A follower, Casella tags a Stravinsky piece for four instruments in five movements with one for five instruments and six movements."
American music-writer Paul Rosenleld's throwaway dismissal has - like most one-liners - a grain of truth; but there's a lot more to Casella than that.
A child prodigy on the piano (first public concert aged eleven), the young Alfredo also loved chemistry and electrical experiments; Martucci, Italy's leading non-operatic composer, helped push him towards music rather than science - via the Paris Conservatoire, where around 1900 Casella studied composition with Fauré, alongside Ravel. Sure enough, Casella long avoided opera, and his first mature music - witness the Barcarole and Scherzo - sounds like Fauré plus hints of Ravel. In Paris Casella also discovered Debussy - "like a fantastic world perceived for the first time" - then Russian nationalists (Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov), Richard Strauss and Mahler: his music took on tinges of them all. Later carne the impact of Bartók, Schoenberg and especially Stravinsky: after the notorious premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913, Casella's idiom (said Italian critic Massimo Mila) was "suddenly cancelled and overthrown by the eruption of expressionistic lava that's been called his second style." But when Stravinsky came over all neo-classical around 1920, who should soon emulate him but ... Casella. Throughout his career, too, Casella incessantly reworked pieces for different line-ups, and ever enthused about whatever he'd just finished: "I'm certain it's one of my best" - hardly suggesting complete artistic conviction.
There's also Casella's record as "a fascist - not an evil one, but full of enthusiasm" (in Mila's words) - and slavish follower of the party line. Early in Mussolini's regime, Casella extolled Italy's "privileged" freedom from "parliamentary action". 1930 found him boasting he was born just four days before his beloved leader. The attempt on the dasert, a "secular oratorio" dedicated to Mussolini, glorified the Duce's vicious and self-aggrandising conquest of Ethiopia (1936-7) as "the civilising mission of a great nation". Italy's closer ties with Nazi Germany after 1938, including the first imposition of racial laws in Italy, soon found Casella eulogising a German "martyr" who happened to share his surname - killed in 1923 backing Hitler's botched Munich "Beer-Hall" Putsch - denouncing his Italian colleagues (naming no names) for "internationalism" and their music as "the product of international Judaism". This from Italy's most cosmopolitan - married to a Jewish Frenchwoman!
Yet Mila, who was imprisoned for anti-fascist activism from 1935-40, recalled Casella "did whatever he could - he believed that by saying a word to the right person ... poor man, deluding himself, as always ..." And musically at least, Casella knew his own faults: "Two solid symphonies for sale" - read a programma note - "in the German, Strauss-Mahler tradition. Unoriginality guaranteed - that's why I want to sell them." Resolving "to dedicate all my strengths and activity to achieve a genuine Italian style, based on our great instrumental past but also contemporary in musical language", Casella returned to Italy in 1915, no follower but a true leader. As concert pianist (and harpsichordist), conductor, teacher, editor and writer, he championed great music from Renaissance Italian to radical avantgarde. Throughout fascist rule, Casella tirelessly encouraged young Italians and masterminded concerts introducing Italy to the newest, most innovatory music from all over Europe. His own "second style" may have been ignited by others, but its music was unique and original: grotesque humour, haunted stillness, savage evocations of mechanised warfare, pioneering harmony superimposing chords in different keys; all scandalised conservative Italian audiences but inspired Italian composer - even Puccini in Turandot.
How to weigh such a complex character? "What unites all his styles," Mila decided, "is eagerness for novelty, a constant need to surpass himself, barometric sensibility to the oscillations of contemporary taste." Naďvely so in politics, perhaps -but not in music. Sicilienne et burlesque is a perfect case of the Casella puzzle. This Paris Conservatoire test piece from 1914 finds him beginning to transcend influences on the threshold of his "second style": echoes of early Italian music, French impressionism and Stravinsky (Petrushka and, in Casella's germinal piano phrase, the opening of the Rite) are often refracted through strange, new harmonies in a kind of musical Cubism, like no other composer. Yet Casella still found rearrangement necessary three years later, replacing flute by violin and cello (but keeping the piano) and renaming it Sicilana e burlesca - by then he was living in Rome! Casella's lifelong revitalisation of old Italian forms was particular1y prominent in the 1930s (politics again?) - as in the unusually-scored Sinfonia. This Italianate overture-movement epitomises his aspiration towards "Italian classicism in extended tonality"; ironically, it was commissioned by the New York League of Composers.
Casella wrote a violin concerto, but nothing for violin and piano save the three transcriptions recorded here. La giara (The urn) was a rollicking, folk-music-inspired ballet on a Pirandello story set in Sicily: miserly Don Lollo's greatest treasure, an enormous jar, has been broken; the local hunchback tinker Zi' Dima squeezes inside, mends it - and finds he can't get out again; no prizes for guessing that the urn's eventually smashed to bits. The gentle, pastoral Prelude in this arrangement leaps via a lightning sketch of Zi'Dima into a whirling Sicilian chiovů dance - rather like the Neapolitan tarantella.
Serenata - Rosenfeld's 6 movements for 5 instruments! (clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, violin and cello) - was a classic of Casella's 1920s neo-classicism. It shared first place with Bartók's Third String Quartet in a competition in Philadelphia, the $10,000 prize being "the largest ever offered for chamber composition," Casella crowed in his autobiography I segreti della giara (The secrets of the jar -but later translated into English more prosaically, indeed misleadingly, as Music in my time). As usual, he capitalised on his success via arrangements -orchestrating five movements and transcribing two for violin and piano.
Interestingly, the Cavatina - singing surely the most beautiful melody Casella ever wrote - was originally scored for just violin and cello, and the dancing Gavotte - which actually preceded it in the Serenata - for the three winds.
In seven movements (but originally for 33 rather than six instruments!), Scarlattiana was Casella's brilliant "divertimento" on "about 80" themes from Domenico Scarlatti's 545 keyboard sonatas. Often accused of imitating Stravinsky's Pulcinella, its ancestry can equally be traced in La Cimarosiana (1921) by Casella's friend Gian Francesco Malipiero. Memorable tunes, inventively updated, strike sparks from one another - by no means least in the catchy Minuet Casella arranged for violin and piano. If the Barcarola e Schelzo is a typically mellifluous product of Casella's early years, the Sonata a tre, his final chamber work, is a virtual summation of his career. This modern trio sonata joins motoric rhythms, angular themes and scrunchy harmonies with sparingly expressive Italianate melody (recalling the Trio of another friend, Pizzetti), in a synthesis presaging Casella's last - and perhaps greatest - work: the Missa Solemnis pro pace of 1944, a plea for peace amid the ruins of Europe. "War, racial suffering (my wife is Jewish) and a long, painful illness necessitating two operations," said Casella, "produced in my Mass a certain change of style, an ultimate deepening of an art that's taken more than thirty years of arduous labour."
As Massimo Mila put it, Casella had at last "begun to understand". Perhaps in the end, then, we should understand and remember Casella as Malipiero did: "A great musician and a lovable companion. In a musical world of competition and envy he was even-handedness, kindness and intelligent sympathy personified".
David Gallagher, 2000