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Ottorino Respighi was a contemporary of Giacomo Puccini and also composed ten operas. But these were not the works that made him famous. It was through the symphonic poems Fontane di Roma and Pini di Roma that Respighi succeeded in restoring Italian orchestral music’s international significance, which had been lost following the deaths of Corelli, Vivaldi and Boccherini. In Italy in the 19th century there was not one symphonist composer, and it was only operas that were acclaimed. As a result, several musicians decided that this could no longer continue and they attempted to amend the situation. Among them was Giuseppe Martucci, a teacher at the Music School of Bologna. It may be true that his works failed to become part of the international repertoire, but he did teach Respighi.
The young Respighi worked for some time as a violist in the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and at the same time took lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov. His knowledge of Russian music proved useful when, later in Rome, he composed the ballets La pentola magica, Fantasia indiana, Canzoni arabe and Autunno to themes from Russian folk songs and music by Glinka, Borodin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Of even greater significance, however, were his magical command of instrumentation and his mastery of a full and colourful orchestra with a glockenspiel, two harps, a piano and organ.
International glory came to Respighi with the symphonic poem Fontane di Roma (1918). The four movements, performed without interruption (La fontana di Valle Giulia all’alba, La fontana del Tritone al mattino, La fontana di Trevi al meriggio, La fontana di Villa Medici al tramonto) to a large degree were inspired by the art of the impressionists who loved to depict objects at different times of the day and in different lighting. Debussy did something similar in music, depicting as no-one else the nature of water through music. But the idea of composing an image of Rome in sounds came from Puccini, who drew a portrait of the Eternal City in his opera Tosca, where, as in the first movement of the Fontane, one hears the bells of Rome chime.
As his success grew, Respighi wrote the magnificent Pini di Roma (1924) and the less well known Feste romane (1928). The four movements of the Pini, entitled I pini di Villa Borghese, Pini presso una catacomba, I pini del Gianicolo and I pini della Via Appia, refer not so much as to the cityscapes as to the history of Rome. Respighi’s interest in the history of Italian music deepened over the years, and his legacy includes a plethora of classical works, while in Pini presso una catacomba he made use of intonations of medieval Gregorian chant.
However, immersing himself in history Respighi was also looking to the future: in I pini del Gianicolo he ordered the use of a gramophone recording of a nightingale’s song. This kind of collage of live sound and recordings came into widespread use much later, in the 1950s.
Anna Bulycheva
A native of the small Italian town of Lucca, the fifth generation musician Giacomo Puccini presented the immense score of his Messa di Gloria as his degree work upon graduating from the Conservatorio. It was first performed on 12 July 1880 at a celebration in honour of Saint Polino and resulted in a veritable storm of opposing and at times downright scandalous reactions.
The senior priest at the local cathedral called the music of the Mass “hooligan-like and not remotely connected with divine worship” and refused to bless it in order for it to be performed in churches. Puccini’s composition teacher, maestro Mosco Carner, considered the work “rather free-and-easy, but not without its charms.” With the wider public, the Mass drew frenzied delight, while the composer’s fellow students from the Conservatorio unanimously called the work the last word in Italian spiritual music that would now become “la musica puccinistica” – “music in the style of Puccini.” And although in his debut vocal and symphony work the Conservatorio’s young graduate did not avoid imitating his older contemporary, the great Giuseppe Verdi, the Messa di Gloria sounds like pure Puccini, with the same sense of theatrical drama with which the composer’s operatic masterpieces would resound decades later. Puccini was later not ashamed to use fragments of the Mass in the operas Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Turandot among other works. The composer himself admitted that the Messa di Gloria was thus named because it is rather glorifying than liturgical in terms of its character. This also explains the particular solemnity, even the flamboyancy of its language, and such extraordinary details – for the Church – as the borrowed theme from the Italian folk song Guardo il cielo in the section Qui tollis peccata mundi. It is clear that the young experimentalist was not remotely attempting to pay tribute to the liturgical canon in his liturgical opus, instead literally testing the limits of his own inventiveness and free-thinking.
Marina Iovleva
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