I
Giovanni Sgambati was born in 1843. About the year 1866 he began to make his influence felt and his compositions appeared from the publishers, who, it may be of interest to note, were advised by Wagner to exploit his music. The friendship of Franz Liszt and Sgambati was a very beautiful one; Liszt, in his really noble and generous way, championed the young Italian, saw in him a desire to do something in which Italians of even that day were not especially absorbed. Sgambati did not show Liszt an opera in the Rossinian manner when the master arrived in Rome in 1861. With serious purpose he brought him a symphony. And Liszt, intelligent musical spirit that he was, looked at it and recognized that here was an Italian who knew what the symphonic form meant, who knew his orchestra, who could write with some distinction. If one does not expect the impossible of a pioneer there is always something to be found in his activity that deserves our aid and sympathy. So Liszt encouraged the young man. Sgambati labored arduously; he accomplished a great deal. In his list of works there are symphonies, two of them, there are chamber works for strings with piano, there is a piano concerto, shorter pieces for the piano, some for violin, many songs, a 'Requiem' and other pieces in various forms. Sgambati as an innovator is nothing; Sgambati as an Italian symphonic pioneer is important. There was work to be done and he did it with a zeal that speaks volumes for his artistic sense. We of to-day might find his symphonies tiresome, we might consider them too consciously Brahmsian without the real Brahms spark, to hold our attention. But their meaning for those men who are producing vital things in Italy to-day is undeniable. Sgambati not only gave the world his compositions; he saw to it that for the first time the symphonic works of the great German masters were produced in his country. And he was among the earliest of the Italians to champion the music of Richard Wagner. Such a man, a musician with the breadth to appreciate Wagner in the days when Wagner was hissed and ridiculed, must in truth have possessed the soul of an artist.
With him worked a colleague, Giuseppe Martucci. Like him, he was a pianist of note as well as a composer. Martucci came a little later than Sgambati; he was born in 1856, and he is still living to-day (1915). For him, too, there was in music something beyond an opera that filled the theatre from floor to gallery and gave some adored singer the opportunity to disport himself in the unmusical cadenzas and other pyrotechnical passages which composers all around him were manufacturing so assiduously. In placing an estimate on the achievement of Martucci it is not impossible to consider him quite as important a figure as Sgambati. His music, too, has traits that are typically Italian, though based on German models. His two symphonies, his piano concerto in B-flat minor are admirable compositions, none of them heaven-storming in originality, all of them eminently praiseworthy for the solidity of their texture, for the beauty of their design and for the unflinching adherence to high ideals which they embody.
It was hardly to be expected that the two men who set the example for their countrymen in symphonic composition would be geniuses of the first rank. Had they been they would doubtless have worked along other lines. Italian symphonic composition was to be placed on a secure basis not by path-breakers, but by path-makers. This they were. And they were notable examples of what good such men can work. Italy is rapidly making felt her individuality in the contemporary musical world by the strides in original composition which she is taking. To those two pioneers, Giovanni Sgambati and Giuseppe Martucci, must go the credit for having pointed the way to absolute music by Italians, for having toiled so that the men who came after them might take what they had done and build on it individual structures. And also that their followers might have a public that would listen to them.
Nowhere in the world to-day is there more activity in musical composition than among the young Italians. The world at large seems to know less about them than it does, for example, about the modern French or Russians. This is perhaps largely the fault of the Italian publishers, who do not seem to spread their publications about in other lands as do their colleagues. Yet the sincere and eager investigator cannot go far before he finds a vast amount of engaging new Italian music.