The Grand tour of Italy was a necessary step in the spiritual and artistic life of eighteenth-century intellectuals – first of all, Goethe’s. Still, it was an elite kind of tourism, in spite of the objective practical difficulties: one should consider the mythical description of the passing of the Gotthard in Mignon’s ballade (Wilhelm Meister), whose dragons by the passage are replaced today by the trucks queuing before the tunnel.
More than a century later, tourism started to become a mass phenomenon, and the great artists adjusted their practices: Richard Strauss toured Italy by car, Brahms did not disdain long stays in Taormina. Poor Hugo Wolf, just dismissed from a psychiatric clinic (and close to the madhouse) ran obviously into the wrong week, before refunds existed: wind and cold weather in Friuli, a pneumonia in Istria, seasick in a savage Adriatic, nostalgia of Austria. In spite of this, it was on that occasion that, at 38, he saw the sea for the first time. But a musical journey in Italy is something different; less expensive but more daring, depending on the known repertoire, on the Volk hybridizations, on one’s love for Italian poetry.
For Beethoven, a pupil of Salieri, musical Italy is often synonymous with “Mozart”, even though his famous In questa tomba oscura overshadows all other versions, written in the fashion of a contest, just as would later happen with the Diabelli Variations. Years later Schubert, a Salieri pupil in turn, learnt a perfect Italian melodic style: even the theme of his Erlkönig (excluding the piano’s octaves) is Italian in terms of its broad horizon and of the phrasing of the long vowels. Brahms’ solid basses are certainly not the Neapolitan ones (different from Strauss’ Aus Italien), but also for him the great themes are often Italian (one may think of the first theme of his Violin concerto).
In Rome, Liszt wore the cassock, but his best as an “Italian” composer had come out in his years of “secular pilgrimage”: as an abbot, he too frequently lingered in a mortification of his mundane style, including a penitential version of Petrarch’s Sonnets.
Wolf, a Slovenian by birth, had some drops of Italian blood (provided that, as Bernard Shaw commented, one can have “some”, just as one has some Scotch whisky left in the cellar). As a boy, he perfectly imitated Rossini’s orchestral style, and in his last years he was actually obsessed by Funicolì Funicolà (which he had heard played by street musicians in Misurina); he tried hard to insert it into the work-in-progress of his masterful Italian Serenade for string quartet. In a terrible night at that clinic, he eventually managed to realize that citation, but it remained as a tragical fragment. More or less tragical tarantellas are not missing in Beethoven (Kreutzer Sonata) and Schubert (Death and the Maiden quartet), and perhaps already in some Gigues by Bach, even though they boast an English air.
The programme of this CD is a journal of the Italian musical journey of composers who undertook it here, each in his own fashion and according to his availabilities. Liszt was probably the first true European composer, not only for his cosmopolitan life, but also since he was a polyglot of the Lied, a genre that had hitherto been bound to the German language only. Among the great ones, only Aribert Reimann, more than a century later, would be so good at composing in so many languages. Petrarch, to whom – among other things – the birth of modern vocal music (the madrigal) is owed, had a kind of musical Renaissance of his own starting with Reichardt, who splendidly set his poems to music, in Italian. Schubert made use of good German translations, and so did Schoenberg with his first serial piece. Liszt, though, recreated an ideal Italy, “all inclusive”, in his masterful Sonnets, later turned into Songs without words. The background looks like a pre-Rafaelite painting; recitatives have a Mozartean intensity. The arias, and the aura, cross the borders of France, just as Petrarch himself had done. The result is memorable, just as if Laura (whom Liszt calls by name, different from the Poet himself) had the red hair of Burne-Jones, and the portamento of Italo-French vocality of the mid-nineteenth century, to say nothing of his sumptuous pianism, which is very detailed in terms of both music and words.
Hugo Wolf, who was encouraged to do so by an aged Liszt, had already set to music the greatest masters of German poetry, to unsurpassed levels, when (somewhat like Nietzsche) he took Italitis and turned his attention to the anonymous (but very refined poetry) of the early Italian Renaissance, translated by Paul Heyse until it became German by adoption (under an Italian sun, as Wolf once put it). The central Italian scenes in his Italienisches Liederbuch became miniature universal stories of life, love, quarrels and jealousy, in this double passage to the North, but references to coeval verismo are not missing, particularly in the Lieder of the second book, after his (Spanish) opera Der Corregidor, and when he was close to a breakdown due to a looming neurosyphilis. In one of his Lieder, for instance (Benedeit die sel’ge Mutter), on lyrics of Venetian origins, a reference to folly anticipates the ghostly pace of the second Michelangelo Lied, which we would find a little later. At the same time, he looked back, just one step away from the symphonic poem Penthesilea (written following Liszt’s advice), another product by a “precarious” artist, as Stefan Zweig described both Wolf and Kleist.
Back from Italy, Richard Strauss composed the already cited symphonic poem Aus Italien; however, even this gem which inaugurates Michelangelo’s (second) Renaissance as a poet for music (after him, and besides Wolf, his words would be set to music by Britten, Shostakovich and Reimann) represents a different kind of Strauss, as was noted by Fischer-Dieskau: not a “Baroque” one, but one in sanguine, with a lowered gaze just as Michelangelo’s own Leda.
Here we find the same colours of the great, last Lieder by Wolf, just before the first signs of his mental decline but still perfectly in tune with the great figure of an artist in which he tries and sees himself before the end. In the first Lied we find dark musings (on a four-notes motif derived from Beethoven’s Op. 132) evoking thoughts of remorse, of alienation from the world (the “negative” of Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen), with a final statement of being still alive (the lyrics are written on a plaque under the house where Wolf composed these Lieder). In the second Lied, which has already been mentioned, that four-note motif gets fragmented and then recomposed. The dissonances between voice and piano sustain a descent into hell marked by the utmost nihilism, with lightings of human voices, cum mortuis in lingua mortua, of whom Wolf himself said he was afraid. The third is one of Wolf’s great love songs. Here the four-note motto alternates with voices which converge like embraces. The finale is a declaration of love on the very same notes used by Brahms (who was dying in those days) to part from death itself, in his four Serious Songs.
Salieri had been the perfect seasoning for Schubert’s studies. Years later, in the wake of the success (for him a detestable one) of Rossini, the master of the Lied demonstrates that he was not inferior to him as concerns the handling of recitatives and of the dramatic and buffo ariosi. He wrote at least two true arie da baule on lyrics by Metastasio for bass Lablache, a great Leporello, who was in Vienna at the time, being the torchbearer at Beethoven’s funeral. Il traditor deluso has, in the recitative, some accents of pure terror in the voice, and makes the piano skillfully tremble (“Ahimè, io tremo”), then “l’aria d’intorno” is also the Aria which wavers and tethers with the controlled panic of vocal virtuosity. Il modo di prender moglie looks like an added aria for a Biedermeier Don Giovanni – who is a Casanova no more but rather an insufferable sexist who, still, knows how to amuse us musically. The first of the three songs, L’incanto degli occhi, is a self-standing piece, a delightful, quintessential Schubert Lied (with the typical repeated chords in the right hand), celebrating the beloved’s eyes in an ectasis of delight (as if they were Marisa Berenson’s in Barry Lindon), with a suggestion of coloratura, as if blushing at the mere thought of it. Metastasio’s mannered words say what in Michelangelo (and in Wolf) was carved in marble: the fault (even as concerns the beauty of music itself) is always that of eyes looking at you with love, or of something like that.
Erik Battaglia
