La canzone dei ricordi (1886–87)

No, svanti non sono i sogni

Cantava il ruscello la gaia canzone

Fior di ginestra

Su ‘l mar la navicella

Un vago mormorio mi giunge

Al folto bosco, placida ombria

No, svanti non soni i sogni

Giuseppe Martucci is a rare phenomenon among 19th-century Italian composers in that he had no ambition to write opera. In fact, he was so devoted to orchestral, chamber and piano music that, finding little to interest him in the Italian repertoire after Scarlatti, he made it his mission to familiarise the Italian public with choice examples from Germany, France and England. Brahms he favoured above all but he was scarcely less enthusiastic about Wagner, whose Tristan und Isolde he conducted on its first Italian performance in Bologna in 1888.

While revitalising Italian concert life and teaching at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna and the Conservatorio in Naples, Martucci wrote music in most instrumental genres, including a very successful Second Piano Concerto and a much admired Second Symphony. In a catalogue including comparatively little vocal music, however, the one work most likely to appear on concert programmes these days is the song cycle La canzone dei ricordi to words by Rocco Pagliare, librarian at the Conservatorio. Although Pagliare shared the composer’s enthusiasm for Wagner and although the work was written for one of Brahms’s favourite singers, Alice Barbi, it is an essentially Italian inspiration, thoroughly idiomatic in its word-setting and beautifully written for the mezzo voice.

The nearest foreign equivalent to La canzone dei ricordi is not by a German composer, in spite of the ocasional echo of Wagner and Brahms, but Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, which was started earlier but actually completed six years later. Like the Chausson Poème, the Canzone is based on memories of a love affair that ended unhappily. Each song begins in the key in which the last one ended and they are further linked by an informally organised network of recurring themes. The most important motif is first heard on the piano at the very beginning and echoes throughout the opening No, svanti non sono i sogni. The mood progresses in the early songs from the happy greeting to spring in Cantava il ruscello la gaia canzone, delivered over an impressionistically rustling piano part, to the tearful recollection of a once cheerful guitar-accompanied serenade in Fior di ginestra. There is a similar contrast between the tuneful memory of a joyous sea voyage in Su ‘l mar la navicella and the intense sense of loss in Un vago mormorio mi giunge, the latter revealing perhaps something of the opera composer that Martucci might have been.

The emotional climax of the cycle occurs in Al folto bosco. Starting with the mixed feelings arising from a vision of the wooded nocturnal scene where the affair was consummated, it so vividly recalls the erotic passion that from, “O dolce notte,” it develops into a sublimated Neapolitan love song. The passion is sustained in an at first tumultuous but gradually more lyrical piano interlude. The last song refers back to just the opening lines and then, on a near monotone, the end of No, svanti non sono i sogni, the piano in the meantime recalling motifs from the intervening songs.

If there were few, if any, Italian precedents for such an organised song cycle in the 1880s, thanks to Giuseppe Martucci influence, not least by way of his Bologna pupil Ottorino Respighi, there are distinguished successors.