of this repertory is the style of singing, a two-voice, parallel third structure, enriched by octave doublings, drones or additional harmony notes. Generally there is a solo opening before the entry of the chorus, which is loud, emphatic and slow (ex.3). Since this style is very taxing, men often tend to shorten ballad texts, preferring to focus on the cohesion of the group and the musical activity itself rather than the narrative. This may be related to the different function that singing has for a male chorus: as an event it has a looser connection with the textual content of the songs and is more directed towards emphasizing the social and cohesive value of the simple act of singing together. There are interesting examples of this type of male choral singing in the Po valley and the Ligurian hinterland.
Broadside ballads are quite different from the ballads of the oral tradition, both in terms of the way they are produced and their content. They are the creation of folk-music professionals, cantastorie (street singers), active in northern and central Italy, and form part of the performances they give in town piazzas, where instrumental pieces and other types of songs are also heard. The songs are a part of the show which is sold to the audience and paid for by the acquisition of various objects, including broadsheets with the song texts (in the past) or pre-recorded cassettes (today). The narrative songs that ballad singers produce are quite different in character from ballads belonging to the oral tradition: they use a variety of poetic metres, different from epic-lyric verse, employ recurrent musical motifs (as in ex.4) and often have an instrumental accompaniment. With topics drawn mainly from recent crime stories, dealt with in a sensationalist manner, their highly detailed narrative style is directed towards the emotional involvement of the spectators. These songs have also entered the repertory of the oral tradition, but they are easy to distinguish from traditional ballads. The exchange has not been one way: ballad singers have also taken over traditional ballads, re-elaborated in the style of broadside ballads, like Donna lombarda or Cecilia.
As well as the broadside ballads, the storie of southern cantastorie are worthy of note. Traditionally, the storia is quite a long piece, with a particularly elaborate narrative and a wealth of detail, employing a strict strophic form, with a preference for 11-syllable lines. Lengthy storie, concerned with matters of honour and blood, have been documented by folklorists in the past, the most famous being La baronessa di Carini, but there are also storie concerned with political events, such as La storia di Muratti (ex.5), which recounts the historical tale of Gioacchino Murat, the former King of Naples who was shot dead in 1815. In the 20th century Sicilian ballad singers have often collaborated with poets (including Ignazio Buttitta) for their texts. Their performances in town piazzas, accompanied by guitar, use the traditional visual aid of the cartellone, a placard depicting the key events of the tale.
The long storie in ottava rima found in central Italy are also narrative in content, and are traditionally sung at veglie, social gatherings with music; a famous example is the storia of Pia de' Tolomei, which exists in different popular printed versions. More typical of the work of poets in ottava rima, who, in contrast to the cantastorie, are not professionals, but specialist interpreters of a song tradition, are re-elaborations of narratives mainly drawn from published classical and Renaissance epic literature. These are heard at competitions in which two performers confront one another, improvising verses according to a specific musical practice, which allows for subjective elaboration of the melodies (as happens in lyrical singing).
Lastly, mention should be made of religious narrative compositions, the orazioni that recount Christ's Passion or the lives of saints. Often performed in the past by mendicants, the religious narrative song in Sicily has been the prerogative of the orbi, a congregation of blind musicians in existence since 1600 in Palermo, who are the trustees of a wealth of novene and triunfi, songs commissioned by a believer in honour of a saint who has bestowed a grace.
This term refers to a system of improvised music-making prevalent in southern and central Italy, but also to be found in the north. The basis of lyrical singing is a creative act, whereby words and music are combined extemporarily. A variety of musical practices are used, by men and women, individually or together. They form an essential part of local culture, often being taken as a potent symbol of local identity. The texts do not recount stories, but express feelings (in most cases addressed to an imaginary female figure), and are subjective in character. They are widely circulated and have given rise to innumerable variants, but are not tied to specific melodies. The principal metre is the 11-syllable line, organized into different poetic forms, and variously elaborated in the course of the song, even with fragmentations and the insertion of verses in contrasting metres. The singing practices are normally local in character and adopt a ‘way of singing’ peculiar to the community which each interpreter is free to elaborate on individually. There are also specific ways of elaborating the text and organizing a group of performers to participate in the singing and the various forms of accompaniment. Since these singing practices are highly diversified, this overview is limited to the observation of some of the elements that differentiate them.
In some traditions the performance is based on a single, consistent text, a ‘continuous discourse’ performed as a solo (such as Sicilian carters' songs) or by a group of performers who follow strict rules of alternation. For example, the first performer may sing a couplet, repeated by the others in turn, and elaborated in a particular manner, as in songs alla verbicarese or alla lonnuvucchisa, or else the singers will alternate, taking single verses and using a technique of fragmentation and repetition which has echoes in 14th-century Italian music. An example of this type is provided by songs ‘alla mageraiota’ (ex.6). In other traditions, the performance will use several song texts (either complete or in part) in sequence, possibly adding verses of contrasting character or nonsense. Such pieces are generally performed by several singers in turn, and the performance is characterized by the notion of ‘interrupted discourse’, in that texts on different themes follow on from each other. Lastly, the performance can be organized as a dialogue between two singers alternately using a precise musico-poetic form for each entry (contrasti, stornelli, dispetti, etc.).
The types of lyrical singing discussed so far are all monodic and are performed employing either purely vocal melodies or dance tunes. In the former case, the rhythm is free, the vocal style is often very tense, the singer uses a high register, and the melody is organized in descending segments, frequently moving by step; there is a great deal of melismatic decoration, the melody is often modal, sometimes characterized by modal mobility, and there may be instrumental accompaniment. When a song is performed to an instrumental dance-tune, the singers can still use the same ‘gestural’ style, or they may adopt less articulated melodies, with a fixed rhythm and a less emphatic vocal style more concerned with communicating the often very dense text. They may even mix the two singing styles as in ex.7. At any rate, making music within the system of lyrical singing provides ways for participants to test their own creative skill and degree of competence in giving a musical performance, within shared guidelines that determine the possibility of reciprocal communication, interaction and exchange between performers.
Lyrical singing serves many functions. One practice of great interest which has now disappeared is the serenata which a man addresses to his beloved; this fulfilled the social function of monitoring pre-marital relations, and in some parts of southern Italy could take the forms of a ‘song of love’ and ‘song of contempt’. The performance of ‘songs of love’ publicly announced the relationship, while ‘songs of contempt’ either informed the community that an engagement had been broken off, or else provoked the break by directing highly offensive comments to the woman. The same repertory can be sung today as a form of entertainment within a male group; the function here is to socialize certain subject-matter of an emotional nature, and realize particular models of interpersonal interaction. In some traditions, the performance of lyrical songs may be part of devotional behaviour during religious festivals. In the past there was also frequent recourse to lyrical singing during agricultural work, at social occasions or competitions, where verbal communication and competitive improvisation predominated.
Agricultural work and entertainment are also associated with polyphonic renditions of lyrical songs, and while these are to be found in many regions of Italy, different regional traditions generally display no connections. In the north, the villotta (a type of lyrical song in verses of 8 or 11 syllables, now rare in either monodic or polyphonic performance) can be sung in parallel 3rds, while in the Italian communities of Istria it gives way to various types of two-voice, non-parallel discant known as canto a pera or a la longa in Gallesano, basso in Dignano, mantignada in Sissano and butunada in Rovigno. In central Italy the most significant form is the vatoccu, found in Umbria, the Marches and the Abruzzi. This type of discant performed by two voices (either both male or mixed), used to perform lyrical satirical songs with verses of 11-syllable lines, whose chief point of interest lies in the non-parallel movement of the lines(ex.8). Other forms of two-part singing in central Italy, in many respects similar to the vatoccu, are known locally by names such as canto a coppia, a recchia, alla metitora, alla pennese.
There are also traditions of polyphonic singing in the extreme south accompanied by a drone (ex.9). In Sardinia forms of lyrical singing show individual aspects when compared to those on mainland Italy, including the monodic ‘song with guitar’, and the polyphonic tenore singing. Mention should lastly be made of the vjersh of the Albanian communities in Calabria, a form of great contrapuntal interest, where a brief sequence of verses is interpreted by two and three voices according to a variety of polyphonic models.
The best-known songs for children are lullabies, an enormous repertory with great variations throughout Italy. This repertory is identified not by form or poetic metre nor by a given musical idiom, but uniquely by the occasion for the song – an important moment in the relationship between mother and child. Different functions can be expressed inside this relationship, beyond the mere inducement to sleep through repeated, rocking melodies. Lullabies display a wide range of imagery, with references to everyday life or religion, and as some of them derive from lyrical songs, they make up a repertory in which women create a world of fantasy that goes beyond the dimension of the relationship with the baby. The very melodic articulation of the song and the loud nature of the vocal style are evidence that the lullaby has often been the instrument for women to express themselves musically, and that has developed beyond the traits generally associated with the occasion of its use.
There is also a rich repertory of rhymes and counting songs for children, often using simple melodies and linked to games which, together with tongue-twisters and riddles, traditionally constitute instruments of the child's physical and mental training. Less well known are the songs that children use for their own games, and which may include pieces from adult repertories, like ballads, or, as in Brianza, the medieval Visitatio Sepulchri, reworked as children's games.
It has already been observed that there are multiple song traditions, many of them lyrical, that performers relate to agricultural work. They take on a variety of names in different locations: canti alla mietitora (harvesting songs), boare, canti alla falciatora (scything songs), carters' or waggoners' songs, canto alla monnarella, vatoccu, canto a pennese, etc. In most cases the singing style is quite taxing, both in terms of vocal production and, for polyphony, in the coordination of voices, a style traditionally sung not while working but during breaks or after the work was done. Other repertories more closely related to work have now generally disappeared, like that of tuna fishers in Sicily, who used sound to coordinate various points in the work of fishing. For salt-workers the principal element lay in counting the boxes of salt transported, while pedlars sang to attract clients and advertise their wares(ex.10). The piledrivers of the Venetian lagoon had work songs, and work was also the context of the repertory of rice-weeders (songs recounting moments of life in the rice-fields or expressing social protest), spinners (working in silk mills) and with other songs of social protest associated, among other things, with labouring and emigration.
Besides the polyphonic practices described above, which are associated with specific occasions (such as work or ritual) or repertories (ballads, lyrical singing), the main function of some other singing practices is collective entertainment. Such practices are characterized more by style than by repertory. Among these are several styles of male polyphony in the north of Italy (including that of the Alpine chorus, which is partly connected to folk repertories), which vary in their particular musical choices. In urban Genoa a complex type of five-voice polyphony has developed, known as trallalero: its characteristics are the use of a falsetto voice (cuntrètu), and a voice that imitates a guitar and takes that name (chitarra), with the addition of a tenor voice (the soloist who begins the song), a baritone and a bass, the last part being taken by at least three singers (ex.11). Trallalero was already documented in the 19th century, but it started to develop from the 1920s particularly. Its musical structure is solidly tonal, most of the texts are very short, it offers no particular message and often resembles nonsense. A singing practice that is similar in many respects is the bei-bei of Monte Amiata in Tuscany. This is characterized by a solo voice (tenor), who sings the song text to the accompaniment of the bei (a voice that performs a kind of yodel moving in intervals of a 3rd or 6th) and the corda (a bass who sings the fundamental notes of the harmony), and sometimes an intermediate voice which fills out the harmonic texture or provides a rhythmic support (ex.12).
A further form of polyphonic song in which voices imitate an instrumental accompaniment (like the trallalero and the bei) is found in Rovigno in Istria. This is the bitinada, a singing style for three male voices: the upper voice takes the melody and sings the text, while the two lower voices perform an accompaniment of nonsense syllables (lulu, tin tin, etc.), based respectively on an arpeggio and a rhythmic motif on a repeated pitch. Another category of polyphonic song in Rovigno is the aria da nuoto, night song. This is for three voices in choral style (ex.13); as in the other examples, the texts are of varied provenance and are no more than a pretext for collective singing. A further style is the tiir of Premana in the province of Como, which aims for maximum socialization during the singing, with no distinction between singers and audience. Men and women together create a complex musical texture where there are no predetermined roles and great harmonic richness is achieved spontaneously.
Of the principal life-cycle events, birth is not connected in Italy to any specific musical repertory, but marriage was often accompanied by songs and music for the bridal pair. Among the different traditions is the sonata per la sposa performed in the pastoral communities of Alta Sabina. This includes three pieces played on the ciaramella (here a bagpipe with two chanters and no drone): the piagnereccia, played while waiting for the bride outside her father's house, and expressing in music the bride's grief at leaving her family (ex.14), the camminareccia, which accompanies the bride's journey to the church, and the crellareccia, a dance performed by the newly-weds as they leave the church. Death has traditionally been an occasion of ritual mourning (ex.15) in the south and in Sardinia. Ernesto De Martino devoted one of his greatest works to this practice (D1958), examining the rites connected with death in Lucania and, for comparison, in other Mediterranean areas of Europe. He describes ritual mourning as ‘protected speech’ (D1958, pp.89–103), that is, a cultural model that offers the protection of organized behaviour for the expression of grief. He thus interprets the lament as a technique for weeping (including particular verbal, musical and gestural behaviour) established in order to control and overcome the psychological risks connected to the experience of death, undergone by individuals and the community as a whole.
De Martino devoted his most famous work (D1961) to another rite, therapeutic in character, which is found in Puglia. His analysis again concerns a situation of physical and psychological crisis, called tarantism. Traditional culture in Puglia considered tarantism to be poisoning caused by a tarantula bite, which could be cured only through a symbolic rite, featuring music, dance and colour. According to De Martino's interpretation, tarantism aims at symbolically representing and acting out a critical situation (a psychological struggle that cannot be remembered, thus leading to neurosis) that affects all women during the age of sexual development. His study (including an article by the ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella) reveals the large part played by music during the therapy of tarantism, since music represents the only instrument that can provoke a reaction to the state of complete apathy of those affected, inviting them to dance and thus to represent and overcome the conflict. Towards the end of his life De Martino began studying a phenomenon parallel to tarantism, the Sardinian argia.
Music plays an important role in a large number of rites that may be either religious or seasonal, or both, varying by region. The cycle of festivals of the winter solstice is the occasion for instrumental performances (the pastorale performed on the bagpipe is common in the south), narrative songs relating to Christmas, lullabies for the baby Jesus, songs for Epiphany (such as the Pasquella in Romagna and the Stella in the eastern Alps) and Christmas novenas. Strictly speaking, the term novena signifies a narrative song in nine sections, corresponding to the nine days preceding the feast day: a widely known piece in Sicily is the Viaggiu dulurusu, a narration in nine parts traditionally performed by the orbi, that begins at the point where Joseph learns of the imperial decree ordering the census and ends with the Nativity. Carnival was traditionally the period for veglie (when songs would be sung and stories told), dances (Bagolino in the province of Brescia has a particularly famous repertory) and rites which are widely found in many parts of Italy. Often the subject is the death and resurrection of a symbolic figure (the Carnevale, the Vecchia) or the representation of ‘the world turned upside-down’, and there may be an element of dressing-up (a famous example being the masked mamutones of Mamoiada in Sardinia, who form a procession, playing cow-bells and rattles). Sometimes the rites take on an explicitly theatrical dimension (for example, the Zeza and the representation of the months in Campania, and the Befanate in Tuscany).
In many parts of the country Easter is the occasion for ritual and representational events which culminate in the rites of Good Friday, and many important song traditions are connected to these. In addition to the numerous songs narrating the Passion found in many regions, mention should also be made of polyphonic songs, often liturgical in character and sung in Latin, traditionally sung by groups of men (although recently women's voices have been introduced in some cases) who belong to lay confraternities. There are particularly interesting examples in Emilia, Liguria, Umbria, Campania (ex.16), Sicily and Sardinia. Particularly in the south, spring and summer see numerous festivals dedicated to the Virgin Mary or to saints, each of which calls for ritual behaviour and involves much singing and dancing. Roberto De Simone's recordings of religious festivals in Campania, issued in 1977, are an important piece of documentation.
In many central and northern regions the arrival of summer is celebrated in the May (Maggio) festival, which, in Emilia and Tuscany takes the form of a proper music-theatre performance, whose origins seem to be traceable to the late 18th century. The Maggio drammatico is one of the most important expressions of folk music-theatre in Europe, and while it retains an explicit connection with a seasonal theme (the triumph of summer over winter), it has developed into a complex piece of work, all of it sung. The subject matter is freely drawn from medieval and Renaissance literature, the Bible and other sources, and elaborated by local writers who adapt the material to a recurring dramatic scheme: through a series of adventures a group of heroes (generally Christians) is formed, and they fight an enemy group (generally pagans), until the eventual triumph of the heroes. The dramatic composition is framed by the procession of the maggerini (or maggianti) followed by a prologue (a series of opening verses often referring to the seasonal theme and introducing the subject-matter), and the final chorus (ex.17), the only polyphonic piece in the presentation, which signals the return to the stage of all the characters who have appeared in the action, representing a communal concluding rite. The drama presented between the prologue and final chorus often has a cyclical structure and is frequently characterized by a number of synchronized actions. The acting style is ‘alienated’ and in some traditions gestures are used to explain particular words of the text. The musical and poetic structures are closely linked: four lines (or sometimes five in Tuscany) of eight syllables – the dominant metre, related to the flowing action – are intoned on a fluid melodic pattern, articulated in four sections, similar to local forms of lyrical singing. An eight-line stanza (ottava) of 11 syllables, intoned on a melody repeated with variations at every couplet, is reserved for the key moments in the drama (death, imprisonment, separation); the sonetto (four lines of seven syllables) is used mainly for lyrical scenes and for the final chorus. As well as the singing there are short instrumental episodes (fragments of liscio dance tunes performed by violin, guitar and accordion) whose principal role is to divide the scenes and underline dramatic moments. The Maggio drammatico is still found in local variants in the Emilian Apennines and in Tuscany.
The principal instrumental music traditions found in Italy are mostly of dance music. Both in terms of dance and of music, the repertories are often profoundly different in the northern and central-southern regions. In northern Italy, the most important dance repertories, prominent in Emilia, Bagolino and Resia, are played by a small instrumental group, based around the violin (whose playing technique retains many elements from Baroque practice). In Emilia these concertini have often changed in composition depending on the availability of players, but the classic formation in the early 20th century was two violins (the first having a solo function while the second provided a rhythmic-harmonic accompaniment), guitar (accompanying), a bowed bass instrument (such as a violone, three-string bassett, cello or bass) and whatever other instruments might be available to double the melody and in some cases perform a counter-melody (such as another violin or a viola). The repertory consisted of skipping dances (ruggero, saltarello, ballo di Mantova, roncastalda, monferrina, etc.), dances with ritual aspects (ballo di baraben) and waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, known as liscio (‘smooth’) to differentiate them from skipping dances.
In contrast, the repertory of instrumental groups in Bagolino is tied exclusively to Carnival. These groups consist of two violins, playing the main melody and a doubling or a counter-melody, two guitars (for accompaniment), a bass and a mandolin. The dances (ariosa, bal frances, bas de tach, muleta, pas in amur, rose e fiori, etc.), reserved for the last Monday and Tuesday of Carnival, are complex and sophisticated, and are performed by specially trained dancers from the village. Instrumental groups of the Val di Resia in Istria are made up of a violin (citira) which performs the melody alternately in two keys a fifth apart, an optional second violin doubling the melody in 3rds, a cello (bunkula) which holds the alternating tonics as a drone, and the stamping of the players, providing rhythmic support (ex.18). The dance repertory (such as the ta palacowa, ta matianowa, ta panawa, rezianka zagatina) is performed for the departure of conscripts (young conscripted soldiers), at Carnival or for festivals, and sometimes has vocal accompaniment.
Although the violin is predominant in the north, it is also used in Puglia in the context of tarantism rites: accompanied by a tambourine (taking the rhythmic function essential to the rite), guitar and sometimes accordion, the violin plays an essential role in the music and dance therapy of tarantism. Still in the north, in the Oltrepò pavese region around Pavia a further repertory of skipping dances can be found; examples are alessandrina, monferrina, piana, giga, perigurdino, sposina (dance for a bride), and povera donna, a Carnival dance that represents a rite of death and resurrection. The latter repertory is played by a piffero, a double-reed instrument belonging to the oboe family, and formerly accompanied by the müsa (a bagpipe with a single chanter for the melody and a one single-reed drone), now replaced by the accordion. Today besides the traditional dances many such groups perform a more recent repertory of liscio dances, also used by band groups (the Concerto Cantoni band in Emilia is famous for its repertory).
Many instruments are used in folk traditions, often deriving from art music. Idiophones include castanets, bells and cow-bells, crotales, cymbals, rattles, Jew's harps, setaccio, traccola and triangle. Of the membranophones, tambourines of different sizes are played (which may incorporate various types of idiophones, like small cymbals or bells), as well as double-sided drums and friction drums. Aerophones include end-blown, transverse or vessel flutes, panpipes, clarinets, oboes with or without pirouettes, shells, mouth organs, accordions and band instruments. Apart from the chordophones already mentioned, guitar and mandolin are common, and in the past the harp was found in Viggiano, Basilicata, and the zither in the Tyrol.
Formerly one of the most widely found instruments in various forms throughout Italy was the zampogna or Bagpipe. In the north, where apart from the müsa mentioned above, types such as the Alpine and Apennine piva were formerly played, today it has completely died out except for the Istrian piva, which has two single-reed chanters and no drone. The piva was once used to accompany singing as well as to play dance tunes (furlana, balùn, liscio dances) to the accompaniment of a tambourine, simbalo. The zampogna is now most widely found in central-southern Italy and Sicily. The instruments found in this area share a common structural characteristic: they have two chanters played with separate hands, and the drone pipes are mounted together with the chanters in a single block of wood, placed in a goatskin bag. In other respects, the central-southern bagpipes display profound differences. Some have chanters of equal length (the surdulina of Basilicata and northern Calabria, the Calabrian and Sicilian zampogna a paro, which generally has single reeds and two or three drone pipes), some have chanters of unequal length (zampogna zoppa with one, two or no drone pipes, mainly with double reeds, found in central Italy). Some have a key mechanism for the longest pipe to facilitate access to the complete system, presumably taken from the Renaissance Shawm, such as the zampogna a chiave found from Lazio down to Sicily, generally with two drone pipes and double reeds. There is also the Calabrian ‘a’moderna’ bagpipe, with chanters of unequal length, three drone pipes and single reeds.
Given the widespread presence of the bagpipe in Italy, its repertories are naturally diverse, using different musical idioms which have yet to be examined in depth. The instrument is used in ritual performance (processions, music for a saint, novenas), for dance (in southern Italy and Sicily the tarantella predominates, displaying a variety of choreographic and musical aspects) and to accompany singing. In many cases the bagpipe is accompanied by other instruments, especially the tambourine, different forms of which are found wherever the bagpipe appears in central-southern Italy, and the ciaramella (shawm; fig.22). The bagpipe is absent from Sardinia, but a triple clarinet of reed pipes called launeddas (played using circular breathing) is found throughout the southern area of the island.
The music played by the launeddas is the most refined example of the open, improvisatory forms mentioned earlier and is widespread in the instrumental music of southern Italy. The general structure of the dances (ballo tondo) played by professional musicians is completely dominated by the aesthetic notion of thematic continuity (sonai a iskala). In practice, the dance is made up of a series of nodas or pikkiades (short elements endowed with a characteristic tripartite form), each of which is developed in a series of variants that together form a group. The passage from a group based on one noda to a new noda has to be effected without a perceptible modification in the musical discourse, something that is achieved through a sophisticated variation technique. Similarly, techniques of improvisation based on the connection and variation of short musical elements may be found, for instance in the repertory of the southern bagpipes and diatonic accordion.
The instruments mentioned above are the most important to be found in the panorama of Italian music, both in terms of diffusion and size of repertory. But the country also has many other instrumental traditions, often limited but nevertheless of great interest, such as that of the chitarra battente (in Puglia, Campania and Calabria), the lyra (found almost uniquely among the Greek-descended communities of southern Calabria), the double flute (in Campania, Calabria and Sicily: ex.19), and simple, double and triple clarinets (such as the Sardinian benas).
See also Sardinia
a: bibliographies, reviews, surveys
g: instruments and instrumental music
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
D. Carpitella: ‘Rassegna bibliografica degli studi di etnomusicologia in Italia dal 1945 ad oggi’, AcM, xxxii (1960), 109–113
T. Magrini: ‘Vent'anni di musicologia in Italia: IV. Etnomusicologia’, AcM, liv (1982), 80–83
S. Biagiola, G. Giuriati and M. Macedonio: ‘Primo contributo ad una bibliografia etnomusicologica italiana con esempi musicali’, Culture musicali, iii (1983), 121–80; ix (1988), 103–34
L. Colombo, P. Staro and A. Zanon: ‘Bibliografia sulla danza popolare italiana’, Culture musicali, vii–viii (1985), 147–94
F. Giannattasio: ‘Pour une musicologie unitaire: l'ethnomusicologie en Italie’, Ethnologie Française, xxiv (1994), 587–600
G. Giuriati: ‘Country report: Italian Ethnomusicology’, YTM, xxvii (1995), 104–31
See also the website of Music & Anthropology 〈http://www.muspe.unibo.it/M&A〉.
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
MGG1 (‘Italien’, §C; T. Magrini)
F.B. Pratella: Saggio di gridi, canzoni, cori e danze del popolo italiano (Bologna, 1919/R)
C. Caravaglios: Il folklore musicale in Italia (Naples, 1936)
F.B. Pratella: Primo documentario per la storia dell'etnofonia in Italia (Udine, 1941)
D. Carpitella and G. Nataletti: Studi e ricerche del Centro nazionale studi di musica popolare: dal 1948 al 1960 (Rome, n.d.)
R. Leydi and S. Mantovani: Dizionario della musica popolare europea (Milan, 1970)
D. Carpitella, ed.: Musica e tradizione orale (Palermo, 1973)
D. Carpitella, ed.: L'etnomusicologia in Italia (Palermo, 1975)
D. Carpitella: Folklore e analisi differenziale di cultura: materiali per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari (Rome, 1976)
L. Fayet and others: Ethnomusicologie: l'expérience italienne (Paris, 1981)
B. Pianta: Cultura popolare (Milan, 1982)
G. Giuriati, ed.: Forme e comportamenti della musica folklorica italiana: etnomusicologia e didattica (Milan, 1985)
S. Biagiola, ed.: Etnomusica: catalogo della musica di tradizione orale nelle registrazioni dell' Archivio etnico linguistico musicale della Discoteca di stato (Rome, 1986)
M. Agamennone: ‘I suoni della tradizione’, Storia sociale e culturale d'Italia, vi: La cultura folklorica, ed. F. Cardini (Varese, 1988), 437–522
P.G. Arcangeli, ed.: Musica e liturgia nella cultura mediterranea (Florence, 1988)
D. Carpitella: Etnomusicologica: seminari internazionali di etnomusicologia 1977–1989 (Siena, 1989)
Le polifonie primitive in Cividale: Cividale del Friuli 1980
R. Leydi, ed.: Le tradizioni popolari in Italia: canti e musiche popolari (Milan, 1990)
M. Agamennone and others: Grammatica della musica etnica (Rome, 1991)
R. Leydi: L'altra musica (Milan, 1991)
D. Carpitella: Conversazioni sulla musica (1955–1990) lezioni, conferenze, trasmissioni radiofoniche, ed. Società italiana di etnomusicologia (Florence, 1992)
F. Giannattasio: Il concetto di musica: contributi e prospettive della ricerca etnomusicologica (Rome, 1992)
Ethnomusicologica II: Siena 1989
T. Magrini, ed.: Antropologia della musica e culture mediterranee (Bologna, 1993)
R. Leydi, ed.: La musica popolare in Italia (Lucca, 1996)
I. Macchiarella: Voix d'Italie (Paris, 1999) [with CD]
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
F.B. Pratella: Etnofonia di Romagna (Udine, 1938)
A. Favara: Corpus di musiche popolari siciliane, ed. O. Tiby (Palermo, 1957)
A. Cornoldi: Ande, bali e cante del Veneto (Padua, 1968)
R. Leydi, ed.: Le trasformazioni socio-economiche e la cultura tradizionale in Lombardia (Milan, 1972)
M. Conati: Canti popolari della Val d'Enza e della Val Cedra (Parma, 1973–5)
E. Guggino: ‘Canti di lavoro in Sicilia’, Demologia e folklore: studi in memoria di Giuseppe Cochiara (Palermo, 1974), 317–36
A. Vigliermo: Cantie tradizioni popolari: indagine sul Canavese (Ivrea, 1974)
M. Conati: ‘La musica di tradizione orale nella provincia di Verona’, La musica a Verona, ed. P. Brugnoli (Verona, 1976), 573–648
R. Leydi: ‘Appunti per lo studio della ballata popolare in Piemonte’, Ricerche musicali, i (1977), 82–118
P.E. Carapezza: ‘Canzoni popolari alla siciliana cioè alla catanese e alla palermitana’, RIM, xiii (1978), 118–41
E. Guggino: I carrettieri (Palermo, 1978)
R. De Simone: Canti e tradizioni popolari in Campania (Rome, 1979)
P. Collaer: Musique traditionelle sicilienne (Tervuren, 1980)
E. Guggino: I canti degli orbi (Palermo, 1980–88)
R. Leydi and T. Magrini, eds.: Guida allo studio della cultura del mondo popolare in Emilia e in Romagna (Bologna, 1982–6)
G. Adamo: ‘Sullo studio di un repertorio monodico della Basilicata’, Culture musicali, ii (1982), 95–154
P. Collaer: ‘I modi della musica tradizionale siciliana’, Culture musicali, ii (1982), 3–18
T. Magrini and G. Bellosi: Vi do la buonasera: studi sul canto popolare in Romagna: il repertorio lirico (Bologna, 1982)
R. Morelli and others: Cantie cultura tradizionale nel Tesino (Milan, 1983)
A. Sparagna: La tradizione musicale a Maranola: materiali di ricerca etnomusicologica nel Basso Lazio (Rome, 1983)
M. Agamennone: Due laudate meridionali: le ‘carresi’ di Larino e San Martino in Pensilis (Campobasso, 1984)
E. Lagnier: Enquête sur le chant populaire en Vallée d'Aoste (Aosta, 1984)
M. Sorce Keller: ‘Folk Music in Trentino: Oral Transmission and the Use of Vernacular Languages’, EthM, xxviii (1984), 75–89
A. Colzani, ed.: Musica, dialetti e tradizioni popolari nell'arco alpino (Lugano, 1987)
N. Iannone: Ballate della raccolta Nigra note nella provincia di Piacenza (Bologna, 1989)
A. Sparagna and R. Tucci: La musica popolare nel Lazio (Rome, 1990)
A. Ricci: ‘Polivocalità tradizionale di Torano Castello e Sartano (Cosenza)’, Studi Musicali, xx (1991), 3–38
P. Sassu, ed.: Romagna, le voci: ricerca sul folklore di Sant'Alberto di Ravenna (Ravenna, 1991)
M. Sorce Keller: Tradizione orale e canto corale: ricerca musicologica in Trentino (Bologna, 1991)
R. Starec: Il repertorio etnomusicale istro-veneto: catalogo delle registrazioni 1983–91(Trieste, 1991)
A. Ricci and R. Tucci: I ‘canti’ di Raffaele Lombardi Satriani: la poesia cantata nella tradizione popolare calabrese (Lamezia Terme, 1997) [CDs enclosed]
S. Villani: Canti e strumenti tradizionali di Carpino (Rignano Garganico, 1997)
R. Leydi, ed.: Canzoni popolari del Piemonte: la raccolta inedita di Leone Sinigaglia (Vigevano, 1998)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
E. De Martino: Morte e pianto rituale (Turin, 1958)
E. De Martino: La terra del rimorso: contributo a una storia religiosa del sud (Milan, 1961)
R. De Simone: Chi è devoto: feste popolari in Campania (Naples, 1974)
A. Rossi and R. De Simone: Carnevale si chiamava Vincenzo: rituali di Carnevale in Campania (Rome, 1977)
T. Magrini: Canti d'amore e di sdegno: funzioni e dinamiche psichiche della cultura orale (Milan, 1986)
T. Magrini: ‘The Group Dimension in Traditional Music’, The World of Music, xxxi (1989), 52–79
T. Magrini: ‘The Contribution of Ernesto De Martino to the Anthropology of Italian Music’, YTM, xxvi (1994), 66–80
L. Del Giudice: ‘Ninna-nanna Nonsense?: Fears, Dreams, and Falling in the Italian Lullaby’, Oral Tradition, iii (1988), 270–93
S. Bonanzinga: Forme sonore e spazio simbolico: tradizioni musicali in Sicilia (Palermo, 1992)
T. Magrini: ‘Ballad and Gender: Reconsidering Italian Narrative Singing’, Ethnomusicology Online, i (1995)
T. Magrini: ‘Music and Function: an Open Question’, Musica oral del Sur, iii (1998), 85–92
T. Magrini: ‘Improvisation and Group Interaction in Italian Lyrical Singing’, In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, ed. B. Nettl and M. Russell (Chicago, 1998), 169–98
T. Magrini: ‘Women's “Work of Pain” in Christian Mediterranean Europe’, Music & Anthropology, iii (1998)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
C. Nigra: Canti popolari del Piemonte (Turin, 1888)
P. Toschi: Fenomenologia del canto popolare (Rome, 1947–9)
A. Lomax: ‘Nuova ipotesi sul canto folkloristico italiano’, Nuovi Argomenti, xvii–xviii (1955–6), 109–35
G.B. Bronzini: La canzone epico-lirica nell'Italia centro-meridionale (Rome, 1956–61)
Le polifonie primitive in Cividale: Cividale del Friuli 1980
G. Sanga: Il linguaggio del canto popolare (Milan-Florence, 1979)
M. Agamennone and S. Facci: ‘La trascrizione delle durate nella polivocalità popolare a due parti in Italia’, Culture musicali, i (1982), 89–106
T. Magrini: ‘Lo studio del comportamento musicale come fondamento del processo analitico: riflessioni sulla musica vocale di tradizione orale’, Analisi, viii (1992), 6–20
Il verso cantato: Rome 1988 (Rome, 1994)
M. Agamennone: Polifonie, procedimenti, tassonomie e forme: una riflessione ‘a più voci’ (Venice, 1996)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
C. Caravaglios: ‘Gridi di venditori napoletani trascritti musicalmente’, Il Folklore Italiano, i (1925), 87–115
R. Leydi: Canti sociali italiani (Milan, 1963)
R. Leydi and A. Rossi: Osservazioni sui canti religiosi nonliturgici, con esempi di ricerca nella Valle Padana (Milan, 1965)
A. Uccello: Carcere e mafia nei canti popolari siciliani (Bari, 1965)
R. Leydi: ‘Spettacolo in piazza oggi: i cantastorie’, Il contributo dei giullari alla drammaturgia italiana delle origini: Viterbo 1977 (Rome, 1978), 295–338
S. Biagiola: ‘Modelli di ninne nanne molisane’, NRMI, xv (1981), 66–94
E. Neill and M. Balma: ‘Il trallalero genovese’, Culture musicali, v–vi (1984), 43–122
C. Oltolina: I salmi di tradizione orale delle Valli Ossolane (Milan, 1984)
A. Ricci and R. Tucci: ‘Il canto “alla lonnuvicchisa”: analisi del testo verbale’, Culture musicali, v–vi (1984), 199–268
G. Pennino: Due repertori musicali tradizionali (Palermo, 1985)
R. Champrétavy and others: Les chansons de Napoléon (Aosta, 1986)
V. Consolo: La pesca del tonno in Sicilia (Palermo, 1986)
G. Kezich: I poeti contadini (Rome, 1986)
L. del Giudice: Cecilia: testi e contesti di un canto narrativo tradizionale (Brescia, 1987/R)
P.G. Arcangeli: ‘Il canto paraliturgico femminile e “volgare” di Tessennano’, Culture musicali, xii–xiv (1987–8), 159–68
M. Balma: ‘Il canto delle lezioni nella musica di tradizione orale in Liguria’, Culture musicali, xii–xiv (1987–8), 169–79
G. Garofalo: ‘I canti dei carrettieri della provincia di Palermo: per un'analisi formalizzata del repertorio’, Culture musicali, xii–xiv (1987–8), 80–105
I. Macchiarella: ‘L'ornamentazione melismatica della canzuna alla carrittera del palermitano’, Culture musicali, xii–xiv (1987–8), 106–15
G. Palombini: ‘Il lamento funebre in Alta Sabina’, Culture musicali, xii–xiv (1987–8), 116–38
G. Borghi and G. Vezzani: C'era una volta un ‘treppo’: cantastorie e poeti popolari in Italia settentrionale dalla fine dell'Ottocento agli anni ottanta (Sala Bolognese, 1988)
G. Fugazzotto: ‘Analisi della Visilla di Barcellona e di Pozzo di Gotto’, Culture musicali, xv–xvi (1989), 69–89
F. Maltempi: I canti della liturgia funebre ossolana (Bologna and Rome, 1990)
P. Wassermann: I canti popolari narrativi del Friuli (Udine, 1991)
Liturgie e paraliturgia nella tradizione orale: Santu Lussurigu 1991 (Cagliari, 1992)
S. Biagiola: ‘Canti di venditori ambulanti a Roma: la raccolta 9 degli Archivi di etnomusicologia’, EM: Annuario degli Archivi di etnomusicologia dell'Accademia nazionale di Santa Cecilia, ii (1994), 7–26
S. Bonanzinga: ‘Reaping and Threshing Rhythms in Calamònaci (Agrigento-Sicily)’, Música oral del Sur, i (1995), 90–102
G. Garofalo: ‘Traditional Rural Songs in Sicily’, Música oral del Sur, i (1995), 65–89
S. Biagiola: ‘Per uno studio sul lamento funebre in Italia’, EM: Annuario degli Archivi di etnomusicologia dell'Accademia nazionale di Santa Cecilia, iv (1996), 7–26
S. Villani: La serenata a San Giovanni Rotondo: studi sul canto lirico (Bologna, 1997)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
A. Baines: Bagpipes (Oxford, 1960/R)
D. Carpitella: ‘Der Diaulos des Celestino’, Mf, xxviii (1975), 422–8
F. Giannattasio: L'organetto, uno strumento musicale contadino dell'era industriale (Rome, 1979)
M. Bröcker: ‘Il Piffero: ein Spieler und sein Instrument’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis, vii (1981), 134–48
G. Giuriati: ‘Un procedimento compositivo caleidoscopico: la tarantella di Montemarano’, Culture musicali, ii (1982), 19–72
S. Cammelli, ed.: Musiche da ballo, balli da festa: musiche, balli e suonatori tradizionali della montagna bolognese (Bologna, 1983)
J.P. De Bousquier and M. Padovan: ‘Il violino della Val Varaita’, Culture musicali, ii (1983), 71–8
F. Guizzi and R. Leydi: Strumenti musicali popolari in Sicilia (Palermo, 1983)
P. Staro: ‘Musica per danzare: congruenza fra cultura musicale e cultura coreutica nella prassi esecutiva del violinista Melchiade Benni di Monghidoro’, Culture musicali, iv (1983), 57–69
P. Arcangeli and G. Palombini: ‘Sulle ciaramelle dell'Alta Sabina’, Culture musicali, v–vi (1984), 169–98
F. Guizzi and R. Leydi: Le zampogne in Italia (Milan, 1985)
R. Leydi and F. Guizzi, eds.: Strumenti musicali e tradizioni popolari in Italia (Rome, 1985)
A. Ricci and R. Tucci: ‘The Chitarra Battente in Calabria’, GSJ, xxxviii (1985), 78–105
N. Staiti: ‘Iconografia e bibliografia della zampogna a paro in Sicilia’, Lares, lii (1986), 197–240
F. Giannattasio: ‘Les recherches italiennes: systèmes d'improvisation dans les musiques d'Italie du sud’, L'improvisation dans les musiques de tradition orale, ed. B. Lortat-Jacob (Paris, 1987), 235–51
G. Plastino: ‘I tamburi di San Rocco’, Culture musicali, xii–xiv (1987–8), 139–58
J. Strajnar: Citira: la musica strumentale in Val di Resia (Udine and Trieste, 1988)
F. Guizzi and N. Staiti: Le forme dei suoni: l'iconografia del tamburello in Italia (Florence, 1989)
E. Stockmann, ed.: Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis, ix (Stockholm, 1989)
R. Starec: Strumenti e suonatori in Istria (Udine, 1990)
M. Sarica: Strumenti musicali popolari in Sicilia (Messina, 1994)
R. Leydi and F. Guizzi, eds.: Gli strumenti musicali e l'etnografia italiana 1881–1911 (Lucca, 1995)
G. Plastino: Lira: uno strumento musicale tradizionale calabrese (Vibo Valentia, 1995)
C. Caliendo: La chitarra battente (Salerno, 1998)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
G. Ungarelli: Le vecchie danze italiane ancora in uso nella provincia bolognese (Rome, 1894)
B.M. Galanti: La danza della spada in Italia (Rome, 1942)
D. Carpitella: Ritmi e melodie di danze popolari in Italia (Rome, 1956)
S. Fontana: Il maggio (Florence, 1964)
G. Bosio and others: I Maggi della Bismantova (Milan, 1966)
P. Toschi: Le origini del teatro italiano (Turin, 1969)
P. Staro: ‘Metodo di analisi per un repertorio di danze tradizionali’, Culture musicali, i (1982), 73–94
D. Carbone: ‘Trascrizione del movimento e danze tradizionali: analisi di un saltarello di Amatrice’, Culture musicali, vii-viii (1985), 3–55
G. Gala: ‘Primo contributo per una filmografia sulla danza tradizionale in Italia’, Culture musicali, vii–viii (1985), 195–238
P. Staro: ‘Analisi del repertorio di danza della valle del Po’, Culture musicali, vii–viii (1985), 57–89
P. Staro: ‘Documento letterario e danza etnica’, Culture musicali, vii–viii (1985), 127–46
J. Strajnar: ‘Le danze di Resia’, Culture musicali, vii–viii (1985), 91–100
E. Castagna, ed.: Danza tradizionale in Calabria (Catanzaro, 1988)
T. Magrini, ed.: Il Maggio drammatico: una tradizione di teatro in musica (Bologna, 1992)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
P.E. Carapezza: ‘Perennità del folklore: tre esempi nella tradizione musicale siciliana’, Culture musicali, iv (1983), 41–6
T. Magrini: ‘Dolce lo mio drudo: la prospettiva etnomusicologica’, RIM, xxi (1986), 215–35
L. Rovighi: ‘Violino popolare e violino barocco’, Culture musicali, iv (1983), 31–55
N. Staiti: ‘La formula di discanto di “Ruggiero”’, Culture musicali, xii–xiv (1987–8), 47–79
R. Starec: ‘Scritto e orale, colto e popolare, sacro e profano nella tradizione cantata: due esempi dall'Italia nordorientale’, Culture musicali, xii–xiv (1987–8), 180–93
G. Merizzi: ‘La fonte popolare nell'opera di Adriano Banchieri: indagine sul repertorio poetico-musicale profano’, Culture musicali, new ser., i–ii (1990), 17–74
R. Morelli: ‘Otto canti della Stella fra Riforma e Controriforma’, Culture musicali, new ser., i–ii (1990), 75–107
I. Macchiarella: Il falsobordone fra tradizione orale e scritta (Lucca, 1995)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
P.E. Carapezza: Antichità etnomusicali siciliane (Palermo, 1977)
A. Carlini: Una raccolta inedita di musiche popolari trentine (1819): 21 balli popolari trentini per violino raccolti nel 1819 da Joseph Sonnleithner (Bologna, 1985)
G. Plastino: Suoni di carta: un'antologia sulla musica tradizionale in Calabria 1571–1957 (Lamezia Terme, 1997)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
L. Levi: ‘Canti tradizionali e tradizioni liturgiche giudeo-italiane’, La Rassegna mensile di Israele, xxiii (1957), 403–11, 434–45
C. Ahrens: ‘Die Musik der griechischen Bevölkerungsgruppen in Italien’, Neue Ethnomusikologische Forschungen: Festschrift Felix Hoerburger zum 60 Geburtstag, ed. P. Baumann, R.M. Brandl and K. Reinhard (Laaber, 1977), 129–39
I. De Gaudio: ‘Analisi delle tecniche polifoniche in un repertorio polivocale di tradizione orale: i “vjersh” delle comunità albanofone della Calabria’, Quaderni di M/R, xxx (Modena, 1993)
L. Del Giudice, ed.: Studies in Italian American Folklore (Logan, Utah, 1993)
N. Scaldaferri: Musica arbëreshe in Basilicata: la tradizione musicale di San Costantino Albanese con riferimenti a quella di San Paolo Albanese (Lecce, 1994)
Italy, §II: Traditional music: Bibliography
R. Tucci: ‘Discografia del folklore musicale italiano in microsolco (1955–1980)’, Culture musicali, i (1982), 125–48
M. Gualerzi: ‘Discografia della musica popolare sarda a 78 rem (1922–1959)’, Culture musicali, ii (1982), 167–92
F. Giannattasio and R. Tucci: ‘Discografia della danza tradizionale in Italia’, Culture musicali, vii–viii (1985), 239–304
T. Magrini: ‘The Documentation of Italian Traditional Music in Records: 1955–1990’, YTM, xxii (1990), 172–84
For updated discography see the database of the website of Music & Anthropology 〈www.muspe.unibo.it/M&A〉