Chigiana Journal of Musicological Studies

Introduzione

Susanna Pasticci — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Una introduzione al nuovo volume.

L’ idea civile della morte negli anni della Rivoluzione francese: la Marche lugubre di François-Joseph Gossec

Simone Caputo — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The deaths of major figures of the French Revolution were not seen simply as moments of passing but marked the complete assimilation of their spirit into the collective consciousness of the people and the nation. They were understood as abstract entities, through their spiritual dimensions, effectively replacing traditional religious functions. The process of secularisation during the century of the Enlightenment had a significant impact on the custom of accompanying death with requiems, leading to a decrease in their production and, in some cases, changing the role of the funeral mass. The association of the funeral march with ceremonies honouring key figures of the French Revolution reflects this change and signals the shift of institutional reference from the Church to the nation. This placed the relationship with religion in a new context — a civic religion practised in the urban spaces of the city and revered as a source of moral strength. Analysing this phenomenon through the lens of François-Joseph Gossec’s Marche lugubre (which accompanied Mirabeau’s funerals in 1790, and the transfer of Voltaire’s remains to the Panthéon in 1791) reveals the multiple consequences of the secularisation of the funeral rite for the new civic understanding of death. It also allows us to assess the role of the funeral march in this process, characterised by the use of instruments with powerful acoustic effects such as brass and tam-tam.

«Qual può cristiano vantar virtute che il Sultan non vanti?»

Maria Rosa De Luca — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An interesting anticipation of these themes is cleverly hidden in the text of the tragedy Zaïre, first performed at the Comédie-Française on 13 August 1732. It became widely known in Italy from 1748, when the first translations were published by Giuseppe Finori, Giambattista Richeri and Gasparo Gozzi. The arrival of Zaira on the Italian musical stage dates back to 1797, with a libretto by Mattia Butturini for the composer Sebastiano Nasolini (Venice, Teatro San Benedetto). Two years later, another version by Bocciardini appeared at the Teatro Carolino in Palermo, with music by Francesco Federici, which enjoyed an extraordinary longevity, with many revivals until 1822. The success of this Zaira is undoubtedly due to the librettist’s efforts to return Voltaire’s text to its orthodoxy, softening the bitter criticism of revealed religion that it contains. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the opera was also known as Il trionfo della fede (The Triumph of Faith). A libretto by Felice Romani, much closer to Voltaire’s polemical vision, was prepared in 1829 for Vincenzo Bellini. After the unfortunate outcome of the opera conceived for the inauguration of the Teatro Ducale in Parma, it underwent further musical variations at the hands of Saverio Mercadante (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1831) and other contemporary composers. This article examines a hitherto unnoticed cut in Bellini’s score, which corresponds to a very ideologically exposed scene.
The passage — which may have been targeted by the censors from the very first performance of the opera — concerns the brief dialogue between Zaira and her confidante Fatima at the beginning of the second act (referring to the first scene of Voltaire’s fourth act). These few lines raise a crucial dilemma concerning the Sultan’s right to salvation on the same level as that offered to a Christian. Here, the bitter interreligious — and, in a broader sense, spiritual — question at the heart of Voltaire’s tragedy comes most clearly to the fore in Romani and Bellini’s opera.

Christ in the Kulturkampf

James Garrat — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The secularisation paradigm has long defined attitudes towards nineteenth-century religious music and painting. Within both musicology and art history, such art has often been treated as marginal to mainstream artistic developments and tangential to the social, political, and intellectual preoccupations of its age. This paper offers a corrective, exploring how religious art was messily intertwined with the most contentious socio-political issues of the 1870s and demonstrating the complex spiritual currents embodied in religious artworks and their reception. I focus on two works and the debates they prompted: Franz Liszt’s oratorio Christus (premiered in 1873) and Max Liebermann’s painting Christus im Tempel (1879).
On the face of it, these works point to antithetical currents, the one seemingly offering a dogmatic, ultramontane view of Christ while the other a provocative rejudaising of its subject. Both works are united, however, in departing from — and offending against — the dominant Protestantism of Bismarck’s Germany. They challenge normative conceptions of the representation of Christ, presenting not so much religious art as art about religion and about religious art. By juxtaposing modern and historical elements, they delineate distinct temporalities and set in motion alternative conceptions of truth. Ultimately, both works offer open, unstable texts onto which competing critical voices projected their own truths.
The hostile reception of Liebermann’s Christ led him to overpaint the image to make it more acceptable to his non-Jewish critics. Similar critical “overpaintings” imbued Liszt’s Christus with a humanistic or pantheistic aura, enabling an uneasy accommodation with cultural Protestantism.

Hausmusik e spiritualizzazione del genere

Roe-Min Kok — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article probes Robert Schumann’s approach to fatherhood in relation to the maternality of his wife Clara, as the early Romantic movement elevated motherhood over traditional Lutheran beliefs in paternal power. While dutiful towards their large brood, Clara harboured “ambivalence” and “resentment” — in contrast to Robert, “an unusually devoted father” for his time (Nancy B. Reich, 2001). The latter assessment is ostensibly based on his compositions for children, as well as touching fatherly observations about their offspring’s daily lives in the Little Memory Book (1846–1854). However, Robert’s paternal devotion shows a marked pattern. He dedicated music only to their daughters — not sons — and recommended biblical readings aimed at women. In light of the above contexts, I analyse his Three Piano Sonatas for the Young Op. 118 (1853), dedicated to Marie, Elise, and Julie Schumann. I highlight unusual musical features that point to Robert’s focus on reinforcing female spiritual-moral behaviour. His concern implicitly censured Clara: as a female traveling pianist, her maternality corresponded to neither the Lutheran nor the early Romantic model of motherhood. A deliberately concealed omission of a misogynistic biblical text recommended by Robert (Eugenie Schumann, Memoirs, 1925) appears to confirm the spiritually tinged gendered tensions in the Schumann household.

Ecumenismi musicali nella Parigi degli emigrati russi tra anni Venti e Trenta

Matteo Macinanti — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The spiritual dimension is one of the most significant aspects of the complex Russian-Parisian socio-cultural milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, resulting from the migratory flows that followed the 1917 revolution. For Russian émigrés in Paris, this dimension is rooted in the cultural horizon of the Silver Age, a period at the turn of the century that witnessed a revival of Orthodox spirituality. In this context, a theological interpretation of emigration found its place in the exile community. Compared to the biblical exile, the experience of expatriation takes on the meaning of a mission aimed at sowing the seeds of a total spiritual renewal throughout the world, to be carried out in a specific field: culture and the creativity of the various arts, including music. In addition to these assumptions, the reality of the Russian-Parisian exile gave rise to another declination of the spiritual sense of creative activity: the encounter with the host culture of the Parisian metropolis resulted in a fruitful period of cultural exchange and interweaving, which also responded to the demands of early twentieth-century ecumenism and the search for reconciliation between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. The musical production of Russian-Parisian composers, in particular Arthur Lourié, author of the Concerto spirituale, offers a unique point of view for analysing the importance of the spiritual dimension in the cultural context of this specific historiographical chronotope.

Pärt after Pärt: the Composer as Progenitor

Andrew Shenton — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) developed a new compositional technique in the 1970s that has a peculiar mystery and enchantment. Called “tintinnabulation”, this music is static and ecstatic, elegantly simple, deceptively complex, visceral and remarkable, and is appreciated by large and diverse audiences. In addition to his original works, Pärt is the progenitor of a diverse array of sibling works which has further broadened his appeal. In this essay I survey some of the ways Pärt’s music has been used as inspiration by other composers and performers. I suggest that the creators of the derived works have mined Pärt’s music for elemental materials that resonate with secular spirituality. Using examples of sampling, arranging, pastiche, direct and indirect influence, improvisation, and digital manipulation, I conclude by acknowledging the intrinsic success of the sibling works which stand as empathetic tributes to the original while at the same time presenting a range of personal expression. The sibling works are fully accessible and utilised in secular rituals of performance, meditation, listening, and transformation. They are highly original and personal essays which attempt a hermeneutic of the original in aural form, often establishing new sound worlds and refining the essence of the mystery of the tintinnabuli technique.

Preghiere di Luigi Dallapiccola

Mila De Santis — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This essay first seeks to place Preghiere in the more general context of Luigi Dallapiccola’s textual choices based on spirituality and, more specifically, on the concept of “prayer”. It then reconstructs the genesis of the work, starting from Dallapiccola’s first encounter (in 1959) with the texts of Murilo Mendes, the Brazilian poet, writer, and literary historian, with whom a lasting relationship based on mutual esteem and spiritual affinity was established. Based on the correspondence between the two artists and the books in Dallapiccola’s personal library, the sources of the three selected texts will be examined, as well as the (minimal) variations made to Ruggero Jacobbi’s Italian translations and the reasons for choosing the overall title Preghiere. In fact, the composition took place between the height of the summer and October 1962, i.e., in the months immediately before and after Dallapiccola’s transfer to Berkeley (California), where he had been invited to hold the chair of Italian culture at that university, and where the first performance of the work took place (10 November 1962).
Finally, some significant variations in the first version performed in Berkeley before sending Preghiere to the publisher (1963) are examined.

Spiritualità e surrealismo alla radio

Giordano Ferrari — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores the theme of spirituality by comparing two radio works created on opposite sides of the Atlantic during the Second World War: The City Wears a Slouch Hat (1942) by John Cage and La Coquille à Planètes (1942–43) by Pierre Schaeffer. Although the authors belong to different aesthetic worlds, the two works have some interesting points in common. Their relationship to radio is central: both see the medium as an innovative means of expression, capable of opening up new horizons for music, but above all, of leading to a broader aesthetic and philosophical reflection, revealing a profound spirituality of a humanistic nature. The analysis of the two works reveals a dialectic between universal themes and inner dilemmas, explored with dramaturgical and expressive techniques of a surrealist matrix.

The “Metaphysical Question” in Contemporary Italian Musical Theater

Graziella Seminara — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Italian religious music of the twentieth and early twenty-first century presents a “problematic” approach to the theme of the sacred. This contribution aims to investigate how the “metaphysical question” is addressed in Alessandro Solbiati’s recent theatrical work
Leggenda (2011), which is based on “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” from the fifth book of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The intellectual, compositional, poetic, and aesthetic complexities posed by such an audacious literary choice constituted a formidable
challenge for Solbiati. The composer stages the “dialogical conflict” between Ivan and Aljòša Karamazov with a stratification of different dramatic and space-time layers, conveying the unresolved ethical dilemmas of the Russian writer. At the same time, he places the work’s vast formal conception and linguistic complexity at the service of a rediscovered relationship with the listener, intertwining his link with “history” with compositional rigour and the experimental and speculative attitudes typical of structuralism. In this interplay between research and memory lies Solbiati’s personal response to the post-Webernian avant-garde and the postmodern aesthetics of our age.

Disappearance as Compositional and Eschatological Trace

Jan Christiaens — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The music of Franco-German composer Mark Andre (b. 1964) often engages with biblical theology. Rather than creating superficial programmatic connections between biblical narratives and musical expression, Andre arguably delves into the intricacies of biblical narratives, extracting morphological features that feed into the structure of his compositions.
In this paper, I will explore and illustrate Andre’s approach through an analysis of iv 15: Himmelfahrt (2018), a work for the organ. Particular attention is paid to the so-called Ausklang passages, in which the wind supply to the organ is deliberately cut off, allowing for a gradual fading away (disappearance) of sound. I show how these sonic traces actively engage with the theological dialectic of presence and absence inherent in the Ascension narrative. With these analytical insights, I develop a synthetic reflection on the intricate connection between music and theology in Andre’s work, invoking the concepts of mimesis and sacramentality.