Canti all'antica 3

For Respighi writing music in the style of earlier periods was not an exercise in pastiche. It came naturally to him and had done ever since his studies with Luigi Torchi at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna. He was just as likely to find inspiration in the music of Monteverdi as in that of major contemporaries like Strauss and Stravinsky. It is true that his antiquarian interest manifested itself more often in arrangements – like the three suites of Antiche danze ed arie from between 1917 and 1931 – but he did write original pieces in historical styles too, not least the Concerto all’antica of 1908. He was fortunate too in that one of his other teachers at the Liceo Musicale was Giuseppe Martucci, one of the few Italian composers of the day who was interested more in song than in opera.

So it is not surprising to find among Respighi’s early songs the five Canti all’antica. The first three, all to texts by Boccaccio, are scarcely 14th-century in style and, indeed, it is difficult to allocate the music to any particular period. Though generalised in its archaisms, however, it fits the words with pleasingly effortless ease, making no effort to interpose the composer’s own personality but finding (in spite of the occasional alien harmony) the appropriate manner for each poem – lyrical song for L’udir talvolta, arioso for Ma come potrei, lament for the Ballata.

Pioggia and Nebbie are not so modest: they are both based on poems by contemporary poets and both required not only a contemporary setting but also subjective involvement. In Pioggia a brilliant form of impressionism is movingly suspended for inward reflection in the third stanza before it is resumed in the last. Another observation of nature, Nebbie    is an uncompromisingly wintry setting of an unrelievedly desolate text which inspired one of the greatest examples of 20th-century Italian song – even though, paradoxically, it could almost be an operatic soliloquy. That aspect of Nebbie is particularly clear in the orchestral version included, alongside arrangements of Poggia and Notte, in the Tre Liriche of 1913.