IV
Doubtless ninety-nine out of every hundred musicians and music-lovers still believe that Italy has no art-song, that her composers are still devoting their energies to turning out those delectable morceaux in ballad-style which Italian opera singers have sung in the past, and still do, to an extent, when they are called upon to take part in a concert. For these persons, whose number is a large one, it will be surprising information that Italy is working very seriously in the field of the art-song. And the man who has achieved the most conspicuous place in this department is that young genius, Riccardo Zandonai, already spoken of as a music-dramatist and as a symphonic composer. Whereas some of the songs which can be placed in this class by contemporary Italians still contain germs of the popular Italian song style, Zandonai's songs are indubitably on the high plane which is uninfluenced by popular tendencies.
Mr. Zandonai has doubtless done a great many more songs than we in America have been made familiar with. He has perhaps also written many more than he has published, the case with most composers. Several years ago there appeared three songs, first a setting of Verlaine's Il pleure dans mon cœur, then Coucher de soleil à Kérazur and third Soror dolorosa to one of Catulle Mendès' finest impassioned outbursts. The effect of these songs on musicians who, at the time, had heard no music of Zandonai was tremendous. In every measure was written plainly the utterance of a big personality, who commanded modern harmonies with indisputable mastery. Whether his setting of the lovely Verlaine poem matches or surpasses the widely known one of Debussy is of little consequence. It is not at all like it; Zandonai doubtless was unfamiliar with the Debussy version when he wrote the song and his Il pleure has an atmosphere all its own. The Orientalism of Coucher de soleil à Kérazur is unique—it gives the impression of a twilight conceived through an entirely new lens. But it is in the Soror dolorosa that the composer has written what would seem to be one of his masterpieces. Every drop of the emotional force that Mendès has called out in his glorious stanzas, every bit of the color, of the warmth of the poem is reflected stunningly in this music. It is a wedding of voice and piano, achieved only by the greatest masters in their most notable songs.
Then there appeared another set of songs, this time five in number. Visione invernale, I due tarli, Ultima rosa (this one to a Foggozzaro poem), Serenata and L'Assiuolo are the titles. You cannot prefer one of these songs to the other if you really get their meaning; only the last one might be said to be not so distinctive. The wonderful dirge of Visione Invernale, the thrilling melodic beauty of Ultima rosa and the lighter Serenata and the tragic narrative of I due tarli ('The Two Worms') grip as do few things in modern music. If Mr. Zandonai has written difficult songs, that is, from the singer's standpoint, it was not unexpected. No composer who really had a message ever wrote to a singer's taste. And Mr. Zandonai never makes concessions.
Guido Bianchini, Enrico Morpurgo, Alfredo Brüggemann, Mario Barbieri—names assuredly strange to many a music-lover—are all men who have contributed significantly to song literature. Morpurgo's Una speranza is typical of him at his best; Bianchini has real modern tendencies. Francesco Santoliquido is known to us through two songs, Tristezza crepuscolare and Alba di luna sul bosco. Tristezza crepuscolare is the better of the two, a magnificent conception, a song that is thrilling in every inflection. There is a strong Puccini tinge in Santoliquido's music, made fine, however, by more restraint than the composer of Tosca knows how to exert. Unusually well managed are the accompaniments, which are rather graphic. Mr. Santoliquido knows how to achieve a climax within a few pages as do few of his contemporaries.
Apart from all these men stands Vittorio Gui, a young composer and conductor, whose career has been furthered by Arturo Toscanini. Signor Gui is an 'ultra' in the best sense of the word. His songs, which have not been exploited in America at all, are enigmatic. In fact his choice of poems makes them so. He has taken Chinese poems and translated them into Italian, poems that contain that world of Confucian philosophy which is still but little known. There are problems in ultra-modern harmony here which many will not be willing to solve, but which a few have already given serious attention to and from which they have gotten much joy. There is distinction in these songs; a desire to experiment, perhaps, but still the feeling for new paths, new moods, and, above all, a new idiom. The attainment of that may not be so easily accomplished, but Gui is one of the men who are going prominently in that direction.
A word about the ballad composers, Paolo Tosti, P. Mario Costa, Luigi Denza, and Enrico de Leva. Whereas their position in serious music is not one of importance, their appeal to millions entitles them to mention. Tosti is doubtless the ablest of them. His innumerable melodie—the characterization of his songs as such is typical of what Italians thought a song must be before they attempted the art-song—have a melodic fascination. Who has not heard his 'Good-bye' and his L'ultime canzone, two songs which have won a popularity truly universal in scope! And when 'Good-bye,' hackneyed as it is, is sung by a Melba it contains an emotional thrill, theatrical as its appeal may be, insecure as its structure is from the standpoint of the art-song. It would be idle to enumerate Tosti's writings. His songs go into the hundreds. De Leva, Denza, and Costa are of the same creative blood; they believe in pure melodies, none of them distinguished, set to very indifferent Italian texts—not poems—and one and all gorgeously effective for the singer. What these men have produced has developed in Italian singers that failing, namely, the dwelling on all high notes, which is so objectionable. But it has also brought joy to so many Italians whose sole musical interest was singing, and their place in the development of Italy's music cannot be overlooked. When a hundred years have rolled around perhaps the name of Tosti will be remembered. But it is exceedingly doubtful whether there will be Italians producing a similar kind of music; for by that time Italy's music-lovers will have repudiated this type of banal melodic song, which makes only an emotional appeal and into whose make-up the intellectual has never been allowed to enter.
Italy's right to a place among musical nations of the day cannot be denied. Not only in the producing of worthy music-dramas, of orchestral works, of chamber music, but also in the noble art-song is she active. A change has come over her. Perhaps her musicians are being better trained. Yet the St. Cecilia Academy in Rome, the conservatories in Milan, Naples, Genoa, and Bologna have always equipped their students well. It may not be this so much as it is the imbuing of those who choose lives in art with the responsibility of their calling. Further, it is the advance which musical art has made all over the world. The young Italian composer of to-day has behind him Wagner and his glorious achievement, Strauss and his superb essays in the operatic and orchestral fields, the Frenchmen and their innovations. What did he have fifty years ago? Was it not to the old-style Italian opera that he looked with a burning to achieve a work of this type and win popular success? And one point that affects all modern composition is quite as valid in Italy as it is anywhere: Composers, in fact, musicians in general, are being better educated; they are feeling the correlation of the arts; they have studied the literatures of many nations, they know the paintings of many masters. In this lie the wonderful possibilities of the future! And modern musical art has its pathway, one quite as open and as free as that of any of its brothers, in which it must accomplish its task. Italy will not be behind in the future as she has been in the past. For she has a Zandonai, a Montemezzi, a Gui to lead her on.
A. W. K.