The Italiana Avant-garde and National Tradition

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The Italian Avant-Garde and National Tradition Author(s): John C. G. Waterhouse Source: Tempo, No. 68 (Spring, 1964), pp. 14-25Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/943549Accessed: 24-03-2015 18:33 UTC

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THE ITALIAN AVANT-GARDE AND NATIONAL TRADITION

by John C. G. Waterhouse Musical nationalism is sometimes looked on as a transient phenomenon,

characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and closely associated with political nationalism. But such a view is only a half-truth: national characteristics have had a way of turning up in the music of most ages, and we find them not only in periods of militant political nationalism and parochialism, but also, often to a striking degree, at times when frontiers seemed to imply no cultural barriers. Medieval civilization was international to an extent that would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century; yet there is no mistaking the quintessential italianitca of, say, Landini. The Italian and English madrigal schools of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries could be regarded as closely-related phases of one great cultural flowering; yet one need not look at the words to assign madrigals by Marenzio and Weelkes, or Gastoldi and Morley, to their respective countries.

During the past hundred-and-fifty years this tendency has, of course, been reinforced by political factors. But now that one-eyed patriotism is at last beginning to die out in Europe, now that air-travel and wireless are making cultural internationalism easier than ever before, it is remarkable how even the most 'common-market-minded' countries still seem to hesitate to sacrifice their musical individualities.

On the face of it nothing could be more international than the present-day avant-garde: composers from all corners of the world flock to Darmstadt (or Warsaw or Venice) and freely exchange ideas and techniques. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that national identities will not be submerged even by this, and that almost all the truly creative members of the avant-garde show strong signs of their national temperaments and traditions: Boulez can only be fully under- stood in the light of his heritage from Debussy and Messiaen; Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle make no secret of their debts to English music of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance; and in Italy, perhaps more than in any other country, international avant-garde techniques have been fused with, and animated by, idioms and spiritual attitudes which clearly spring from national roots.

To see how this situation has arisen we must try to consider the younger generation of Italian composers in relation to the whole past history of Italian music, and more particularly to their immediate predecessors, the Italian composers of the period stretching from the first world war to the second. It is unfortunately very difficult for the British to view them in this way, because of our extraordinary neglect of almost all Italian music between Puccini and Dallapiccola, and because of our relative ignorance even of Dallapiccola himself. Recent investigations have convinced me not only of the very considerable intrinsic worth of much of the music in this neglected field, but also of its crucial importance for a just assessment of the Italian music of the present moment. My

1964 by John C. G. Waterhouse



THE ITALIAN AVANT-GARDE 15

main purpose in this article is to point to just a few of the connecting links between the Italian avant-garde composers and their national heritage.

Nowadays it has become a cliche to speak of the 'Mediterranean sunshine' of much typically Italian music. But it is quite a useful cliche, which happily sums up a quality that Landini, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bellini, Dallapiccola, etc. all have in common. Among the various technical features most commonly associated with it, one of the most obvious is a tendency to delight in thirds, sixths and common chords as sensations, not merely as 'functional' building-stones in the music's structure-a tendency to enhance the sensuous warmth of these intervals and chords by their spacing, melodic context, instrumentation, etc. Landini's use of thirds and sixths shows markedly greater awareness of their euphony than Machaut's; Palestrina's ethereal polyphony lays more stress on the beauty of the triad as sound than do the rougher, more impassioned textures of Byrd or Lassus; Monteverdi and Giovanni Gabrieli sometimes sustain single common chords for long periods, often dressing them up in the most dazzling ornamentation; Vivaldi, whose harmony can seem functional in the extreme, nevertheless allows himself to luxuriate in triadic warmth for its own sake in many of his best slow movements; Boccherini's chord-progressions are in general more sonorous and less dramatic than Haydn's. In the nineteenth century this tendency went into temporary eclipse-Verdi was more interested in stark, powerful chord-relations than in chords as chords. But in the twentieth century it reappears with great prominence, and has done much to prevent Italy from submitting whole-heartedly to the anti-triadic trends associated with Schoenberg.

This revival of 'Mediterranean' triadic sensuousness is already clearly evident in Puccini. But to the end of his life foreign, and especially French, influences prevented him from fully regaining the Italian ethos as it had been in the great days of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The full recovery of that ethos, and the reshaping of it in modern terms, was the work mainly of composers of the next generation, and above all of Pizzetti and G. F. Malipiero. Thanks to these composers, younger men like Dallapiccola and Petrassi and still younger ones like Nono, Maderna and Berio could accept this aspect of italianita' as a birthright, and integrate it with much more advanced trends without any danger of destroying it. Exx. i, 2 and 3 give some idea of the forms that this sensuous approach to thirds, sixths and triads has taken in successive generations of modern Italian composers. Ex. 1

Largamente, ma non troppo lento

etc.

from G. F. Malipiero's Torneo Notturno (1929)



16 TEMPO

Ex.2

Allegretto molto comodo (J= 58-o0)

_

p tranquillo, recilando

Pie - na splen- de - va la l - na

V iolin _4 ...... . .... .. . - ... 'Cello "

(arm.) (arm.) Trumpet p sost. V

iola 4 . .. ...... ' ...... .... ... ..... Horn

(tutti con sord.)

quan - do pres- so I'al- ta - re si fer - ma - ro - no

(arm ) semnpre

Jp (arm.)

from Dallapicola's Cinque Frammenti di Saffo (1942) Ex. 3

(un poco liberamente) -108ca. Cit.en.l

Woodwind Ses.pr ~ mp espr.

Tpt. con sord cupa 5 Trumpet & Horn

-_ , _. HCh. n.p

V i bra Vn con sorde Violin Viola o

- Cb.(arm.)

Woodwind A

Vib.

V ibraphone ....... ..... . .................... , & Piano

Violin L9 I 1 19

Via.

from Maderna's Serenata No. 2 for II instruments (1954, revised 19g7)

It is noteworthy that Dallapiccola worships Malipiero, and rightly looks on Torneo Notturno (perhaps this bewilderingly uneven and over-prolific composer's most impressive work) as one of the most fascinating and strangely haunting one- act operas of the twentieth century-he has said that when he first heard the work in 1932 it seemed to him "to rediscover the old authentic spirit of Italian




music." It is also perhaps significant that Maderna was a member of Malipiero's master-class, and conducts his teacher's music often and with evident enthusiasm.

Another facet of the 'Mediterranean sunshine' of Italian music can be seen in an exceptional sensitivity to all the subtleties of that most luminous of musical textures: vocal polyphony. Here too we find a definite twentieth- century revival of something that had been dormant during the nineteenth century and indeed the eighteenth-for all its splendour Verdi's choral writing lacks the infinite refinement and richness of detail to be found in Palestrina's or Monte- verdi's. In this revival the crucial figure was Pizzetti, who in the choruses for La Nave (1905-7), in the 'Trenodia per Ippolito Morto' from Fedra (1905-12), and above all in the Due Canzoni Corali (19 I 3) not only resurrected the old madri-

gal tradition virtually single-handed, but raised it to a remarkable intensity of expression which makes the decline of his creative powers from about 1921 onwards all the more regrettable.

But even if Pizzetti himself never again equalled the choral writing of these early works-with which I should also mention the magnificent choral scenes in his finest opera Debora e jaele (19 15-2 I), in which, however, Italian qualities are modified by Russian ones deriving from Mussorgsky-he laid the foundations of a tradition which soon produced notable results in many passages of vocal polyphony by G. F. Malipiero, from San Francesco d'Assisi (192 I1) to Magister Josephus (1957); in much of Casella's Missa pro Pace (I944); in the Cori di Michelangelo (1933-6), the Canti di Prigionia (1938-41), the Canti di Liberazione (I955) and the Requiescant (1958) of Dallapiccola; in Salmo IX (1934-6), the Coro di Morti

(1940-41) and Noche Oscura (i950o-5)

of Petrassi; and, more recently, in the Canto Sospeso (19 g6) and several smaller pieces by Luigi Nono.

The best music of this tradition, which includes both accompanied and unaccompanied choral works, shows a strong awareness both of the sensuous and beauty and of the dramatic power of human voices in concert. In some works of Nono the exploration of the subtleties of nuance and texture made possible by the division of words and even syllables between different voices still harks back to madrigalian roots:it is really only an extreme extension of the somewhat fragmented treatment of words and choral textures to be found in the madrigals of Marenzio, Gesualdo and others. Exx. 4-7 give some impression of the growth and continuity of this tradition.

Ex.4 Moderatamente mosso..

il dolce4ap - ri - le giun - se, il dolce ap-ri -le giun - se,

Soprani -. II

il dolce6ap - ri - le giun-se, il dolce ap -

Confralti I F F

il dolcea - ri - le giun - seil

Tenorii 1. 11 II

Bassi 6v 5 R (Ex. 4 continued overleaf)



I8 TEMPO

trailt. . . . . non e ion - ta - - no

- ri - le giun-se, non I lon- ta . - no

non ion - ta - - no molto tratt . ..

dolce'ap- ri - le giun - se, non e, non e lon- ta - no

om----) -~---t -------" non on ta - - no

non ion ta -

no

from Pizzetti's Due Canzoni Carole (1913)

Ex. 5 Sempre molto lento, ma un poco pii flessibile (molto espressivo)

e div

- O Do - mi - ne A meno dik pp.

Soprani

O Do - mi - ne De- us! Do - mi- ne

O Do - mi- ne Do - mi - ne, Contralti p ii pp

0 Do - mi-ne De-us! O

Do - mi .

ne De- us!

Tenori

a00; m)1olto P De - - us! n Tutti>

-n- I 4f To In

O e us! O Do - mi.-ne De-us! spe - ra

- Vi in Te. etc.

Do. - , .mi--

ne De - us! -sb p P subito

from Dallapiccola's Canti di Prigionia (1938-41)

Ex. 6 Molto tranquillo ma senza trascinare ( = 0)

r 1 S.&T. Speak gent - y, she can hear

C.& a. Speak gent - iy, she can

B, 9 1 3 , . . 1

Bass Clt.

A Ii Orch. Hn. Hrp

PP Hu.& Harp

(Ex. 6 continued on next page)



THE ITALIAN AVANT-GARDE 19 I 3 1

L7 . --the dais - ies grow... hear the dais - ies grow...etc.

B. 4

F=_

L -- - - -- - - - - - - from Dallapiccola's Requiescant (I957-58)

Ex. 7 A - cque

c.I

.Ici

mpo Fa

T.II 6.(- .. .

, .

" ,.

ca

from Nono's Sara dolce tacere (i960)

Closely allied to this sensitivity to vocal polyphony, and even more persistent and well-known, is the sensitivity to the solo human voice embodied in the bel canto tradition. This tradition did not go into eclipse in the I9th century, but it became somewhat vulgarized around the turn of the century, for instance in the notorious Mascagnian aria dell' urlo; and this once again led many composers to react against recent developments and seek inspiration in Italy's more remote past. G. F. Malipiero's cantilena lines owe more to Monteverdi than to Bellini, Verdi or Puccini, while Dallapiccola's owe at least as much.

The vocal lines of Dallapiccola's recent works and of all the avant-garde are often angular in the extreme and very complex in rhythm; yet by some alchemy even they rarely lose the suave cantilena quality of the bel canto tradition-a comparison of the vocal parts of Dallapiccola's Concerto per la Notte di Natale (i956-7) with the sharper, harder-edged lines of Webern's cantatas will dem- onstrate this clearly. It is noteworthy that Dallapiccola's purely instrumental works are few and relatively unimportant, and that in many of Nono's less satisfactory pieces, e.g. the first Canciones a Guiomar (1962), the most convincing sections are those for voice. The development of Italian vocal cantilena in the twentieth century is illustrated in Exx. 8- i.

Ex. 8 Lento

disperato 31 m4J (tenor)

Man - gio pa - ne con la - cri - me, a - cquaa - ma ra, i do -

P n 00 K"7 +-: . ' "t~f" I ,r" fird

(Ex. 8 continued overleaf)



20 TEMPO

lo - ri e i tra - va gli mhan nu - tri ca - to.

etc.

a ir

from G. F. Malipiero's Torneo Notturno (1929) Ex.9

Molto tranquillo 4 42-44 p . " o p

Riviere f

ar - ri - vo de-gli aero - pla - ni non sa - ra per me giam-mai la vit-to- ria che

Strgs.

p dolcissimo

Mki.01 1

chi - de u- na guerra ed a - pre un pe - rio - do di pa - ce.

Fl. etc.

from Dallapiccola's Yolo di Notte (1937-39) Ex. 10 Allegro moderato

etc. leading

eventually to

' I Ib el

Ex.11

If - Pppp If>P4'-

Female...... voicefo D ii

sti - n g . .. " " "

- i - n g

lascia vibrare sempre Harp

c e t

(Ex. i i continued on next page)




_"_ _ PP"= p ==-

go 1- ..-. .-. -d go I

-- i'Is - fj Pfrom Berio's Circles 96)

from Berlo's Circles (1960)

Up till now I have concentrated on musical characteristics that have reap- peared, at least intermittently, throughout Italy's history. But there are also a few more specifically modern musical phenomena which are both recognizably Italian and considerably older than the avant-garde; which, in other words, formed a part of the avant-garde's birthright though they were not of such ancient lineage as the tendencies I have already discussed.

Firstly I should mention a special kind of pretty, rather superficial decorative- ness in which a variegated and colourful palette serves purely hedonistic ends and is often associated with a rather gimmicky violence which can be downright vulgar. The protagonist of this trend was not in fact a composer but the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio. But dannunzianesimo has cast an insidious spell over a very great deal of modern Italian music: it left traces even on so sober a composer as Pizzetti, while in Respighi and Zandonai it is often allowed to run riot. What is more, though the full d'Annunzian ethos now has a 'period' flavour its influence is still discernible in some ways even today: few would deny that something of the kind can be seen in much of the music of Nono, especially when, for instance, he juxtaposes gentle, rarefied sonorities with unmotivated bashing on the percussion.

Similarly decorative, post-d'Annunzian qualities figure prominently in the music of Niccolo Castiglioni (b. 1932), whose style ranges from mere gimmicks, sometimes of childish naivety, to a shimmering kaleidoscopic prettiness which can be very charming indeed. One recurrent feature of his music is a fondness for multitudes of trilling, twittering lines which are incomparably airier and more delicate than Stockhausen's eruptive arabesques,which they in some ways resemble; indeed they are often curiously reminiscent of bird-song (the resemblance may or may not be deliberate). But Castiglioni's birds, if such they be, lack the numin- ous quality that gives Messiaen's the air of mystical symbols; they belong, rather, to the same hedonistic ornithology as the recorded nightingale in Respighi's very d'Annunzian Pines of Rome. Ex. 12 is a typical excerpt. Neo-d'Annunzian

Ex. 12 oscillando da 54 a 68

Flutes-2I

Oboe

Celesta Nap

Violin I So

(Ex. I 2 continued overleaf)



22 TEMPO

III -

l.

Flutes

Ciarinet

pp

from Castiglioni's Sequenze (1959)

tendencies can be seen in several other Italian avant-garde composers. To cite one more example (very different from Castiglioni), the Due Improvvisi per Orchestra of Gino Marinuzzi junior are so unabashedly lush and variegatedly sensual in sound that only their rhythmic and textural intricacy maintain any connection with the avant-garde at all.

The last tendency that I have space to mention, and the only one that has nothing directly to do with 'Mediterranean sunshine', though the two things are often found in the same work, is an exceptionally potent tradition of highly 'committed' protest against war and injustice, which reached maturity with Dallapiccola and is the mainspring of several of Nono's most intense and moving works. Political protest-music has, of course, appeared in many countries; but compared with Dallapiccola's and Nono's that of composers like Tippett and Eisler, and even that of Shostakovich and Weill, seems relatively aloof and lacking in the more agonized kind of involvement. The Italians seem to be unusually willing to abandon themselves to this kind of musical 'impurity': no other country has produced such powerful expressions of protest from its resident composers; the only comparably forceful and committed musical utterances outside Italy are those of the by-then-expatriate Schoenberg.

This tradition of protest-through-music may have its ultimate roots in the close association of music (especially that of Verdi) with the struggles for freedom and national unity of the Risorgimento period. It reappears in a more desperate and 'modern' form in the strangely tormented works that Casella was writing during the first world war (in some ways his most interesting period). Two of them, the Pagine di Guerra ( 91 5) and the Elegia Eroica (1916), make specific, almost programmatic reference to the war. There can be no question about the nature of the impulse behind a passage such as Ex. I3. But Casella's attitude to the war seems to have been curiously ambivalent and muddled; by a kind of doublethink he managed to retain a naive, almost Rupert Brooke-like belief in the heroism of fighting. This sentiment was later, alas, to get the upper hand in his ludicrous opera II Deserto Tentato (1936-7),in praise of Mussolini's Abyssinian campaign.

There is no such ambivalence in Dallapiccola's protest, nor in Nono's. These composers' wrath at the state of the world gave rise, in the older man's Canti di Prigionia (1938-41) and I1 Prigioniero (1944-8), and in the younger man's II Canto Sospeso (1956), to three of the most famous of all modern Italian com- positions. Few could remain unmoved by the clanging, relentless bells and impassioned choral entreaties of the first two of the Canti di Prigionia, or by the overwhelming choruses of II Prigioniero (less overwhelming in the production at Sadler's Wells than the composer intended: he says that the second choral



THE ITALIAN AVANT-GARDE 23 Ex. 13

Grave e pesante, grandiosamente ________ _------- AV__(all_4) n all 4 notes (all 4) (a114)

upperussion

Trpts.sella's Elegia Eroica (96) Hns.TLE

Vln.I.II Vla.

molto espr. ed a]Passionato

,ff

(Bass line doubled in lower 8ve)

s.D. Percussion

gong

joy Si

lasci vibrare

from Casella's Elegia Eroica (I916)

intermezzo should be amplified by microphones so that the audience feels itself "literally swept away and submerged by the immensity of the sound"). The frenetic brass-writing and howling semitonal clashes of 11 Canto Sospeso may at times seem more wilful, but they too are thrillingly effective.

Some idea of the protesting violence, the terror-struck agony, expressed in these works, is given by Exx. 14 and I g, and by Ex. g, quoted earlier.

Much more could be said about various aspects of the Italian avant-garde's Ex. 14

Appena meno mosso

=o =72

_ 1 I I I I I

Bass Drum -

.

Sa- er-dio tes tu - i i in-, et duan-t - etr iu

- stif ti- am ..........

T. B.

Hns. Timp. Tuba, Pfte. Cb.

Tam-Tam L Bass Drum - jP

(ripretndere ii lempo) Et sann-

- cti tu - i, et san - ti

S.

B. rrrr Et san - eti tu - _ et san - cti

Org. ___

If 8f

before) Z'

+ Organ Pedals V

(Ex. 14 continued overleaf)



24 TEMPO

t- Molto animato, glorioso (Jd84)

S. A C. T. ri

Et san- cti tu i ex -

Et san- cti toui ex - f - - t ent, ex -

tu-- i,

Org.

Organ Solo sostenendo le voci (as

before)

from Dallapiccola's 11 Prigioniero (1944-48)

Ex. 15 ca. 92

Horns

7

.-I Trumpets

I I . I7 Trombones

Fl.

O I 7_ _ I

7

S. _Timp.

_ _ -

Hn-. oil

_ _ V mf

Trombs. I. J

Timp.

Hns. A

Timp. 21V l

from Nono's II Canto Sospeso 1956

national heritage. One could for instance mention the engaging (indeed in a work like Circles extraordinarily fascinating) spirit of caprice which Berio seems to have inherited from Petrassi, hence indirectly from Casella, and through him ultim-



BENJAMIN LEES'S VISIONS OF POETS 2S

ately from Domenico Scarlatti and Rossini, and which serves to lighten and vivify the 'note-volleying' manner which Berio shares with Boulez and Stockhausen. One could also mention the influence of plainsong (not, of course, confined to Italy, but particularly strong there) which runs through much of the output of Pizzetti, G. F. Malipiero, Respighi etc., figures prominently in the early works of Dallapiccola and Petrassi (and, albeit in a more sublimated form, in some of their recent ones too), and can still be heard with unexpected clarity in, say, many parts of Nono's Epitafo per Garcia Lorca (1952-3).

These various tendencies are, of course, no more than ingredients of something altogether more intangible and complex-a persistently recurrent musical atmosphere which seems to be the musical equivalent of the Italian national temperament. I certainly do not claim that all these tendencies are in themselves either universal in Italian music or confined to it; some of them have counterparts, for example, in British music. Nevertheless the sum total of their effect is distinctively Italian. Nor should one suppose that all Italian avant-garde composers show obvious national characteristics,any more than all their predecessors did: there is nothing specifically Italian about the hard, ejaculatory texture of, say, Aldo Clementi's Ideogrammi No.2 or his Episodi per Orchestra, while most of Franco Donatoni's recent music seems no more national than his Bart6k- ian early works. Both these composers have clearly learned a great deal from Stockhausen. And I can detect little Italian spirit in most of the sounds which emanate from the Milan electronic studies, and little spirit of any kind in such of Italy's more extreme aleatoric lunacies as have come my way. But on the whole Italy's musical avant-garde shows to a surprising degree how resilient a national tradition can be even when circumstances seem to be conspiring to obliterate it.

BENJAMIN LEES'S VISIONS OF POETS

by Deryck Cooke From the expressive point of view, as was shown in the first part of this

articlel the special quality of Lees's music is that it is concerned with the emotional unrest of contemporary life-the sense of violence, the feelings of doubt, discouragement, even despair-but while voicing these unflinchingly, it confronts them with a natural vitality which is not devoid of humour, courage, and hope. Seattle therefore made an appropriate choice when they commissioned him to write a large-scale choral work to open the 'Century 2 Exposition' of 1962. The result, Visions of Poets, was performed at the exposition on May 15 and 16, by Adele Addison (soprano), Albert da Costa (tenor), the Seattle Chorale and Symphony Orchestra, under Milton Katims. It was a spectacular occasion, the stage of the new Seattle Opera House being filled with a chorus of 90o and an orchestra of 95; the work created a profound impression, and was generally voted Lees's outstanding achievement to date. i. This is the conclusion of Mr. Cooke's article 'The Recent Music of Benjamin Lees' in Tempo 64, Spring 1963.

( 1964 by Deryck Cooke



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