Examining the debate which developed in Italy during the early years of the twentieth century around the concept of romanticism is a useful and effective way of charting the relationship of intellectual and critical ideas to the realities of the national operatic tradition. The common ground of the discussion was to locate the idea of the romantic tradition in a synthesis of various historical, aesthetic and ethical characteristics, and to identify it with the period of the melodramma , a genre which brought with it notions of humanity and moral character, of stylistic features (sentimentalism, expression of the passions, primacy of melody), and of formal and linguistic conventions, which, taken together, go to make up the received view of Italian musicality. From the varied pronouncements and points of view expressed within this complex of ideas and characteristics, an ideological divide seems clear between those musicians who remained loyal to the melodramatic tradition (essentially, those born around 1860 and who first came to prominence around 1890, such as Francesco Cilea, Umberto Giordano, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni and Giacomo Puccini) and those who, being more sharply critical of this tradition, inclined towards a radical re-evaluation both of dramaturgical categories and also of the musical language itself within a modernist perspective (those musicians who were born around 1880 and came to prominence around 1910, such as Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero and Ildebrando Pizzetti).
In this context, the voice of Fausto Torrefranca stands out as that of a strong and intransigent critic of the most recent tendencies of the Italian tradition. Viewing music history primarily as the development of genres, he went so far as to deny romanticism all historiographical validity, to the extent that it was identified with the era of the melodramma (which ‘never was the ideal of our national musical culture’). In opposition to it he placed the symphony, a genre which he saw as embodying the most authentic Italian tradition (albeit an interrupted one), and whose artistic renewal by means of new creative impulses he regarded as essential. The inevitable consequence of this was the establishment of a clear distinction between the categories of ‘musician’ and ‘opera composer’, two types of activity which could no longer be simply assumed to be the same, not least since the second was in the process of exhausting itself in the febrile pursuit of passion and dramaticism in the manner typical of operatic verismo . This was, he considered, a state of decadence of which the operas of Puccini offered a clear example: female characters who had inherited from the Verdi of La traviata ‘the ethereal spirit of sentimentality and unhappiness’ while exuding poignantly an aura of ‘humanity and sincerity’; typically melodramatic situations (as in La Bohème : ‘the poet’s sudden realization [of his love], his lover’s consumption, and the simple goodness of all the girls fallen on hard times’), balanced only by the ‘lacrimose idealization’ of musical pathos; and at times an excess of realism (as, for example, in Tosca ) which seemed to be unaware that the essence of romanticism lay, precisely, in a combination of qualities which joins the trivial with the ideal, and finds a balance between the realism of the plot and the idealizing representation of the action through the expressive means of music (Torrefranca 1912 , 30, 51, 54).
Among musicians of a modernist persuasion, on the one hand we find Malipiero invoking an absolute creative freedom from received operatic conventions (in the first place from operatic vocality and the ‘petulance of singers and their vocal organs’) and from the obligatory requirements of stage spectacle, in the name of a more fully integrated balance between music and poetry (Malipiero 1913 , 1); while, on the other, Casella went as far as refusing to recognize any reasons at all for the survival of the melodramma , which he saw as having been henceforth assimilated into the modern tradition of instrumental music in its primary and most characteristic dimension, namely, a dramatic sense. From here, the future of musical theatre is foreseen precisely as ‘the union of the medium of sound with a certain quasi-sculptural vision: forms, colours, gestures’, and in terms of the need to combine the idioms of the Italian comic tradition with those of contemporary ballet in a new form of ‘figural comedy in which gesture will substitute for text, and out of which will re-emerge the wonderful energy and comic verve of eighteenth-century Neapolitan comedy’ ( 1919 , 2, and 1921 ). Of its nineteenth-century roots, Casella therefore allowed to modern Italian music only the rather minor and certainly intermittent current of nineteenth-century operatic comedy: from Il barbiere (1816), the most successful of all Rossini’s operas, to Verdi’s Falstaff (1893) .
Nevertheless, other musical figures of the early twentieth century took up less radical positions. Pizzetti, for example, convinced of the irreplaceable and indeed exemplary theatrical quality of Bellini and middle-period Verdi, set out to demonstrate that his idea of a ‘Latin musical drama’ – basically an Italianate version of modern, that is, post-Wagnerian music drama, which Pizzetti described as ‘an opera of poetry and music combined’ – stood in a relationship of continuity-within-diversity to the traditional melodramma . Both of these two genres were after all ‘battlefields of human feelings and passions [set] in conflict’, with ‘characters whose actions are motivated by these feelings and passions’ ( 1945 , 53–4). The essence of any form of operatic theatre consisted more in this intrinsically dramatic duality than in any external musical or scenic factors. But the attachment to tradition was fundamental above all for the cluster of more reactionary tendencies which were embodied in the Manifesto di musicisti italiani per la tradizione dell’arte romantica dell’800 (‘Manifesto by Italian musicians in favour of the romantic artistic tradition of the nineteenth century’), printed on 17 December 1932 in two leading national newspapers, the Corriere della sera and La Stampa , and signed by, among others, prominent composers such as Pizzetti, Ottorino Respighi and Riccardo Zandonai.
Presenting a selection of the most reactionary objectives favoured by the more backward-looking wing of fascist musical culture, this Manifesto sought to reaffirm the legitimacy of the ‘free expansion of lyricism’, as also of ‘the vehemence and intensity of dramatic expression’, giving preference to ‘the rhetoric . . . of feeling over [that of] culture’. It declared itself against the kind of art that ‘has no human content’ and is nothing but a ‘mechanical play, a cerebral juggling’, in favour of the ‘romanticism of yesteryear, which . . . is life in action, in joy and sorrow’. By affirming the primacy of the romantic tradition over more recent developments (described as ‘mere atonal and polytonal trumpetings’, and criticized for their ‘objectivism’ and ‘expressionism’), the Manifesto gave voice to those aspirations towards a restoration of certain key aspects of the old order which were active during the 1930s. So much so that, in this general climate directed towards the explicit denial of modernist aspirations, even a musician who can hardly be suspected of conservatism such as Mario Labroca nevertheless pointed to the fundamental need for a recovery of the lyric and operatic forms of the romantic era. For him, the supreme model is still given by the operas of Verdi, which embody the ‘romantic spirit’ to the extent that they represent the ‘making explicit of feeling’, while yet setting this expression within a ‘rigidly classical’ musical form, directly descended from the intrumental forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And so from here, there is a clear invitation to confront the entirety of the Italian musical tradition – an invitation which, within the context of the age-old polarity between musical drama and symphony, seems to announce a brilliant, and potentially reconciling, compromise solution (Labroca 1934 ).
In fact, more than with the dramatic subjects, the plots, and the particular qualities of the dramatis personae of the melodramma , which had all declined in the general taste, the modernists felt called to measure themselves against the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the forms and dramaturgical conventions of the genre – conventions which were fully in the contemporary consciousness thanks to the overwhelming presence of such repertory pieces in the programmes of the opera houses. In their (never slavishly imitative) confrontation with nineteenth-century models of the lyric number, negotiating between the negation, elaboration and restitution of older vocal models, is to be found one of the most productive (rather than ideological) factors of the romantic inheritance within Italian twentieth-century dramatic and operatic music. The critic Guido M. Gatti had already realized this when, implicitly criticizing the anti-melodramatic position taken by Casella, he found himself unable to deny the links that still bound contemporary Italian opera to its nineteenth-century roots. And this even led him to see in the rise of neo-classicism the emergence of a kind of musical neo-romanticism, guaranteed by what seemed likely to be the secure future of opera as a genre (which was by then judged to be on the point of ceding its position to the pre-eminence of ballet), by the renewed vitality of its closed forms, and by the tenacious resistance of melody to the new types of prosodical and text-based vocal writing (Gatti 1925 , 18–19). This amounted to a recognition of the existence of certain constants within the genre of Italian opera: the primacy of singing, by means of which the human characters individualize themselves; the importance assigned to balance and equilibrium within the musical forms, grounded in the metrical structures and general layout of the dramatic text .
Once verismo had run its course, which in the case of Mascagni stretched from Cavalleria rusticana (1890) to the less extreme versions of the style found in L’amico Fritz (1891), Silvano (1895) and Zanetto (1896 ), and taking in along the way such works as Tilda by Cilea, Mala vita by Giordano, and Pagliacci by Leoncavallo (all dating from 1892), the composers of the 1860 generation began to show signs of anxiety in the face of this tradition. And so they began to move in directions which would subsequently bring good fortune and success: towards a confrontation with broader European tendencies (at that time bound up with the whole process of the internationalization of Italian culture in its ‘Scapigliatura/Decadent’ phase, a process by which important elements of verismo had already found their way into a variety of non-Italian (chiefly French) contexts, from the elegant and affecting lyricism of Gounod, Massenet and Ambroise Thomas, to the realism of Bizet’s Carmen (1875); and towards the recovery and assimilation of musical and dramaturgical solutions to the problem of musical theatre from further afield .
In the meantime, and in a climate in which echoes of the polemical debate around opera and musical drama were still strong, the musicians of the 1860 generation faced in definitive fashion the question of Wagnerian music drama, and – while still maintaining a certain distance from the sheer complexity of thought such an enterprise would have entailed – drew certain inspirations from it. Among these were: a degree of nationalistic defiance on behalf of the Latin-Mediterranean epic, read in a primarily historical light, as an alternative to Nordic-Germanic epic, of predominantly mythological character; a series of harmonic innovations, but only so far as they offered musical materials which could function effectively together with other materials, and would fit with a variety of contexts; the challenge of reshaping motivic contours and of increasing the symphonic contribution, but within an operatic system which nevertheless refused to embrace the whole network of leitmotivic elaboration and which presented itself instead as a renewal and further development of the Italian method of using reminiscence motifs. Leoncavallo, with his opera I Medici (1893, set in Renaissance Florence at the time of the Pazzi Conspiracy), explored the project of creating a truly Italian form of operatic epic, ‘animated by a high philosophical and patriotic content, yet drawn from and grounded in reality’ (Leoncavallo , Appunti , 24).
Puccini, after having completed his ‘revision’ of Die Meistersinger (the usual kind of cutting meted out to Wagnerian music dramas when given in Italian translation), just as he was beginning on the composition of Manon Lescaut (1893), made use of the ‘Tristan chord’ as well as of reminiscences of Wagnerian situations to express the true love of the two young lovers (the whole of the duet between Manon and Des Grieux in Act II, for example, recalls that of Tristan and Isolde), in opposition to the Arcadian and eighteenth-century colour of the ridiculous passion of the aged Geronte . Similarly, in Leoncavallo’s La Bohème (1897) the various harmonies and motifs of Tristanesque inspiration take on something of the expressive colouring of solitude, of illness and death . But this is so only in contrast to the youthfulness of the bohemians, the musical expression of which includes quotations from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836) – at that time performed quite frequently in Italian theatres – and even embraces the Rossinian pastiche of Schaunard’s ‘cantata’ . In this way, once the initial score had been settled with the problem of Wagnerian reception (seen at its high point in the dense leitmotivic working found in the operas of Antonio Smareglia) in the years around the turn of the century, there was a move to confront the impressionist challenge of Debussy ( Pelléas et Mélisande was first given at La Scala, Milan, in 1908) and the proto-expressionism of Richard Strauss, while also embracing – in this case, too, via Paris – a rather late encounter with the tradition of Russian grand opera ( Boris Godunov was given at La Scala in 1909).
On the other hand, at the fin de siècle we see the appearance of retrospective currents, and a movement towards explicitly old-fashioned types of opera. Alberto Franchetti, for example, conceived his Cristoforo Colombo (1892) as an ‘opera-ballet’ all’italiana , but using a historical subject in the manner of early nineteenth-century Parisian grand opera. And in the wake of Verdi’s Falstaff (1893), there was a flowering of operatic comedy, a foretaste of the later fashion for comic ‘revivalism’ and the return to the buffo genre on the eighteenth-century model. Act II of Puccini’s La Bohème (1896), for example, is a famous instance of brilliant comic dynamism. Mascagni and the librettist Luigi Illica, in their collaboration on Le maschere (1901), set out on an ambitious, even audacious project (which in the event was not a great artistic success): to present the commedia dell’arte as nothing less than the archetype of an Italian form of dramatic art that was ‘true and human’ . And the character role of Michonnet in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur (1902) quite literally takes its cue from the protagonist of Rossini’s Barbiere , deriving from it its most amusing characteristics and comic traits.
At the same time, the Italian tradition was in the process of beginning to free itself from the well-worn cliché of its ‘national operatic product’ in order to move outwards into the more cosmopolitan world of the new international operatic market, run on commercial lines by the powerful Milanese publishing houses (Ricordi and Sonzogno), and also into a new cosmopolitanism of operatic subjects, times, places and climates, all to be represented with realistic precision and plausibility. For Puccini, for example, the translation of ambience into musical atmosphere is always a preliminary creative operation of fundamental importance, but it takes on a special intensity in operas on exotic subjects, in which the relationship of the music to setting and ambience acts either as a function of local colour (in Madama Butterfly the Japanese melodies, which are contrasted with the hymn of the American Navy; in La fanciulla del West the Indian Zuni melodies; and in Turandot the ‘original’ Chinese music), or else as an active principle of modernization within the musical language itself, favouring the use of long pedals, unresolved dissonances, harmonic ostinatos of ‘primitive’ character, and of bitonal passages, which all conflict in various ways with the fundamentally Italian character of the Puccinian style, as expressed in its essential diatonicism, in the stability of its tonal centres, and through the primacy of melody .
With its assertion of such thematic and stylistic ideas as the comic, the antique and the exotic, late nineteenth-century opera entered into a dynamic relationship with tradition, thereby opening the way to a kind of dialectic between, on the one hand, opera as the possession and indeed the satisfaction of norms held in common by composers, interpreters and public alike; and, on the other, opera as a project of research, as an individual intellectual adventure, yearning for and struggling towards renewal. In general terms, in trying to evaluate the gains and losses, it is above all the metric and lyric schemes, the melodic and dramatic periods of the nineteenth-century tradition which tend to disappear, to make way for a musical syntax that is no longer periodic but rather is more often grounded in the idea of the lyric fragment or moment. In this perspective, it is the Verdi– Boito line of development (the lyric use of the classic Italian endecasillabo (11-syllable line) in Aida , for example, or of the pervasive experimentation with metrical and poetic forms in Falstaff ) which served as a model, even more than Strauss’s Salome (performed for the first time in Italy in 1906, in Italian translation), and which was able to develop and establish new prosodical standards. Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff (completed in 1895), based on Alessandro Maffei’s version of Heine, offers an early example of Literaturoper , having been composed on a text written originally as a piece of literary rather than staged theatre, and may be seen as anti-operatic in its narrative approach and in its use of unrhymed endecasillabi in the libretto .
Puccini himself, from the period of even his most popular and successful operas, never concealed his preference for using a wide variety of metres (unrhymed endecasillabi and settenari , for instance, which once were reserved for recitative); and he also showed a certain indifference to lyric verse-types with their rhymed, closed forms. In the second place, and on a more general level, even the dynamic process of both satisfying and playing on the public’s expectations enters once more into a phase of relatively greater equilibrium. Overturning the formal and expressive balance of the traditional melodramma , the taste for complex and intricately worked plots placed the music in a somewhat secondary position relative to the presentation of the action, and favoured the adoption within the operatic sphere of procedures indebted to literary or bourgeois-theatrical models, with a marked preference for types of plot based on the narrative conventions of the popular novel (typical cases of this would be Andrea Chenier , Adriana Lecouvreur and Siberia ) or of more complex theatrical plays (such as Fedora and La Tosca , by Victorien Sardou). In Puccini’s Tosca (1900), from the standpoint of sheer theatricality, we find an extraordinarily impressive combination of elements: extremes of passion, a dramatic escape, ‘theatre within the theatre’, torture, an attempted rape and subsequent murder, an onstage execution by firing squad, the heroine’s suicide; and, on top of all this, the powerful element of ceremony and spectacle of baroque Rome, and the evocation of a pastoral dawn at the beginning of Act III, echoing with rustic voices. It is Puccini’s great merit to have treated his subject in such variety and yet with such skill and tact as to make of it a coherent dramatic whole, seeking deep within his characters in order to bring out the turbulent erotic feeling of Tosca and Cavaradossi, and the monstrous inhumanity of Scarpia, whom the series of three striking chords heard at the very opening of the opera (the ‘Scarpia motif’) immediately characterizes, with no need for further elaboration, as a sadistic demon .
A new repertory of shared musical and stylistic features, which lend a semblance of mutual familiarity to many operas of the early years of the century, is confirmed by the extensive use of subjects which continue to draw on the attractions and aestheticizing tendencies of fin de siècle decadence: archaisms, folkloric allusions, instrumental writing with hints of a late nineteenth-century polyphonic character, sinuous chromaticisms and touches of modality, decorative harmonic sequences lacking an essential functional context, polytonal allusions and the pervasive use of free declamatory writing, thereby favouring a rapid pacing of the text. Mascagni’s Iris (1898) and Isabeau (1912), although arising out of the somewhat homespun reception and assimilation of decadent themes on the part of Luigi Illica, offered Mascagni concrete opportunities to extract himself from the familiar subjects of verismo . In Iris it is the floridly decorative nature of the exotic material which weaves around the usual erotic events of the action a precious halo of symbols (as, for example, in the little theatre of the three ‘Egoisms’ in Act III ); while in Isabeau it is the sheer brilliance and splendour of an aestheticizing medievalism and the associated cult of beauty which lead quite naturally to certain stylistic archaisms (parallel triads, effects of ‘primitive’ polyphony) and to a sense of pure scenic contemplation . The librettist Silvio Benco created a series of dramatic scenarios for Smareglia ( La falena , 1897; Oceana , 1902; Abisso , 1913) and for the young Malipiero ( Elen e Fuldano , 1907; Canossa , 1911–12) which are set against a symbolist background, and tend also to reposition the usual atmosphere of quasi-medieval or Nordic aestheticism within a dreamlike dimension, as opposed to a realistic one, operating more by suggestion than by action and leaving ample space for the free play of the irrational forces of the unconscious . Franco Alfano in La leggenda di Sakuntala (begun in 1914, premiered in 1921), skilfully fashioned a dramaturgy that proceeds more by allusion than by representation and emerges from a clearly impressionist stylistic matrix . All these are dramatic and aesthetic themes that, in exalted form, flow directly into the D’Annunzian phase of musical drama.
The development of the musical interests of the towering literary figure of D’Annunzio unfolded over a broad span of genres – from the novel to the drama, and from drama to the opera libretto. And the transfer from the one to the other of the same freedom of subject matter, of the same sensuality in the dramatic figures, of the same sophisticated and recherché quality of the sensations, functioned for the composers who set his texts as the catalyst of a process of change which was pursued, at the musical level, through the enrichment of the harmonic language and of the orchestral palette. In truth, D’Annunzio’s contribution to opera may be thought of as a somewhat audience-directed operation, offering spectators the sheer immediacy and impact of a grandiose approach, with a certain standardization (and indeed repetition) of dramatic themes and motifs, with a superabundance of Gothic and medieval theatrical settings, great battle scenes, suicides, motifs of incest and adultery, erotic encounters inspired by passages of romance, scenes of love and death, and so on. In the libretto of Parisina – the only one of his texts conceived expressly for operatic setting – the delirium of the protagonist recalls the fantasies of Francesca and of Isolde, while the eroticism of the great scene in which Ugo and Parisina find passion, and also meet their deaths, makes explicit what in Wagner’s Tristan remains at the level of suggestion . This kind of Tristaneque atmosphere is evident also in the verse written for the love duet added to the libretto reworking of Francesca da Rimini (1914): ‘As an enemy I saw the light, – As a friend I found the night’ (‘Nemica ebbi la luce, – Amica ebbi la notte’, Act III). These words were destined to furnish what would become the best-known passage of Zandonai’s opera.
From the collaborations with more traditional composers, which the poet pursued in a rather distant and aloof way, usually with his own commercial interests at heart, remote from the project and most often delegating the work to others through the intermediary of his publisher Tito Ricordi, came diverse results. Mascagni interpreted the drama of Parisina (1913) with an incomparable modernist tension that has scarcely an equal in the Italian works of its time. And yet, notwithstanding the cuts made to D’Annunzio’s prolix text, it tends to lose itself in the intricate spider’s web of pastiche strambotti and medieval litanies, while still managing to present itself to best advantage in the musical continuity of a noble declamation, supported by a mobile and remarkably intense symphonic texture in the orchestra . In his setting of Francesca (1914), Zandonai moves skilfully within a versatile linguistic and stylistic range. There are archaisms in the popular songs, written in period style (complete with lutes, ‘pifferi’ wind-players, ‘viole pompose’, and plagal cadences!); passages of chromaticism as a symbol standing both for intoxication and for magic; and harmonic colourings of impressionist derivation for the moments of coastal or seascape atmosphere . Italo Montemezzi first passed through a phase of D’Annunzianism at second hand, in the dark and turbulent idiom of L’amore dei tre Re (1913), composed to a libretto by Sem Benelli. Then, when approaching the composition of La Nave (1918), Montemezzi sought to intensify and enhance the asymmetrical phrasing and impact of his declamatory writing through the use of a chromaticism of broadly Straussian character .
Undoubtedly the most significant results were obtained by Pizzetti, the only composer to whom D’Annunzio ever paid sustained attention. From the Musiche per “La nave ” (1908), developing through the incidental music to La Pisanella (1912–13) and carried through into the opera Fedra (1915), Pizzetti developed a new ideal of drama based, precisely, on the assumption of an archaizing fiction. The recovery and appropriation, within an avowedly modern style, of past idioms – of ancient modality, of Palestrina’s polyphony, of madrigalian techniques, and, above all, of a pervasive use of syllabic declamation, even in the music for the chorus, which borrowed from plainchant its preference for movement by small intervals and for a vocal ambitus confined within the mid-range – bespeaks a musical dramaturgy that has remained largely immune both from the influence of Wagnerian reception, and from any kind of verismo survival .
D’Annunzio’s libretti imposed on all these musicians an effort of acculturation and forced them to confront two major questions, both of which obliged them to loosen somewhat their ties to the received tradition. On the one hand, D’Annunzio’s dramas tend to suppress or at least play down the conflict of psychologically plausible emotions, which had been essential to the very substance and character of the genre of Italian opera throughout its history. And on the other, faced with a level of verbal poetry which itself aspired towards the condition of music, they were led into a radical reconsideration of the relations between words and music – and not always to the advantage of the singing line, which generally remained in a state of subordination to the elevated tone of the words, and for which the composer was therefore forced either to find alternative vocal solutions, or else to channel the vocal element into the broader continuity of a sustained declamation.
The first case is well illustrated by the traditional lyric-operatic structures of Alberto Franchetti’s La figlia di Iorio (1906). For example, in the great duet between Aligi and Mila which opens Act II (this is the episode during which the passion between the two is consummated), the popular song sung by Mila which opens the scene and the archaic-religious tone of the chorus of pilgrims in the middle of the scene (which connote, respectively, local colour and the age-old, ancestral religiosity of D’Annunzian tragedy) are not enough to hide the extreme formal conventionality of the whole piece, which, in line with tradition, presents an opening tempo d’attacco (‘Se vuol sangue’) followed by a cantabile (‘Rinverdisca per noi’), and then by a finale (‘Aligi fratel mio!’) which engages in a crescendo of animation, not without a clear memory of the traditional cabaletta in the unison high notes which the two singers share at the end . At the opposing end of the spectrum stands the ‘musical prose’ of Pizzetti’s Fedra , modelled directly on the word- and phrase-rhythms of D’Annunzio’s verse and anchored to the scenic movement of the stage action, as projected through the motivic texture of the orchestra operating now in the dimension of memory and reminiscence, now in that of foreknowledge and intimation .
Perhaps as a result of D’Annunzio’s tendency to withdraw from any kind of effective or practical interaction with his composers, for most of them their collaborations with him were to remain unique occurrences. Franchetti, after a long silence, teamed up with Giovacchino Forzano (later the librettist of two thirds of Puccini’s Trittico ) who led him first to the mythologizing archaisms of Notte di leggenda (1915) and then to the graceful ‘superhuman’ mythological fable of Glauco (1922); Mascagni tempered the emphatic and vehement style typical of the decadent aesthetic in his virtuoso idyll Lodoletta (1917); and Zandonai, beginning an artistic relationship of several years with the librettist Giuseppe Adami, turned towards an essentially rather lightweight revitalization of Italian comedy ( La via della finestra , 1919). Only Pizzetti, who became his own librettist, confirmed and developed the linguistic and dramatic codes established in his Fedra through a series of works produced in response to varied poetic ideas and scenarios: the biblical dramas Dèbora e Jaéle (1922) and Lo straniero (1930), and a Fra Gherardo (1928) inspired by the vivid Chronicle of the thirteenth-century Franciscan writer Fra Salimbene de Adam .
By way of contrast, a wide range of composers showed themselves ready to make use of themes and formulae of D’Annunzian inspiration. Umberto Giordano in La cena delle beffe (1924), based on the neo-Gothic romantic-novelistic approach of Sem Benelli, displays, in the opera’s expansive approach to lyric expression and its symphonic flights, a clear relationship to his own most conventional verismo manner. Respighi and Claudio Guastalla in La campana sommersa (1929) – a rather strange mixture of the human and the fantastic – set out to aestheticize the legend, arriving at their most interesting and involving results in those passages drenched in a magical sensuality, as for example in the duets sung by the two protagonists, Enrico and Rautendelein. Then, in La fiamma (1934), they buried the modernist aspirations of the most evolved D’Annunzian aesthetic in what is in effect a true and traditional melodramma , in which the Byzantine frame of the dramatic action (which takes place in seventh-century Ravenna – a local and historical colour evoked musically in the presentation of oriental scalic and melodic patterns) becomes the setting for the unfolding of the individual dramas of three tragic figures: Basilio, victim of an old man’s love for a young woman, Silvana; Silvana herself, attracted by the young man, her stepson Donello, and burning with an ambiguous disquiet as she recognises herself to be a witch; and the aged mother Eudossia, implacable in her hostility towards her young rival). The unfolding of these personal human fates is articulated through the familiar dramatic and musical form of a number opera, with arias, duets, and elaborated finales to the acts .
Puccini meanwhile maintained a guarded position in relation to D’Annunzio, and an aristocratic distance from the temptations of the decadent aesthetic. The long-drawn-out problem of the various attempts at a collaboration with D’Annunzio – first of all in 1906–7, then again in 1912 – demonstrates very well their inability to find a mid-point of stylistic contact, in which ‘the painful experience of life and love . . . might logically live and palpitate in a cloud of living poetry, rather than in a dream-world’ (Gara 1958 , 328). The result was a very particular approach to dramaturgy which perceived clearly the need for renewal, and also began to move towards the revitalization of the musical language, recalling in certain points the neurotic anxiety of the crisis through which operatic music was passing, while still preserving a solid foundation and never abandoning its polemical stance vis à vis the modernist current of the early years of the century, judged guilty of a certain corruption of the taste and technique that went into the making of opera in the true sense.
From La fanciulla del West to Turandot , Puccini showed a special awareness of – and sensitivity to – the crisis of nineteenth-century melodrama, displaying in these later operas an increasing refinement of musical means and a diversification and enrichment of his dramatic subjects. His approach to vocal writing went far beyond the received patterns of Italian bel canto , and was generally reduced to a series of skilfully fragmented melodic ideas: this approach is fundamental to both La fanciulla del West (1910) and Il tabarro (1918), two operas which display a marked openness to declamatory singing, with a corresponding shift of interest at times onto the distinctive use of timbre and sonority in the ‘symphonic’ orchestral material, at other times onto the rich and suggestive quality of the harmony. The operetta-like approach of La rondine (1917) includes, among other things, a reflection on the use of functional types of music (e.g. dance-types, including waltzes). But by the following year it is a fully retrospective view, looking back to genres by now firmly historicized, that stands at the basis of Il trittico (1918), a three-in-one work which might almost be described as a mannerist compendium of the dramatic tendencies of the preceding twenty years: from the Grand Guignol-style realism of Il tabarro (a revisiting of the typical verismo subjects of the 1890s), to the sentimental exploration of the tragic situation of the central heroine in Suor Angelica (a perfect example of the ‘Puccinian manner’), to the recovery and revitalization of the comic in Gianni Schicchi (which, unlike other contemporary revivals of the eighteenth-century buffo manner, offers a kind of comedy that is anything but ‘reconstructed’, being grounded in a perceptibly modern idiom in respect both of the musical language and of the scenic approach). And finally Turandot (1926) opens up the possibility of the renewal of opera by means of a return to mythic and legendary subjects.
Puccini explored a range of strategies as he confronted modern composers and styles. Il tabarro contains Debussyan orchestral traits (and indeed a stream-like musical flow that is also somewhat Debussyan), touches of dissonance redolent of Strauss (in the tense scene of the lighted match), and even citations of Stravinsky (the waltz of the little out-of-tune barrel-organ). Suor Angelica displays archaizing traits (allusions to organum, the sonority of a cappella choral singing, modal inflections), which are bound up with the religious and liturgical setting of the action. Turandot reviews and reworks the formal schemes of the nineteenth-century melodramma (the conventional types of arias and duets) with a kind of studied meticulousness in the recovery of remote and old-fashioned procedures; while, at the same time, it presents an unusual stylistic fragmentation, proceeding by means of ‘blocks’ conceived either on the basis of exoticism, as an element capable of revitalizing the forms and structures of Western traditions, or, at other times, on that of the free use of dissonant intervals and harmonic agglomerations; or, again, on the sentimental and pathos-driven form of melody that is so deeply characteristic of Puccini’s normal style. By these musical means, the contrasts and oppositions of the protagonist’s gradual process of humanization are rendered in a directly scenic way: the warm glow of the golden reflections and the cool brilliance of the silver reflections, the sun and the moon, the sunset and the dawn, the cruelty of Turandot and the sacrifice of Liù, the failure of the Prince of Persia and the success of the Unknown Prince, the frozen body of the princess illuminated by the cutting light of the moon, and the ‘burning hands’ with which Calaf clasps her in the moment of their embrace, death and love.
Thus within the Puccinian theatre we can observe the gradual appearance of fissures in the logic of psychological ‘identification’, a phenomenon which is fundamental to a kind of dramaturgy which – in the romantic manner – continued to present itself as the confessional disclosure and evocation of a certain kind of realistic psychology. And on the other hand, we also see the emergence of a clear emotional distance on the composer’s part from the events and situations of the action, even to the extent of a certain lack of sympathy for his characters, anticipated in the almost documentary-like dispassion first shown in Il tabarro and then, fully fledged, in the vocal part given to the princess Turandot – abstract, cold, impersonal – for the entire first act. Here she seems a distinctly unusual Puccinian protagonist in her state of human incommunicativeness .
Turandot is the last Italian opera to have gained a foothold in the international repertoire. It is a work that stands at the very limits of the grand tradition of opera in Italy (which was henceforth dead as a compositional phenomenon, while still continuing to live magnificently for the musical public in the form of an operatic repertory), and of the genre of opera as a broader category (which managed to survive, while remaining an object of indifference to the vast majority of the general public, more and more cut off from an appreciation of the more novel realizations of the genre) . The establishment of the Maggio Musicale at Florence in 1931 – in the full flush of the Italian rediscovery of the romantic operas of Verdi, which was in turn the point of departure for the more extensive reappropriation of the nineteenth-century repertory in general – was intended to satisfy the demand for operas of the past, offering them to the public in lavish and prestigious stagings, given by celebrated conductors and singers, and often produced by directors and designers borrowed for the occasion from the figurative arts (among others, Sironi, Casorati, De Chirico), with the intention of achieving a more even overall balance by giving the scenic function (usually held to be secondary) a weight and prominence equal to that of the other elements of the dramatic spectacle.
Meanwhile, other types of spectacle were exercising a varied influence on the paths and approaches musicians were taking. Pizzetti (Sinfonia del fuoco for Cabiria , 1914) and Mascagni (Rapsodia satanica , 1915) were both attracted by the beginnings of cinematography, which in its turn drew on situations which were markedly melodramatic. And the ballet became a viable alternative to opera both for Malipiero, who in his ‘symphonic drama’ Pantea (completed in 1919) gave active expression to his polemic against the predominance of the singer-actor, and for Casella, who with La giara (1924, from the novella of the same title by Luigi Pirandello) attempted a distinctively Italian contribution to the international world of modern European ballet music.
Within this context, the crisis of tradition touched upon the very substance of the categories which lay at the root of melodramma as a genre, bringing into question the normative power of the relevant conventions, the temporal structures and the narrative categories, of operatic theatre. Malipiero – who also became his own librettist – elaborated his own version of an anti-theatrical dramaturgy. The libretto, once the recitatives had been excised, became an assemblage of poetic texts taken from the medieval and Renaissance eras. The relativization of the idea of a coherent narrative sequence, implicit in the whole dramatic layout, adapts itself to the paradoxical and at times grotesque character of the episodes, and to the interweaving of distanced and stylized figures (masks, allegories, marionettes, character-types) and of sentiments, of scenic plans and settings. The opera presents itself as a sequence of unrelated episodes, linked by instrumental interludes and culminating in closed song-forms: the ‘lyric piece’ is thus entirely parenthetic to the action, which is represented by means of pantomimic gestures during the symphonic instrumental sections. This model, invented for the Sette canzoni (1920, a sequence of ‘seven dramatic expressions’ which were then placed at the centre of the triptych L’Orfeide of 1925), could be easily applied to works that were similarly structured, such as the diptych Filomela e l’Infatuato (1928) and Merlino mastro d’organi (1934, an allegorical self-representation of music itself), or the trilogy entitled Mistero di Venezia ( Il finto Arlecchino , 1928; Le aquile di Aquileia and I corvi di San Marco , 1932). But it was also applied to works such as the Tre commedie goldoniane (1926), which sought to reinstate a new solution to the problem of operatic dialogue, while transforming several of the most distinctive figures of Goldonian theatre into character-types lacking any human or psychological density, reduced instead to the status of masks of grotesque or tragic character, and suffused with a sense of ironic nostalgia.
Malipiero’s theatrical utopia reaches its high point in Torneo notturno (1931), in which the composer achieves a new balance between a discontinuous approach to dramatic structure and the narrative continuity of the action, a solution which is sketched out in the dialectical relationship between the two characters: the Despairing Man (‘Il Disperato’) who is drowning in his own anguish and anxiety, and the Thoughtless Man (‘Lo Spensierato’), who is impudent and unscrupulous. The centre-piece of the opera is the ‘Canzone del Tempo’: ‘Chi ha tempo e tempo aspetta, il tempo perde’ (‘Whoever has time, and waits for time, loses time’), the text of which is formed of a chain of strambotti attributed to Serafino dall’Aquila (1466–1500). It is sung by the Thoughtless Man in the first Nocturne and then repeated – in whole or in part – in the six which follow. It thus stands at the very centre of the opera and becomes its dramatic core, both for its warning about the transitory nature of human existence, and for the way it alludes to the irreconcilable dualism between time, which disperses everything, and the ultimately hopeless determination to grasp and embrace life fully. It is also a distinctive example of Malipiero’s highly characteristic approach to vocality: in setting the Renaissance texts he loved with an appropriately direct and elemental scansion, he deliberately alienated the musical from the verbal accent in his out-of-phase treatment of the textual and poetic stresses relative to the beats of the bar, thereby relegating the word to the status of a purely rhythmic pattern, geared solely towards prosody and largely indifferent to the communicative and expressive aspirations of music .
But already his next opera, La favola del figlio cambiato (1932–3), composed to a text by Pirandello (traces of Pirandellism can also be found in the typecasting of his characters from as early as the Sette canzoni ), marked the composer’s return to a unified action and plot, to a libretto with dialogue, and, as a consequence, to the extensive use of sung recitative . Malipiero thus stakes his claim for the recovery of a ‘lyric conception’ of opera, a conception which pervades the works of the 1930s, and is inspired by a classicizing ideal (Giulio Cesare , 1936; Antonio e Cleopatra , 1938) – albeit one by no means wholly devoid of encomiastic intentions vis à vis the Fascist regime .
The importance Malipiero accorded to medieval and Renaissance traditions of Italian poetry lent his approach to drama an archaizing character which, as an expression both of a certain cult of the antique and of a fastidious love for rare and beautiful objects, was closely bound up with the tenets of D’Annunzian aestheticism. (Malipiero lived out in sentimental fashion the duality between classic and romantic, viewing the beauty of Venice through its portrayal in the novels of D’Annunzio, and attending with antiquarian passion to his edition of the works of Monteverdi, thereby facilitating the composer’s rebirth in Italy – so that in all this he is, of the musical generation of 1880, the one most intimately compromised by his involvement with D’Annunzian aesthetic ideas .) Among his dramatic works the ‘mystery’ San Francesco d’Assisi (1922), inspired by the Fioretti (the ‘Little Flowers of St Francis’) and by the poetry of Jacopone da Todi, lays claim to an original and distinctive position within a clearly medievalizing aesthetic. In the four tableaux into which this one-act drama is divided, Malipiero emphasizes an almost anti-theatrical orientation, achieved by means of a process of distillation, almost of ‘drying out’ – of the words, of the characters (which are denuded of any kind of emotional or psychological individuation), of the vocalism (aiming at a pseudo-Gregorian purity, and, in the choruses, at a kind of writing which recalls the simplicity of the polyphonic lauda), of instrumental timbre and sonority, and finally of the scenic and theatrical apparatus. The result is a prototype of chamber opera, born out of a radical archaism in its dramatic approach, which enjoyed a certain successs in the 1920s and 1930s .
In similar vein, Pizzetti twice worked with the fifteenth-century miracle play entitled La sacra rappresentazione di Abram e d’Isaac by Feo Belcari, the first time by composing incidental music for a stage production (1926), then following this with a fully sung version (1937). Respighi, too, explored this aesthetic with his Lauda per la natività del Signore (1930) and the ‘concert-opera’ Maria Egiziaca (1932), which finds its expressive high points in the vocal intensity of the protagonist’s mystical exaltation, and in the poetic quotation borrowed from St Francis which provides the text of the final chorus: ‘Laudato sii, Signore’ . In Maria d’Alessandria (1937) by Giorgio Federico Ghedini, the composer’s approach emphasizes the work’s oratorio-like characteristics.
Mystery-play, dramatic lauda, sacra rappresentazione – all these genres stand within the framework of a broader and more general expression of antiquarian taste, which also embraces the intellectualizing reinvention of mythological opera (for example in La favola d’Orfeo of Casella, based on Poliziano in the version by Corrado Pavolini, 1932 ) and revivalist reworkings in modern style of the early ‘proto-melodramas’. Indeed, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo became a veritable stadium for often naïve pseudo-philological exertions: in 1928 it was performed at Leningrad in Malipiero’s version; in 1934 it was given in two further versions, one at Perugia (by Giacomo Orefice) and the other at Rome (by Giacomo Benvenuti); and in 1935 it finally arrived at La Scala in the ‘free interpretation’ by Respighi and Guastalla. All these versions are in reality adaptations: they cut whatever in the general layout and conception seemed redundant; they ‘complete’ the harmonic syntax wherever it was felt to be insufficent, even primitive; and they ‘reconstruct’ with modern instruments whatever of the early approach to timbre and sonority was judged inadequate to be presented to contemporary ears.
During the first decades of the century, however, neo-classicism came to the fore and expressed itself above all in the recovery and revitalization of eighteenth-century comedy, a development which favoured the reinstatement of the structural properties and other features of opera buffa , and also leaned (somewhat ambitiously) in the direction of the absolute Mozartian ideal. Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari made of this idealizing approach the very cornerstone of his operatic work, producing a series of pieces characterized by a somewhat melancholy and well-mannered type of comedy, inspired by Goldoni ( Le donne curiose, I quattro rusteghi , Gli amanti sposi , La vedova scaltra , Il campiello , works composed between 1903 and 1936) and also by Molière (L’amore medico , 1913). Alongside this series of works we find the varied post-D’Annunzian approaches of Zandonai, of Adriano Lualdi ( Il diavolo nel campanile , Le furie di Arlecchino , 1925), of Felice Lattuada ( Le preziose ridicole , 1929), of Luigi Ferrari-Trecate ( Ciottolino, La bella e il mostro, Le astuzie di Bertoldo , works composed between 1922 and 1934), and of Ghedini with his Boccaccio-inspired ‘divertissement’ entitled La pulce d’oro (1940).
Respighi (Belfagor , 1923) and Casella (La Donna serpente , 1932 ) treated the subject matter of legend and fable by means of a notably eclectic approach, and with a quick-witted sense of the comic. Belfagor , based on the comedy by Ercole Luigi Morselli, sets the decidedly anti-heroic episode of a devil-turned-man who is scorned and shamed by the human beings in the story (‘a devil who gets married, falls in love, and is ridiculed’). The work plays on the multiple levels of style suggested by the grotesque, free-and-easy character of the protagonist, by the vein of sentimentality appropriate to the young lovers, and by the strong presence of Rossinian vivacity (as in the protagonist’s comic rigmarole of self-presentation, ‘Sono un grosso mercante ritirato’) which replays similar hints present in the ballet of a few years before, La boutique fantasque (1918) . Casella stays close to the magic of Carlo Gozzi’s tale, to the freshness and ingenuity of its fantasy and invention, and to the complications of a plot that is elaborated to the very limits of comprehensibility (embracing as it does a whole series of metamorphoses, apparitions and sudden changes of scene and locality), while also bringing to it all the bubbling vitality, the optimism, the comedic energy and the colourful irony that had matured in his instrumental music.
By these means La Donna serpente became an opera in complete contradiction to the norms of the melodramatic model. It is a work in which the text and the other dramatic elements (including the vocal writing) are subordinated to the musical invention and to the refined play of stylistic registers, including a range of well-judged references to stylistic features of the music of the past. The comic element (above all, the use of masks) is taken as an unending source of rhythmic vitality and dynamism, and possesses a clear Rossinian character and edge. And then into the various incarnations of the chorus is distilled the whole imaginative repertoire of the nineteenth century – the chorus is called upon to impersonate figures which are at times fantastic (fairies, gnomes, spirit-lovers), and at others sacred and ritualistic in character (priests, warriors). For the rest, the score abounds in ariosos, in Handelian arias, in concertato writing in the typical eighteenth-century manner, in duets and terzettos, all connected together according to a very immediate and graphic dramatic process which assigns to music the role of an abstract scenic flow, one which pursues its course more or less oblivious to the blandishments of sentiment .
In the aftermath of the Second World War, it was precisely the eclectic spirit of operatic comedy which offered the final opportunity of resistance to the received melodramatic tradition. Italian opera survived the apocalypse, firstly by lightening its burden of dramatic themes, which were orientated now for the most part towards the use of the grotesque, of the fabulous and legendary, and of the comic – this, then, was one of the fruits of the lesson pioneered by Casella in favour of a ‘delightful and entertaining’ theatre, and against a theatre ‘of preaching and moralism, of pseudo-religion, of stasis and contemplation’ ( 1932 ); and secondly by emphasizing a craftsmanlike concept of operatic composition, entirely remote from the intellectualizing and ideological agenda of the theatrical preoccupations favoured by the avant-garde.
Translated from the Italian by Philip Weller.