Il Tramonto (The Sunset) (1914)

Il Tramonto is one of the very few works conceived, rather than arranged, for voice and string quartet. Its one notable predecessor is Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, the last two movements of which are settings for soprano of poems by Stefan George. While we cannot be sure that Respighi knew that quartet – which was completed in 1908, six years before Il Tramonto – there can be little doubt that he was familiar with the same composer’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) of 1899. There are obvious fundamental differences between Verklärte Nacht and Il Tramonto, not the least of which is that the former score, though closely based on Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name, has no vocal part. The two works do, however, have a similar nocturnal atmosphere, each animated by two people walking together and, though in different ways, expressing their love under the moon. Both works end in a serene reconciliation.

Respighi might not have chosen Shelley’s The Sunset (in an Italian translation by R. Ascoli) with the specific intention of creating his own “Transfigured Night.” He was clearly drawn to the English poet anyway. Apart from three Shelley songs with piano, there are two other settings of Shelley texts for mezzo and instrumental ensemble – Aretusa written three years earlier in 1911 and La sensitiva completed a few months later in 1915 – and in this context Il Tramonto is just the second in a series of three. Aretusa and La sensitiva, however, are both scored for orchestra whereas Il Tramonto was conceived for the all-but unprecedented combination of voice and string quartet. And it is not only that which invites comparison with Schoenberg but also the actual sound and some of the figuration of the string writing. The vocal part in Il Tramonto is not so much a solo role as a sensitively executed means of integrating the text with the reactions it provokes in the string quartet. It is going too far, as one commentator has done, to describe Il Tramonto as the best Italian string quartet alongside Puccini’s Crisantemi – which is more than a little unfair on Verdi’s Quartet in E minor for a start – but it is a not entirely irrelevant idea.

Perhaps the most inspired aspect of the vocal line in Il Tramonto is its flexibility, the ease with which it so spontaneously fluctuates through the area between dramatic recitative and lyrical arioso, only occasionally touching on song and generally avoiding anything like operatic word-setting. From the beginning, even before the first entry of the voice in recitative, the melodic interest is in the string quartet, which opens the work with an expressive melody of long-term significance. One of the most alluring episodes is the purely instrumental, and beautifully written, interlude before the couple “mingle,” as Shelley discreetly puts it, “in love and sleep.”

There seems to be no predetermined structural pattern: tempo and mood change only on the prompting of the poem. There is, however, a resourcefully sustained series of contrasts between the reflective, as in the section beginning “Ora è sommerso il sole” with its gently undulating string figuration passing through the ensemble, and the eventful, as when Isabel wakes in the morning to find her lover “gelido e morto.” The most effective contrast of all is between the percussive pizzicato sounds associated with “la nuda tomba” near the end and the caressing violin melody which, reflecting Isabel’s final prayer for peace (a long-sustained “Pace!”) so serenely transfigures the earlier material.