Respighi: Six Pieces; Piano Sonata; Ancient Airs and Dances. Konstantin Scherbakov, piano

Respighi, Ottorino

(b Bologna, 9 July 1879; d Rome, 18 April 1936). Italian composer. Despite the eclecticism and uneven quality of his output as a whole, the colourful inventiveness of his most successful works has won them an international popularity unmatched by any other Italian composer since Puccini.



1. Life.

The son of a piano teacher, Respighi began to learn the violin and the piano as a child, before becoming a student (1891–1901) at the Liceo Musicale, Bologna, where his violin (and viola) studies continued with Federico Sarti. He also studied composition there with Torchi who, being eminent especially as a pioneering musicologist, sowed the seeds of his lifelong interest in early music. The Liceo’s director at that time was Martucci, whose achievements both as an enricher of Bologna’s musical life and as the leading composer of non-operatic music in Italy at the turn of the century made a strong impact on the young Respighi: Martucci taught him composition in his last year as a regular student, and had a high opinion of his technical competence and promise.



In the winter of 1900–01, and again in 1902–3, Respighi was employed for several months as an orchestral viola player in Russia, where he had a few, ‘but for me very important’, lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov that crucially influenced his orchestration. His brief period of study with Bruch in Berlin in 1902 (not, as has often been stated, 1908) seems, on the other hand, to have helped him little. During 1903–8, back in Bologna, he continued to earn his living mainly as an orchestral player, while winning increasing (though still only local) recognition as a composer. From 1906 he also became active as a transcriber of music from the 17th and 18th centuries: his version for voice and orchestra of Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna gained him his first significant public success outside Italy, in 1908 during another visit to Berlin. That second stay in the German capital (which lasted nearly a year) widened his musical horizons considerably, with creative results that can already be discerned in his first full-scale opera, the initially successful but thereafter long-neglected Semirâma.



Although Respighi was seldom much attracted by the more self-consciously innovative musical trends of the time, he nevertheless became marginally involved (in 1910, the year of Semirâma’s première) in a short-lived anti-establishment pressure-group – the ‘lega dei Cinque’ whose other members were Pizzetti, Malipiero, Bastianelli and Renzo Bossi. Soon afterwards the first performance of his justly admired solo cantata Aretusa (1910–11) was given by the singer Chiarina Fino-Savio, for whom he subsequently wrote many songs and who for some years was his close friend and confidante. From then onwards Respighi became more active as a piano-accompanist than as a string player. Meanwhile he had had intermittent opportunities to teach at the Bologna Liceo Musicale without, however, gaining a permanent post there: frustration at this failure led him reluctantly to apply for posts elsewhere, and in January 1913 he settled in Rome, having been appointed professor of composition at the Liceo Musicale di S Cecilia.



Respighi held this post for over a decade, during which he revealed a notable flair for teaching, as several pupils have testified. In addition to Rieti and Amfitheatrof, his students included (from 1915) the young Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo, a talented composer and singer, who married her teacher in January 1919 and was the inseparable mainstay of many aspects of his existence for the remainder of his relatively short life. (She was to survive him by nearly 60 years, becoming his principal biographer and a tireless fighter for fuller recognition of his achievement right on into the closing decades of the century.)



By 1913 Rome had become Italy’s most vigorous centre of orchestral concert-giving, thus providing a stimulus that was soon to bear appropriate fruit in Fontane di Roma (1915–16). This vivid piece’s huge and well-deserved success, though not quite immediate, was quickly to transform Respighi’s reputation (and finances) beyond recognition. Meanwhile in 1915 an adventurous new colleague had joined him on the staff of the Liceo: after living in France for many years, Casella had returned to Italy bent on drastically modernizing the country’s musical life in the light of his recent experiences abroad. Again Respighi became marginally caught up in the resultant ferment of new ideas; but he played only a limited part in the activities of Casella’s controversial Società Italiana di Musica Moderna (1917–19), with whose aims he had little natural sympathy.



In 1923 Respighi was appointed director of the now state-funded Conservatorio di S Cecilia (as the former municipal Liceo had become from 1919); but his administrative duties proved uncongenial and time-consuming, and in 1926 he resigned so as to have more time to compose. Yet, although he no longer had any economic need to do so, he continued until 1935 to teach an advanced class in composition that had been specially created for him under the auspices of the much older Accademia di S Cecilia. (His successors in this prestigious new post were to include Pizzetti, Petrassi and Donatoni.) Meanwhile, although he continued to win his biggest successes with orchestral pieces, he again became involved in opera-composition, encouraged by his meeting in 1920 with the writer and journalist Claudio Guastalla (1880–1948) who is now remembered almost exclusively as the librettist of all Respighi’s later operas. Guastalla seems also to have exerted a significant influence (for better or worse) on the conceptions and programmes of some of his non-operatic works.



During his later years Respighi’s now worldwide fame encouraged him to travel extensively, conducting his music in many countries on both sides of the Atlantic, accompanying singers – especially (though not only) his wife, who increasingly replaced Fino-Savio as the leading interpreter of his songs – and occasionally even appearing as a piano soloist in his own compositions. Before long his international success brought him substantial rewards at home, including official favours from the fascist authorities: in 1932 he was honoured with membership of the Reale Accademia d’Italia. Mussolini’s own admiration for Respighi’s orchestral works seems to have been genuine and considerable, and it could be argued that parts of, for example, Pini di Roma (1923–4) and Feste romane (1928) evoke something of the atavistic pageantry that became associated with fascist propaganda. Yet Respighi himself remained uninvolved with politics: unlike some of his main Italian contemporaries he seldom wrote to the fascist leaders, and his few surviving letters to them are simple and relatively innocuous. It has been convincingly suggested that ‘Respighi did not attempt to ingratiate himself with the regime because he was the one composer of his generation whom the regime backed without being asked’ (Sachs).



In the field of ‘musical politics’, however, his essentially conservative position was confirmed when he became a signatory (with Pizzetti, Zandonai and various lesser figures) of the notorious, widely quoted manifesto which in December 1932 attacked the more adventurous musical trends of the time and urged a return to established Italian tradition. Ironically, on this occasion the unpredictable Mussolini firmly took the side of the modernists. By then Respighi’s health was declining: a heart murmur had been diagnosed in 1931, and by 1935 more serious heart problems had set in. He completed no new original compositions after 1933, and his last opera, Lucrezia, though seemingly almost finished at his death, is the work of a tired and weakened man.



2. Works.

Since 1980 many of Respighi’s hitherto little-known early works have belatedly become available in print or in recordings, some of them thus being heard for the very first time. Although the quality of these juvenilia is variable (some are notable more for technical fluency than for individuality or memorable ideas), there are striking pieces among them: for example, the previously unperformed cantata Christus, composed at the age of 19, is a moving and not unoriginal creative response to the sound world of Perosi’s early oratorios, which were then just becoming fashionable. Also worthy of attention are the Piano Quintet and the A minor Piano Concerto, whose evident debt to Martucci does not preclude signs of fresh thinking in their structural outlines, as well as in evocative details which in the Concerto sometimes reflect Respighi’s recent experiences in Russia. The orchestral resourcefulness that he had picked up from Rimsky-Korsakov – and also ‘conspicuously’ from the music of Tchaikovsky – can even more clearly be heard in parts of the Suite (originally Symphony) in E (1903), in which distinctive Respighian phraseology is often foreshadowed. Here, as in Christus, there are occasional signs that he was responsive to Gregorian chant long before he met his future wife, despite her oft-quoted claim that it was she who first induced him to study plainsong systematically.



Influences from other types of early music, too, are evident in some of his youthful pieces: the Suite in G pays free, rather romanticized tribute to late Baroque styles from Corelli to J.S. Bach, and pastiche of 18th-century music also pervades the long-winded Concerto all’antica (1908), written during Respighi’s first major burst of activity as a transcriber of compositions from that period. Meanwhile he was winning his first really lasting successes mainly with songs, some of which have remained among the most popular he ever wrote. Although he never became as strongly individual a song composer as his Italian contemporaries Pizzetti and Malipiero at their best, the charm and expressive variety of his many works in this field – ranging, in these early years, from the disarming, child-like freshness of Stornellatrice (1906) to the concentrated, hypnotic turbulence of In alto mare from the Sei melodie (1906) – has proved attractive to singers and audiences in many countries.



More adventurously up-to-date elements began to enter Respighi’s music in some of his works of the years immediately preceding World War I. Pre-eminent among them is Semirâma (1908–10), whose recent revival in the theatre and on disc (after over three quarters of a century of total neglect) has proved considerably more rewarding than had been generally expected. The style is, admittedly, still somewhat eclectic, with suggestions both of recent French music and – not least – of the Strauss of Salome, interacting with more tranditionally Italian operatic tendencies and with appropriate excursions into the exotic. The sumptuous orchestral palette of this shamelessly indulgent work prepared the way for the colouristic virtuosity of better-known pieces to follow.



Soon after the première of Semirâma, Respighi’s solo vocal output entered a more ambitious phase, in three substantial settings of translations of Shelley. The vividly picturesque Aretusa, which the composer is said to have regarded as ‘more his than anything he had previously written’ (E. Respighi, 1954), directly foreshadows Fontane di Roma in some of its orchestral imagery. Il tramonto (1914) too – more than the rather prolix La sensitiva (1914–15) – combines lyricism and restrained dramatic expression in a hauntingly eloquent single-movement cantata. The accompaniment, though here for strings alone, contains plentiful signs of Respighi’s flair for imaginative textures, fully justifying the work’s place among his most widely performed vocal compositions.



However, Respighi’s move to Rome led him, by and large, to devote more of his energies to purely orchestral music. His first extended orchestral piece of the Roman years, the huge, unconvincing Sinfonia drammatica (1914), paid turgid tribute to the more ponderous sides of both Strauss and the Franck tradition, and has understandably made little headway in the repertory. In Fontane di Roma, by extreme contrast, influences from, among others, Ravel and the Strauss of the ‘silver rose’ music in Der Rosenkavalier are totally assimilated into a highly personal, memorably pictorial soundscape: here Respighi showed both a perfect knowledge of his limitations and a superb command of his talents as an outstanding musical illustrator.



Fontane di Roma proved to be the most important creative turning-point in Respighi’s career. Yet the initial delay of its big success prevented its significance from being recognized at first even by the composer. During 1917–19 he wavered between contradictory stylistic possibilities: the Violin Sonata in B minor again harks back to 19th-century forerunners (from Martucci to Franck), with a risk of academicism in the final passacaglia; whereas a more modern, even cautiously experimental approach is evident in the capricious superimposed fourths that pervade the song cycle Deità silvane (1917), and in the menacing orchestral dissonances that caused the Ballata delle gnomidi (1919) to be controversial when new, before sinking into near oblivion until quite recently. Such works show that Respighi did respond to some extent, however temporarily, to the innovative ideals of Casella and his Società Italiana di Musica Moderna, which was active in precisely those years.



Meanwhile his creative involvement with music from the past entered a particularly happy phase, when the first set of Antiche danze ed arie (1917) combined a typically Respighian colouristic variety with a crisp clarity of sound that suits the chosen lute pieces surprisingly well. The work soon became another of his major successes, as did the ballet La boutique fantasque (1918). Here the themes borrowed from Rossini must themselves take part of the credit for the sparkling result; but Respighi’s skill in deploying and scoring this material is also notable, and may even have helped to prepare the way for Stravinsky’s far more drastic reshaping of borrowed ideas in Pulcinella, which was likewise the result of a commission from Diaghilev.



Respighi’s most famous works of the 1920s are the several symphonic poems that followed on, in various ways, from Fontane di Roma, whose international success was by then going from strength to strength. Pini di Roma and Feste romane were consciously planned as sequels to Fontane, and became inseparably linked with it in the public mind and in due course in countless recordings. However, these two later ‘Roman’ poems (especially Feste), though in many ways imaginative, are inclined to let picturesque colourfulness spill over into a flamboyant garishness that seems aimed primarily at lovers of orchestral showpieces. One can understand why Mussolini was fond of these works; yet the unworldly Respighi was probably, in truth, more influenced here by a simple, child-like delight in the kaleidoscopic riches of a modern orchestra than by the pageantry of fascism.



Between Pini di Roma and Feste romane, he wrote some more restrained tone poems on non-Roman subjects, among which the Trittico botticelliano (1927) stands out as a radiantly evocative little masterpiece for small orchestra. Imaginative in a different way is the central, and best, movement of the Impressioni brasiliane (1928), which evokes the Butantan snake farm near São Paulo with appropriately unsettling squeaks and slithering sounds. Vetrate di chiesa, though it too is colourful and ostensibly pictorial, consists largely of orchestral amplifications of the abstract Tre preludi sopra melodie gregoriane for piano (1919–21).



The best known of the overtly abstract compositions whose use of plainsong-like material followed on from the Tre preludi is the Concerto gregoriano for violin and orchestra (1921), whose central movement features the familiar Easter sequence Victimae paschali. Elsewhere in the work the allusions to plainchant are more fleeting and disguised; the quasi-pastoral result parallels some