“Around the middle of November 1927, I turned up from amongst the chaos of papers that constitutes my desk, the entry form for a competition organised by the Philadelphia Musical Fund Society; it stipulated a chamber composition for from three to six instruments, in any form, and they had allocated $10,000 as the first prize - in other words, the largest sum of money that had ever been offered as a prize for a chamber composition.” Thus does Alberto Casella recall in “I segreti della giara” (Florence 1941 , p. 238) the circumstances which led to the birth of his Serenade, composed in a mere six weeks and submitted to the jury at the eleventh hour thanks to a well-timed trip to America by Bernardino Molinari, who in 1919 had conducted in Rome the first performance of Pagine di guerra in the original version for orchestra. And it was also purely by chance that, the following year, Casella learned the outcome of the competition; “One morning … in October, glancing through Il Messaggero, I read that the first prize … had been divided between myself and Bartók (Quartet No.3) … The jury’s report was, for me, extremely flattering and declared the Serenade an authentic example of the purest Italian style, both in the form, the spirit, and above all in the characteristically flowing melodiousness of the musical discourse. I later transcribed the work for a small orchestra (without the Minuet) but I still prefer the first version for its’ greater transparency and its’ sonorous originality.”
The high regard in which, as we have seen, the composer himself held the Serenade appears nowadays more than ever justified, belonging as it does to the most interesting period of Casella’s career, which Mila defines as being that of “stylistic clarification”; it followed the period of so-called harmonic “exasperation” and culminated in the poem for piano A notte alta (1917); and it bore such fruit as the masterpieces La giara (1924) Scarlattiana (1926) up to the Symphony Opus 63 from 1940 and beyond. Constructed in the form of a suite in six movements, the Serenade is the supreme example of Casella’s neoclassicism, a work so assured that it is able easily to absorb certain rhythmic/melodic elements of folkloristic flavour that in other works had appeared extraneous (one thinks particularly of the rather forced inclusion of the motif tram Funiculì-Funicolà in the orchestral rhapsody Italia from 1909). After the tripartite opening March - the central section in E minor has an atmosphere so comic as to be almost tragic - and the following staccato Minuet, we come to the splendid central Nocturne in which appears for the first time the echo of a neapolitan folksong that interweaves perfectly with the musical fabric, drawing from it rhythmic sustenance. The carefree modulation of the Gavotte, entrusted largely to the bassoon, is contrasted with the almost sorrowful sound of the violin in the Cavatina. The Serenade closes with the finale’s Tarantella which easily bears comparison with that used seven years previously by Stravinsky in Pulcinella, for the perfect ease with which the rhythmic/melodic fragments entrusted to the individual instruments intermingle in a fluid succession of musical kaleidoscopes.
Between late 1924 and early 1925 Pizzetti received a commission far a chamber composition to be performed in Paris during a concert of entirely new works that had been sponsored at her personal wish by the American benefactress and amateur musician Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. At that time Pizzetti’s name was famous not only because of the success of his collaboration on various theatrical works with D’Annunzio, from Fedra in 1915 to Debora e Jaéle in 1922 - but also because of the reputation as an essayist and polemicist that he had earned whilst living in Florence between 1917 and 1924 where, as well as teaching counterpoint and harmony at the Istituto Musicale Cherubini, he had, together with such notables as Soffici, Prezzolini, Papini and Bastianelli, participated in the heated cultural debate that was largely expressed in the columns of such prestigious journals as “La Voce”. And in order, within the context of this debate, to give music a more forceful presence, he had founded, together with Consolo, the Società degli Amici della Musica and, with Bastianelli, the journal “Dissonanze”.
One of the subjects under discussion was the comparison, on the one hand with the new musical experiences coming from Paris and Vienna (Schoenberg composed his first dodecaphonic pieces between 1923 and 1925) and, on the other hand, with the Italian instrumental tradition, both Renaissance and Baroque, that had already been the subject of study on the part of scholars such as Fausto Torrefranca, who was also active in Florence at the time. Pizzetti, for his contribution to the debate, drew on his studies of gregorian chant and 15th and 16th century music under Giovanni Tebaldini when he was a student at the Parma Conservatoire. In the light of all this, the Trio - first performed in Paris on the 23rd May 1925 with George Enescu, violin, Hans Kindler, cello and the composer at the piano - encapsulates the spirit of a vital and vivid period in Italian 20th century music when many composers, with Pizzetti in the forefront, were searching for a cure for what they saw as the profound divide between music and musical culture, this cure being interpreted in Italy as a rediscovery of their great instrumental inheritance. (The chief cause of the divide was attributed to 19th century melodrama, Puccini included.) In the Trio’s first movement, Mosso e Arioso, after the opening chord that immediately establishes the basic key, the harmonic discourse contains no especially audacious eye-openers; nor does the piano ever go beyond the role of sustainer and anticipator of the modal progress, and only occasionally does it take part in the imitative game of the violin and cello, where the use of their different timbres is masterly. There are equally enigmatic sonorities in the brief Largo that follows - the merest echo at the beginning of Debussy's La Cathédrale engloutie (Preludes Book I, 1910) - due, in the writing for piano, to the initial passage for organum al basso, above which the cello moves freely in a space that does not diminish during the entire movement. The closing Rapsodia di Settembre does not appear to be on the some level artistically as the preceding movements; it seems laboured, too theoretical and appears to support, at least in this case, Bastianelli's statement that defined Pizzetti's attitude to the 15th and 16th centuries as “amateur and cerebral”.
“The music of Nino Rota is music without quotation marks and, therefore, able to restore to us emotions both great and small in all their urgency, This is his great quality and his message. An important message? I don’t know, Perhaps it is only a humble message. But its’ import is true.” Re-reading today Fedele D'Amico's affermation - pronounced on the occasion of the inauguration of the “Omaggio a Rota” organised in summer 1981 by the town of Pistola - it has lost none of it's value; in fact, in the light of certain aesthetic and lingulstic choices taken by the so-called “neo-romantic” generation, it seems to assign to his music an almost prophetic role. Composed in 1958, the Trio is a year younger than Boulez’ Third Sonata, a contemporary of Nono's Canto sospeso and Maderna’s Continuo and falls chronologically in the middle of Stockhausen’s Gruppen project; it is as if Rota’s composition, far from trying to link up with what was happening around him, was looking to the future, towards the music of future composers, those born after 1945 who, between the 1970s and ‘80s, were provoked into rebelling against the cerebralism of their “fathers”. But such an analysis does not do justice either to Rota the human being - the ambition to be a protagonist was totally alien to his nature - or to Rota the composer who, and this was no mere twist of fate, gave the best of himself to film music, in other words to a product whose principal artistic value is that it does not fall into any particular category. And this some value is also implicit in the chamber output that includes the Trio - one of the last of Rota’s compositions in this field - written for the Klemm-Cervera-Wolfensberger Trio on the eve of the triumphs of Il cappello di paglia di Firenze (Palermo 1955) and the soundtrack for Felllni’s Le Notti di Cabiria (1957). In this composition Rota confirms his desire to communicate to the listener his sheer pleasure in making music employing, without pretension, simple craftsmen’s tools. The opening Allegro non troppo is entrusted largely to an insistent rhythm on the piano, above which the flute and the violin toss back and forth, as if in a game, echoes and fragments of a simple melodic figure; the central Andante sostenuto in 3/4 time is like a brief dream in which the same figure assumes an entirely different aspect yet losing nothing of its’ identity. In the final Allegro vivace con spirito it is once again the rhythm that predominates, obsessively imposed by the piano, leaving little room for either the violin or the flute to tear at the melodic fabric or indulge in harmonic pretentiousness; It is only in the Finale that the three instruments unite, like puppets that, having performed their various roles for the public’s entertainment, take their bows together on the small stage of a provincial theatre.
Ettore Napoli