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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
In the early part of this century Italian musical critics were bemoaning the decadence of the national lyric stage. No inspired figure had come forth to claim the mande of Verdi; new Italian opera was becoming artistically irrelevant. In an effort to reclaim a ‘lyric spirit’ from Wagnerian Germany, Gabriele D'Annunzio ‘rediscovered’ the early seventeenth century as the birthplace of opera. Specifically, he fashioned Monteverdi – ‘il divino Claudio’ – as visionary proto-lyricist, a nostalgic move seconded by many other Italian authors through the 1920s and 30s.
1 Malipiero, Francesco, ‘Claudio Monteverdi’, La musica II, 22 (Florence, 1943), 1–3, here 1.Google Scholar
2 Labroca, Mario, ‘Vita e musica nell'Italia nuova’, La rassegna musicale, 7 (1932), 39–43, hereGoogle Scholar
3 Pannain, Guido, ‘Problemi della musica italiana contemporanea’, La rassegna musicale, 10 (1930), 196–206, here 202–04.Google Scholar
4 For contemporaneous and early twentieth-century accounts of the political idolisation of Verdi and his music, see Phillips-Matz, Mary Jane, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford, 1993), passim and especially 145, 188–91, 388, 395.Google Scholar
5 Verdi was given an elaborate state funeral, his burial procession was attended by an estimated 300,000 people, and Parliament gave a two-day tribute in his memory, with speeches on all sides praising his seminal inspirational role in the unification movement. See Phillips-Matz, , Verdi, 761 ff.Google Scholar
6 Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols. (Turin, 1977), II, 1192.Google Scholar
7 For a good biography of D'Annunzio that traces his aesthetic positions as well as his works and deeds, see Rhodes, Anthony, D'Annunzio: The Poet as Superman (New York, 1960).Google Scholar
8 His constitution for Fiume, for example, contains this remarkable statute: ‘If every rebirth of a noble people is a lyrical effort, if every unanimous and creating feeling is a lyrical power, if every new order is a lyrical order in the vigorous, impetuous sense of the word, Music considered as a ritual language is what exalts the act of life, the work of life.’ (Se ogni rinascita d'una gente nobile è uno sforzo lirico, se ogni sentimento unanime è creatore è una potenza lirica, se ogni ordine nuovo è un ordine lirico nel senso vigoroso e impetuoso della parola, la Musica considerata come Unguaggio rituale è l'esaltatrice dell'atto di vita, dell'opera di vita.) This passage is quoted with admiration in Luciano Tamelleri's lengthy polemic ‘Giuseppe D'Annunzio ispiratore di musicisti’, Rivista muskale italiana, 43 (1939), 161–233, in an entire issue of the RMI devoted to D'Annunzio and music.Google Scholar
9 Corazzol, Adriana Guarnieri, Sensualità senza carne: la musica nella vita e nell'opera di D'A.nnunzio (Bologna, 1990), 91.Google Scholar
10 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, Il fuoco (1900; rpt Milan, 1989), 187.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., 126.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 127.
14 Corazzol, Guarnieri (see n.9), 28–9, 40.Google Scholar
15 Chieregin, Salvino, ‘Claudio Monteverdi’, Rivista musicale italiana, 47 (1943), 212–19, here 214–15.Google Scholar
16 Pannain, Guido, ‘Il rinascimento e la musica in Italia’, Rivista musicale italiana, 29 (1922), 600–620, here 616.Google Scholar
17 Chieregin, (see n.15), 217–18.Google Scholar
18 See most recendy Curtis, Alan, ‘La Poppea impasticdata, or, Who Wrote the Music to L'lncoronazione?’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), 23–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 Chieregin, (see n.15), 218.Google Scholar
20 Roncaglia, Gino, ‘Grandezza musicale del '600’, Rivista musicale italiana, 39 (1932), 46–50, here 50.Google Scholar
21 Roncaglia, , 48–9.Google Scholar
22 Pratella, F. Balilla, ‘Idea e forma nell'oratorio di Giacomo Carissimi’, Il pensiero musicale, 4 (1924), 1–6, here 2.Google Scholar
23 Pannain, (see n.16), 615.Google Scholar
24 Malipiero, (see n.l), 3.Google Scholar
25 ‘Claudio Monteverdi il divinissimo’ — it is, however, unclear how successful D'Annunzio was in hawking this devotee to Mussolini. See Corazzol, (n. 9), 34–5.Google Scholar
26 Damerini, Gino, ‘Venezia al tempo di Monteverdi’, La musica II, 22 (Florence, 1943), 105–20, here 119–20.Google Scholar
27 Denis Arnold, for one, points out that the style of Monteverdi's later operas ‘was taken up less by his Venetian successors than has often been imagined’. Arnold, Denis, ‘Claudio Monteverdi’, in Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New York and London, 1980), XII, 530.Google Scholar
28 Dallapiccola, Luigi, ‘Per una rappresentazione de “Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria” di Claudio Monteverdi’, La musica II, 22 (Florence, 1943), 121–36, here 126.Google Scholar
29 Dallapiccola, 129.Google Scholar
30 In fact, when Arrigo Boito asked Verdi to recommend names of great Italian vocal composers of the past to be studied in the planned new national music education programme, not only did Verdi focus on sacred composers, but he relegated Monteverdi to the sixteenth century — and indeed recommended that students not study his works, because his ‘voice leading is poor’. See Conati, Marcello and Medici, Mario, The Verdi—Boito Correspondence, trans. Weaver, William (Chicago, 1994), 125.Google Scholar
31 Damerini, Adelmo, ‘Aspetti dell' VIII Maggio musicale fiorentino’, La musica II, 22 (Florence, 1943), 207–13, here 207.Google Scholar
32 Gramsci, (see n.6), III, 209.Google Scholar
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35 Lang, Paul Henry, Music in Western Civilisation (New York, 1941), 339–41, here 341. This is by n o means Lang's description in its entirety.Google Scholar
36 Grout, Donald Jay, A History of Western Music, rev. edn (New York, 1973), 309, 311.Google Scholar
37 Kamien, Roger, Music: An Appreciation (New York, 1994), 94–5.Google Scholar
38 See, for example, contemporary accounts given in the Appendix to my dissertation, ‘Syntax, Form, and Genre in Sonatas and Canzonas, 1621–1635’, Ph.D. diss. (University of California, Berkeley, 1991);Google Scholar in press for the series Quademi di Musica/Realtà (Lucca, 1996).Google Scholar
39 ‘[Ulisse and Poppea] are masterpieces of the genre’, Ellen Rosand allows, ‘but they were not typical of their time’. See Rosand, , Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991), esp. 4, 15–25.Google Scholar
