In black and white: Pizzetti, Mussolini and Scipio Africanus

Musical Times, Summer 2004 by Sciannameo, Franco

IT WAS EARLY IN 1958 WHEN I SAW ILDEBRANDO PlZZETTI. The famous cellist Enrico Mainardi and pianist Carlo Zecchi were to play sonatas by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms at the SaIa dei Concert! of the Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia in Rome. Both artists were professors at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the national institution for advanced musical studies and concert association with which the Conservatorio shares the 17th-century (ex)-Convento delle Orsoline, a city block in the fashionable Via del Corso, extending from Via dei Greci (Conservatorio) to Via Vittoria (Accademia). The two institutions also share - besides a legacy going back to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - corridors, the Biblioteca, a cloistered courtyard, and the concert hall. For us, the Conservatorio's students, the Accademia was always spoken of as a sort of Mount Olympus, whose access was the privilege of only the very best graduate students destined for a solo career. The others were left to face a stiff competition for a seat in the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, where most of our teachers occupied principal chairs. The Mainardi-Zecchi performance that Friday evening assumed therefore an especially symbolic meaning; it was a rare exhibition of the revered masters' masters.

The house was full and we non-paying students had to stand in the small foyer. The atmosphere was charged with the gravitas emanating from the stage and - from the back of the hall, where yS-year-old Ildebrando Pizzetti, the Accademia's severe-looking Professore di Alta Composizione, dressed exactly as portrayed in fig.l (pipe included), had stationed himself. he had arrived late (or did he plan to leave earlier?) to listen to his academic colleagues. For me, Ildebrando Pizzetti, standing in the back of the foyer, slightly reclining backward, with his right hand holding a pipe and the other in his jacket pocket, was going to become a memorable event, an ever elusivequest in those formative years. As for the Mainardi-Zecchi performance, I remember very little.

In 1958 Ildebrando Pizzetti was still considered by some as a musician loaded with historical and intellectual significance. At the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia he had inherited the celebrated composition class of Ottorino Respighi, while at the Conservatorio his junior colleagues were none other than Goffredo Petrassi and Virgilio Mortari. His latest opera, Assassinio nella Cattedrale, was to be premiered at La Scala on 1 March.

At the turn of the century, Pizzetti had sought to steer Italian opera towards new directions by proposing a return to Monteverdian recitar cantando modes, aiming at diluting the miasma caused by the composers of the verismo school. In this quest, Pizzetti collaborated at first with Gabriele D'Annunzio; then he wrote his own librettos seeking a better integration between words and music, as if he were a Latin embodiment of Wagner and Musorgsky. Fedra (1913) emerged as a vital product of the D'Annunzio-Pizzetti collaboration. In the meantime, Pizzetti's first orchestral work of note, Tre interment sinfomci per 'L'Edipo Re' di Sofocle, commissioned by the Italian tragedian Gustavo Salvini to enhance his production of Sophocles's tragedy, began to receive attention as well. It consists of three distinct pieces: 1. Largo; 2. Con impeto; 3. Con molta espressione di dolore.1

Although there is no question that, stylistically, some influences from the Smetana-Dvorak-Suk vocabulary and the quasi-quotation of the cor anglais solo from Tristan und Isolde (oboe solo in the second movement) showed young Pizzetti's preoccupation with emerging from Italian musical provincialism,2 his language was even then characterised by the original, ample melodic arches spreading over grey-hued orchestral textures that became his trademark.

Pizzetti's Quartetto in la, composed between june and October 1906, became, for example, a milestone in Italian instrumental chamber music. It has been pointed out elsewhere how tenuous, though tenaciously maintained, a string quartet tradition existed in Italy during the ujth century; at the century's end, in fact, Verdi's lone string quartet (1875) was still considered by many to be the only Italian example of the genre. The string quartets of Sgambati, Scontrino, Busoni (with his mix of German romanticism and Italianate caprice) and Antonio Bazzini were too sporadically performed in Italy for consideration. Respighi, Alfano, Malipiero, and casella did not tackle the genre until 1909, 1918, and 1920 respectively. Therefore, Pizzetti's Quartetto in Ia was really the Spring flower of a new season of Italian chamber music which held steady throughout the 2oth century. The quartet is structured in the traditional four movements: i. Vivace ma sereno; 2. Adagio; 3. Tema con variazioni: Allegretto tranquillo; 4. Finale. Like the Tre interment sinfoniciper 'L'Edipo Re', Pizzetti's Quartetto in Ia is imbued with Slavonic flavours somewhat transformed into Italian folk-like melodies, giving the work an aura of wholesome freshness.3 The third movement, 'Tema con variazioni', contains a section called Ninna nannaperla miapiccina (Lullaby for my baby girl) ,4 an autobiographical cameo which would become a constant in Pizzetti's chamber works.