Naples:life,death &
                Miracle contact: Jeff Matthews

entry Nov. 2002, entry 2-May 2017, boxed entry Aug. 2019


There are 3 entries on this page: 1. The Neapolitan Song   2.  Antonio Grande & Nine Neapolitan Songs   3. Listening to Naples



contains audio                    
The Neapolitan Song

Torna a Surriento sheet musicSome years ago, the mayor of Venice, in a fit of high doge dudgeon, officially declared that the gondoliers plying the city's watery by-ways should stop serenading the tourists with Neapolitan Songs! Two questions may occur to you. One: Why should he care? Two: What are Venetian boatsmen doing singing 'O sole mio, in the first place? Well, one: He cares for reasons of authenticity. Uninformed tourists may feel that it is completely natural to go punting along the Grand Canal while their chauffeur croons about returning to Sorrento, but the mayor knows better. He knows that's as authentic as a Cockney waxing elegiac about the Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond or a Mississippi Delta blues singer belting out a New England sea chantey. Two: The gondoliers sing these songs because that's what the tourists want to hear. To them, Funiculì Funiculà, Santa Lucia and other examples of la canzone napoletana, the Neapolitan Song, are Italy. But they're not, really. They're Naples.

[======> text & audio for Torna a Surriento here]

Strictly speaking, the Neapolitan Song is not folk-music, if by that term you mean the result of countless ancient improvisations and reworkings handed down from generation to generation of nameless troubadour. It is folk-music—in spite of being formally composed and published—if you mean that therein reflected is the ebullience, melancholy, joy, fatalism and thousand emotions that Neapolitan character is heir to. 

There are, indeed, fragments of popular motifs which can be traced back half a millennium, but the popular canzone napoletana, the sound which conjures up "Italy" in the minds of millions the world over, dates back, as a genre, to the first Festival of Piedigrotta, held in 1835 and more or less regularly until shortly after WW II. Each year, an official song of the festival was chosen and the winning song from that very first year, Te voglio bene assaje, is still enormously popular. It's about love, as you might imagine, but it is well worth noting that the real passion in the Neapolitan Song is generally reserved for celebrating the city, the sun and the sea— or lamenting life's greatest tragedy: not death, but, rather, being far from home. (The melody to Te voglio bene assaje is usually attributed to Gaetano Donizetti.)

[=======> text & audio for Te voglio bene assaje here]

The Golden Age of la canzone napoletana was around the turn of the century (that is, the years between the 1890s an 1910s) and many of the best-loved songs found their way abroad on the lips of the millions of emigrants who left their home. Many of them were from Naples, which explains—along with the infectious charm of the music, itself—why it was this music that became synonymous with Italy all over the world. The great Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso, was from Naples, and in America, besides his normal operatic repertoire, he recorded many of these songs for RCA and even sang them frequently as encores after a performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. 

But, whether you're singing an exuberant tarantella or bewailing your lost homeland in the immigrant tear-jerker, Lacreme napulitane, you have to sing correctly—that is, in the Neapolitan dialect. This means that "Napoli" becomes "Napule" and "Sorrento" "Surriento". And don't forget the retroflex "l" and reduced final vowels. Even another great Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, evokes a good-natured wince or two down in these parts when he wraps his Northern vowel sounds around 'O sole mio. 

Here is a short audio excerpt from the "immigrant tearjerker" mentioned in the above paragraph. It is the best-known of all songs of the so-called Neapolitan Diaspora (see entry at emigration/immigration). Lacreme napuletana was composed in 1925, text by Libero Bovio, music by Francesco Buongiovanni. The title means "Neapolitan Tears"; the text is in the form of a letter written home from America to Naples at Christmas by an immigrant. The excerpt starts on the refrain that "everyone knows"--a startlingly oriental melodic phrase with the text, "How many tears America has cost us...". It is performed here by Roberto Murolo, the greatest scholar of the Neapolitan Song in the 20th century and one of the greatest interpreters.
 

(Thanks to Larry Ray for this excerpt and for his audio expertise!)

There are a few bizarre sidelights to this phenomenon of the Neapolitan Song: the pseudo-Neapolitan Song generated abroad, for example. Some years ago, one Dino Crocetti (aka Dean Martin) unleashed a monstrosity called That's Amore. Don't fail to miss that immortal first line: "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore." Another line contains perhaps the most execrable rhyme ever penned: "drool /fasule " (Neapolitan for fagioli—beans). True to the prediction implicit in H.L. Mencken's jibe that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public, Dino had a smash hit on his hands. Oh, well. Another "oh, well" for Elvis Presley and the lyric, "It's now or never," sung to the melody of  'O sole mio. It is not clear whether this version confused or amused the ultimate arbiters of the canzone napoletana, the Neapolitans, themselves. Who knows? One of them, Eduardo di Capua (1864-1917), the composer of 'O sole mio, might even have been delighted, just as he undoubtedly is when he looks down and sees men rowing legions of Americans, British, Japanese and Germans along the lagoon beneath the cold and grey skies of Venice and praising to them the glorious sun of Naples — for, yes, the mayor of Venice finally had to give in. Hah! 

(Also this link for another note on "That's Amore". In spite of my utterly snobbish disdain for the song, I have to admit that Neapolitans love it. Since there are no Italian or Neapolitan lyrics, they get a kick out of singing it in the English version and trying to reproduce a typical American accent. It's fun, or so they tell me.) 

[Also see: the texts of some Neapolitan songs in the original Neapolitan dialect; the page includes some audio excerpts.]
[See separate item on Funiculì-Funiculà and an item about copyright.]

[added: March 2018 - The recently rejuvenated Casina pompeiano on the grounds of the Villa Comunale in Naples now holds the Archives of Parthenopean Song, Parthenopean being the common local synonym for Neapolitan.]

more on That's Amore and other non-Neapolitan songs


2.  added May 7, 2017       


Nine Favourite Neapolitan Songs arranged for Voice and Guitar
  (with notated fingering) by Antonio Grande


Clearly, this new publication is for musicians. Neatly bound with separate vocal and guitar scores, it is meant to be opened and played. Guitarists and singers will truly find their own joy here, but even if you don't read a note of music, you'll enjoy this volume because of the written information it contains about what is called the “Neapolitan Song”. (The format, image right, is the size of standard printer paper, or as they used to say, a page of typewriter paper
—European format A4, large enough to hold the full-sized sheet music within.) (p.s. If you don't know what a typewriter is, God, please get help!)
 
First, Antonio Grande is a prominent Neapolitan classical guitarist. He was born in 1960 and graduated with a degree in composition and guitar performance from the “S. Pietro a Majella” music conservatory in Naples; he currently gives master classes and teaches guitar at the “Giuseppe Martucci” music conservatory in Salerno. He has traveled widely to international events throughout Europe and Brazil and is devoted to ensemble playing —from duos to chamber orchestras— and to contributing to the dissemination of contemporary music, particularly that of the “Neapolitan School”. He has given several world premiere performances of guitar works composed especially for him and has recorded for Italian, Vatican, Dutch and Brazilian radio and television.


Mentioned above, the written Preface is extensive (2200 words!), half of which are devoted to the recent history of Naples (shortly before the unification of Italy in 1861 and then thereafter up to the present). It is an excellent short historical and sociological treatise on why Naples is different and special. In those notes, we read:
...the demotion of the city that had a century earlier been an important European capital, a cultural and technological center second only to Paris, led to an artistic channeling that expressed itself in song. It was a true cry of pain and an important bit of anthropological testimony —this attempt, sometimes ingenuous, to save the lost identity of an entire people that had collapsed upon itself [...] This explains why Neapolitan songs in the fifty years from 1880 to 1930 reflect the most varied and socially mixed origins. They range from songs by erudite poets and music scholars to poor, unknown and illiterate rhymers and street and tavern musicians. We see here once more this intersection of social classes that is so often characteristic of the history of Naples. In any case, the results were often excellent and even outstanding in their irrepressible creativity that was at the same time meaningful... In the songs of the 1800s, for example, we hear echoes, at various levels of our consciousness, of the heritage of one of the most solid and innovative schools of composition of the entire Baroque and, even earlier, of the late Renaissance. Nor should we overlook the determining role of radio and the invention of the phonograph and records. Tenor Enrico Caruso (Naples 1873 - 1921) was really the first one to try out this new technology, recording various operatic arias and Neapolitan songs in the early 1900s. His singing thus reached every corner of the planet to soothe the souls of millions of nostalgic emigrants on every continent, granting to Caruso a media fame previously unheard of.
This leads Grande to speak of the new...
...bombastic interpretations that in a certain sense deprived the songs of their aesthetic quality, in that they strayed from the original, more sincere domestic versions composed for voice and piano or plucked string instruments. Rather than the poetic chamber effect that bind verse and music together, Caruso aimed at amazing the public with his power and his ability to overpower a symphony orchestra, leading to the inevitable high-note conclusion.
That is, perhaps, at the heart of Grande's rationale for releasing this edition —not to disparage the “bombastic interpretations” but if all you have ever heard of the Neapolitan song is the overpowering voice of Caruso or the Three Tenors or, recently, il Volo, then you are not getting the whole story.
“...we note that the Neapolitan song in any case requires an evolved and cultivated approach to singing; the line of the melody is drawn out and rides thread-like above the accompaniment. Singing the Neapolitan song cannot be undertaken without adequate training in voice and general music; these songs are not like simple popular verses.”
The author goes into other approaches to the music such as the
...vocalizing more associated with acting and narration, an approach that later, in the 1930s, gave way to other subcategories, on the one hand comic songs and, on the other, songs of the malavita—organized crime—"outlaw music", as they say. Singers wore the true theatrical "masks" of vaudeville and music hall, dressing in garb identifiable with the role: the straw hat in the comic versions, the wrinkled jacket of the "guappo" in the tragic or noir versions. Also, the ancient figure of the "posteggiatore", gained in popularity. These were the street-singers and guitarists who held forth outside of restaurants and cafes and who could handle even the most exotic requests for tip-laden tourists in search of local colour . [...]
...these works take their rightful place alongside the German lieder or Italian chamber music of the latter half of the 1800s. Pianist and teacher, Vincenzo Vitale, accurately observed that the well-known composer of the Neapolitan Song "does not hide behind the false modesty that was necessary for the Italian salon romanza". To a good degree, the Neapolitan song, indeed, had that salon kind of refinement of style, but in sentiment and subject matter, it was of the people. Popular elements were simply inserted into urban settings.
Grande tells us that
It is not until the second half of the 1900s that we are able once again to hear intimate versions of the Neapolitan song, performed delicately, almost ascetically. This revival of the original spirit of the music is no doubt the merit of the duo of singer Roberto Murolo (Naples 1912 - 2003) and guitarist Eduardo Caliendo (Naples 1922 - 1993); both were born into the music and both had a profound knowledge of Parthenopean habits and customs, thus providing  perhaps instinctively a true rebirth of the genre. The clarity of intoned diction combined with light chords appropriate to the guitar traced a new interpretative path, freeing the repertoire from the excessive trappings built up over time —often in bad taste.

antonio grande            
That is what this edition is really about: “intimate versions of the Neapolitan song performed delicately, almost ascetically” in the spirit of Roberto Murolo and some others. (There are on this website some brief recorded excerpts from Murolo's A Chronological Anthology of the Parthenopean Song from 1200 to 1962 at this link).
 
And finally, from Grande:

With due respect to those who have gone before, and after more than 20 years of scholarly research and intense concert and recording activity, we cautiously put forward our readings of these timeless masterpieces for those who are interested in approaching the song/guitar interpretations of these most representative Neapolitan songs of the late 1800s...we have tried to find the path of synthesis and conciseness: an uninterrupted and equal dialogue between a single voice and a single instrument, using the instrument—in keeping with the lesson given us by Hector Berlioz—as a small orchestra across its entire range of expression.
I have barely touched the Preface. Really. Antonio Grande and I had a common friend in the late Mark Weir, who passed away in 2015. The volume is dedicated to him. Mark and I translated the Preface, and Mark contributed the translation of Grande's very informative notes on the songs themselves —the stories behind the music. Indeed, it isalas and sigh!the case that Come back to Surriento [the Neapolitan spelling], this beautiful, inspired love song, was written to mark the visit to Sorrento by minister Giuseppe Zanardelli to lobby for the opening of a post office.
The nine songs in this volume are

 'A Vucchella – Torna a Surriento – Scétate – 'O marenariello – Futurella –
Era de maggio – Serenata napulitana – Autunno – Marecchiare.


The texts are in the original Neapolitan presented with English translations, as well.

All these songs—performed by the Duo minimo Ensemble (Daniela del Monaco, voice, and Antonio Grande, guitar) —have been presented in hundreds of public performances and feature on the following CDs:  1) Napoli in Canto - Opus 111 30-268 Paris, 1999 /reissue,  Naïve  op 30459  Paris, 2007; 2) Bellavista - CNI – Ut Orpheus Cndl 26847 – Rome/Bologne, 2013.  

Antonio Grande has a google page with a number of videos at this link.

additional publishing information:
  Favorite Neapolitan Songs for Voice and Guitar
  CH 251
  ©2017 Ut Orpheus Edizioni S.r.l.
  Piazza di Porta Ravegnana 1 – 40126 Bologna (Italy)
  www.utopheus.com


3. added-Aug 19, 2018
This is an excerpt from Marius Kociejowski's The Serpent Coiled in Naples, chapter 3.
My index reference subtitle for this passage in the excerpts table (below) is Listening to Naples.
The original title in the book is


Street of the Lonely Woman
"The first important thing is to learn how to listen to Naples,’ Scialò began. "It is like going through a composition that builds up in real time. The wonderful thing is that sounds come from all these different settings and so you have this juxtaposition, these different layers, which, as you walk through the city, fade in and out like in a movie score. If you go out of my home and head towards Piazza Dante you will hear the sound of young people playing in the streets.
"As soon as you get closer to Piazza Dante, which is an open space, you will hear the tolling of bells. And when from there you go beneath Port’Alba, which is an enclosed space, the sound changes. There is a different reverb, a different acoustic, and then you come close to the conservatory where there is another kind of interference, snatches of Pergolesi and Scarlatti, and further on there is the posteggiatore* in front of a restaurant singing popular songs. And then three steps later you find a cantante neomelodico who sings a song of the malavita the  criminal underworld, maybe some latitante. You have these continuous layers of sound and interferences. You are completely enfolded into this soundscape and it takes you to where you may feel through your feet the underground train or the telluric motions of the earth, the rumbling of an earthquake, which equally could be the sound of your belly reacting to something that upsets you or is something so nice it is almost erotic.

"And then there is the music of the hands … many Neapolitan singers move their hands as if they are melodies …there is the music of the heart which involves another part of the body … and the music of the head, which is an intellectual music,
a stylised sound, although really it might be only the sound of a plane flying overhead. Walking around town is like having an immersive experience that involves the whole body.

"Naples is like an informal orchestra where there is lots of noise and noise is important because it has the power and strength of transgression. The way to make revolution is through noise. There is no action without noise. You listen to the noise and sometimes it becomes melody. And then there is the voice, the voices of the people. In Naples people talk like they are singing and with an intensity of sound that is greater than in Helsinki or Greenland and because in Naples the climate is nicer so they live in the street much more. The voice is an instrument. It adapts to the environment and you use it to communicate with people, so it necessarily has to be higher and so you throw your voice... Lellucciooooooo! That is the mother calling her son. It is a combination of sound and architecture because it is architecture that makes sound and determines the echoes."
* The posteggiatore or parking valet is a feature of Neapolitan life, bordering on the folkloric. A rascal he may be, but with a coin or preferably a note he will assure your car is spared the dents and scratches of outrageous fortune. You don’t have to pay him if you don’t wish to, but then neither will he feel obliged to know the whereabouts of the car which by the time you return may have found a new home.

† An astonishing number of these singers drift into crime. One finds its equivalent, complete with bullet holes, in
gangsta rap.

‡ A fugitive from justice although often everyone knows where he is.

These are the chapters in Marius Kociejowski's The Serpent Coiled in Naples that currently have small excerpts in Naples, Life, Death & Miracles. There is also an extra item (after #15) from the same author.

Ch.1- introductionCh.2- An Octopus in Forcella - Ch.3 - Listening to Naples (this box) - Ch.4- Lake Averno -
Ch.5 - Street music - Ch.6 - Leopardi - Ch.7 - R.di Sangro - Ch.8 - Old Bones - Ch.9 - The Devil
Ch.10- Signor Volcano  -
Ch.10 (2) (3)Ch.11- Pulcinella  - Ch.12 - Boom - Boom (2) - Ch.13 - Two Women -
Ch.14- The Ghost PalaceCh.15- An Infintesimal Particle -
(extra) R. Carbone, photogr.

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