Deità silvane (1917)

I fauni

Musica in horto

Egle

Acqua

Crepusculo

Antonio Rubino’s verse in Dietà silvane was music waiting to happen. And Ottorino Respighi in 1917 was the right composer at the right time to make it happen. He had already, in such winners among his early songs as Nebbie and Stornellatrice, demonstrated a characteristically Italian flair for writing effectively for the voice, while avoiding the operatic tendency that so often goes with it. More recently, in his Shelley setting Il Tramonto, he had revealed a rare poetic sensitivity. Now, in the year after he had scored his first major success with Fontane di Roma, he tested his genius for colour by applying it on a very much smaller scale to the sound imagery of Rubino’s verse. The composer made a chamber-orchestra arrangement of the Deità silvane cycle eight years later but the original piano version is no less evocative.

Another factor that went into the formation of the miniature soundscapes of Deità silvane was the influence of Alfredo Casella who, back in Rome after nearly twenty years in Paris, persuaded his normally conservative colleague to take an interest in modern developments in French music. While it is not a modernist score, the prominent use of quartal harmonies not only gives it a distinctive flavour but also, in Egle at least, loosens its hold on tonality. As anticipated by the solo line of the piano introduction, the shepherds in I fauni like to play their bagpipes and their fifes in fourths. Their dance rhythms, which motivate the activities of the lascivious fauns and happy nymphs, are to be recalled later in the cycle.

The delightful sonorities of Musica in horto are so consistently derived from fourths and fifths that the song takes on a distinctly pentatonic sound not unlike that of Ravel’s Laideronette. In Egle it is Debussy that is called to mind, La plus que lente perhaps, as the nymph so languidly dances in slow-waltz rhythms. Acqua, on the other hand, offers an unmistakably Italian, sensuously shaped vocal line while the piano echoes something of the water imagery of Fontane di Roma. A melancholy reflection at twilight on the passing of the ancient gods - Pan now reduced to an overgrown sculpture in a deserted garden - Crepuscolo is animated in the middle by a memory of the dotted rhythms of the dancing fauns in I fauni and the waltz of the nymph in Egle. The fauns dance for the last time in the piano postlude.