entry Apr 2008
Obscure composers (7)
Instrumental Music
Giuseppe
Martucci
If you have read the other
entries in this series, you have noticed that the
discussion has been exclusively about composers of
opera. We can now take a brief look at purely
instrumental music in Italy —or the lack thereof.
There are, no doubt, deep
psychosocial-musical reasons for the fact that group
instrumental music such as symphonies and concertos
developed, say, in Germany but not in Italy. (And if I
find out what those reasons are, I'll get back to
you.) Whatever produced the symphonic chain of
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and
Mendelsohn in Germany did not happen in Italy. (This,
in spite of the facts that modern instrumental
technology owes a lot to Italian craftsmen, and one
Italian, Alessandro Scarlatti,
helped introduce new orchestral forms such as the
symphony.) The emphasis on melody in Italy manifested
itself in the view that the human voice singing a
song/aria was the highest form of musical expression,
that expression taking place within the formal context
of an opera—people singing a story. Yes, Italian opera
composers may have written instrumental works:
Rossini’s Theme and variations
for harp and violin (1820), Verdi’s
String Quartet in E minor (1873) or even Donizetti’s
18 string quartets and 5 symphonies, etc. That is
interesting, but largely irrelevant. (Those works
enjoy “esteem by association” at best—somewhat like
Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio.)
In "Italy's Ottocento
[the 1800s]: Notes from the Musical Underground"
in The Musical Quarterly
56
(1): 27-53 (1970) author Bea Friedland refers to
what she calls "an almost unexplored segment" of music;
that is, "…the orchestral and chamber music produced by
Italian composers in the 1800s." There was, in fact, a
substantial body of Italian composers in the 19th century
trying to work in non-operatic musical forms. Among them
were Antonio Bazzini
(1818-97), Giovanni
Sgambati (1841-1914); Antonio Scontrino
(1850-1922); Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909), and Marco Enrico Bossi (1861-1925). They
composed symphonies, string quartets, sonatas, and
concertos, but in spite of recent attention by
musicologists, their music is still largely unexplored
and obscure, except to historians of music. From the
above list of names and within the brief scope of this
article, we can look at the local composer,
Giuseppe Martucci, as being representative of the others.
In spite
of his dates (1856-1909) Martucci wasn’t up against the
great Italian operatic composers. No one thought of
comparing him to Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, or his own
contemporaries such as Puccini, Mascagni and Leoncavallo.
He was simply “out of the running,” so to speak, because
he wrote absolutely no (!)
operas. Not one. Martucci was born in Capua, was clearly a
child prodigy in music, and was admitted to the Naples conservatory at age 11. He
toured internationally as a concert pianist starting in
1875 when he was only 19 and was appointed a professor of
piano at the Naples conservatory only 5 years later.
Martucci
became director of the Naples conservatory in 1902 and
counted Ottorino Respighi among his pupils. He was also a
conductor and helped introduce the music of Wagner and of
the late-Romantic symphonists of northern Europe to
Italian audiences. He started to compose at age 16; he
wrote many chamber works for piano plus other instruments,
instrumental sonatas, two piano concertos, and two
symphonies. It is especially the two symphonies that show
his enthusiasm for the German orchestral sounds of the
late 19th century. A later Italian composer, Gian
Francesco Malipiero, called Martucci’s Second
Symphony "the starting point of the renascence of
non-operatic Italian music.” It was a rebirth that
produced the music of Malipiero, himself, as well as that
of Alfredo Casella, Franco Alfano and Respighi. Arturo
Toscanini and Martucci were friends, and the conductor
held a memorial concert in Naples upon Martucci’s death in
1909 and continued to include Martucci’s music on concert
programs.
Politics
rears its delightful little head in Italian culture around
the turn of the century. Nascent Italian nationalism and
colonial expansion in Africa produced a climate in which
“alien” forms such as symphonies were spurned in favor of
“pure” Italian melody. And then the passing of Romanticism
(yes, sorry, it’s dead) changed all music
to the extent that the “renascence of non-operatic Italian
music” now seems more wishful thinking rather than a
statement of fact. Certainly, composers such as Martucci
are still waiting.
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