Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

(ii) Church 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 The most prolific writers of church music were often opera composers who had withdrawn from the theatrical battlefield, like Generali, Vaccai or Carlo Coccia, who produced mainly masses with orchestral or organ accompaniment; while the sacred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

(iii) Instrumental 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

(iv) Musicology.

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

(v) Cultural systems and aesthetics.

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.

Italy, §I: Art music

7. 20th century.

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.

Italy, §I: Art music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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ES (G. Prosperi and others)

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PirrottaDO

SartoriD

StiegerO

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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)

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A. Schlossberg: Die italienische Sonata für mehrere Instrumente im 17. Jahrhundert (Paris, 1935)

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R. Lunelli: ‘Nuove ricerche sulle origini della musica organistica italiana’, RMI, xlix (1947), 249–63

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R. Lunelli: Der Orgelbau in Italien in seinen Meisterwerken vom 14. Jahrhundert bis zum Gegenwart (Mainz, 1956)

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M. Labroca: L’usignolo di Boboli: cinquant’anni di vita musicale italiana (Venice, 1959)

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G. Colarizi: L’insegnamento della musica in Italia (Rome, 1967)

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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

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Italy