Italy… Violins, Operas and Popes.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… the music of Italy… including music of the city states, republics and kingdoms that became the nation of Italy in the late nineteenth century.

So can something of a survey of an entire country’s music be done in a little over an hour? Absolutely not. But the music I have chosen does perhaps suggest a few themes in the music made on the Italian Peninsula over the last several centuries… the principal one being the tension between religious music and secular music. And there’s going to be a certain focus on Violins & on Singing. So, why? There’s not much science to this train of thought but for me what the guitar is to Spain, the violin is to Italy. The instrument seems to feature disproportionately in the make-up of the peninsula’s compositions and players. As for singing, you’ve got the dominance of Rome and the Vatican as the centre of the western world’s principal religion for a thousand years which drove the huge amount of sacred choral music created and performed there. And then you have what I think of as the innate musicality of the sound of the Italian language itself. Another description I’d use is ‘singability’. I don’t think it is surprising that the secular song blossomed early in what became Italy and that opera followed hard on its heels.

But mainly, to be honest, this episode’s theme is an excuse to play some very beautiful music and to get to say out loud the wonderful names of the composers… Giuseppe Verdi, Archangelo Corelli, Claudio Monteverdi, Ottorino Respighi, Carlo Gesualdo, Tomaso Albinoni, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Gioachino Rossini,  Pietro Mascagni and Alessandro Scarlatti.

Ok. This is not going to be a chronological playlist.  I’m going to bounce around four hundred years of music… ideally emphasising the contrasts between the works, the styles and the forces they require. I’m going start with the orchestral overture to the opera ‘Nabucco’ by Giuseppe Verdi written in 1841. The opera follows the biblical story of the Jewish people as they are assaulted, conquered and subsequently exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian king Nabucco or (Nebuchadnezzar II). The historical events are used as background for a romantic and political plot. And one of the choruses from the opera became strongly identified with the unification movement that would lead to the creation of modern Italy. And it was Verdi’s first big success. Here is the Overture. It is about seven minutes long and it is performed here by the German Opera Orchestra conducted by Giuseppi Sinopoli.

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That was overture to the opera ‘Nabucco’ by Giuseppe Verdi performed by the German Opera Orchestra conducted by Giuseppi Sinopoli.

Ok. In Italian the word ‘follia’ means madness so, for example, ‘to be madly in love’ is ‘amare alla follia’. And ‘follia’ has been given to an intriguing musical form that is thought to have originated as a wild and abandoned festival dance in the 1500s in the Kingdom of Portugal. In terms of music it is hard to know whether to describe the ‘follia’ as a melody, a sequence of chords or a particular dance rhythm. Perhaps it is better to describe it as a combination of all three. More importantly it became a sort of starting point for a whole range of compositions over the next several hundred years throughout Europe. I guess it can be compared to many composers taking an anonymous piece of folk music and developing that into more complex composition. Surprisingly, the rhythm of the piece seems to have slowed down over the next couple of centuries. Anyway, one of the best uses of this very old music called ‘La Follia’ is a slightly less old work by Arcangelo Corelli, published in 1700, for solo violin and a small group of accompanying instruments he called, not surprisingly, ‘La Folia’. Here it is performed by the Dutch group Musica Amphion directed by Pieter-Jan Belder and the solo violin part is played by Rémy Baudet. It is about eleven minutes long. Arcangelo Corelli’s Violin Sonata called ‘La Follia’.

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That was Arcangelo Corelli’s Violin Sonata called ‘La Follia’. It was performed by the group Musica Amphion directed by Pieter-Jan Belder and the solo violin part was played by Rémy Baudet. Now if it seemed a little familiar it might perhaps be that a few weeks back I played what Georg Friedrich Handel did with it in a keyboard suite. Anyway…

I hope you are enjoying this episode of Classical For Everyone devoted to music from Italy and… From memory, in the Introduction I threatened some opera… And I know it is not everyone’s cup of tea or glass of Barolo but it would be silly to do an Italy episode without a little bit of it. Ok.

When the first public opera house in the world opened in Venice in 1637, the composer Claudio Monteverdi, by then in his 70th year, returned to writing full-scale operas. He had been one of the pioneers of opera at the beginning of the century but his final opera, ‘The Coronation of Poppea’ was to be one of the few early operas that has been resurrected and achieved some contemporary popularity. The plot describes how Poppaea, mistress of the Roman emperor Nero, is able to achieve her ambition and be crowned empress. I’m going to play you one song from it.  It is ‘Goodbye Rome’ or ‘Addio Roma’ sung near the end of the opera by Nero’s wife who is being exiled and I guess in some way removed from the marriage to make way for Poppea. It is a pretty fabulous example of what the emotional power of a song can be… even almost four hundred years ago. Rene Jacobs conducts the Concerto Vocale and Jennifer Larmore sings Ottavia. It is about four minutes long. ‘Addio Roma’ by Claudio Monteverdi.          

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That was Rene Jacobs conducting the Concerto Vocale and Jennifer Larmore singing Ottavia’s aria ‘Addio Roma’ by Claudio Monteverdi from his opera ‘The Coronation of Poppea’

OK leaping forward to the 20th century and keeping the city of Rome as the subject… here is a section of Ottorino Respighi’s four part work for orchestra… ‘The Pines Of Rome’ from 1924. This part is called ‘Pines Near A Catacomb’. This is a good example of what is sometimes called ‘programme music’… music that is designed to portray quite specific places and elements… so much so that composers frequently prepare a written description for concert notes so people know what to listen for as Respighi did for ‘Pines Near A Catacomb’

“…It is a majestic dirge, conjuring up the picture of a solitary chapel in deserted,  open land, with a few pine trees silhouetted against the sky. A hymn is heard…the sound rising and sinking again into some sort of catacomb, the cavern in which the dead are immured. An offstage trumpet plays a hymn. Lower orchestral instruments, plus an organ suggest the subterranean nature of the catacombs, while the trombones and horns represent priests chanting.”

Here is a performance by conductor Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra. Ottorino Respighi’s ‘Pines Near A Catacomb’ from The Pines Of Rome. It is about 7 minutes long. It starts quite quietly.

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That was Lorin Maazel conducting the Cleveland Orchestra with Ottorino Respighi’s ‘Pines Near A Catacomb’ from The Pines Of Rome. I’m going to play you the next piece without too much introduction suffice to say it in one way it illustrates the point I made in the Introduction… that a feature of music from the Italian peninsula is the tension between the sacred and the secular. This is a short… 4.5 minutes… piece for unaccompanied voices published in 1603 called ‘Ave Dulcissima Maria’… which in English is… Hail sweetest Mary.

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So why the unusually ‘light on information’ introduction? Well the name of the composer who wrote that truly exquisite setting of a Latin poem asking the Virgin Mary to intercede with her son Jesus on behalf of all us sinners… was Carlo Gesualdo. Gesualdo wrote a huge amount of beautiful vocal music but he is perhaps better remembered for murdering his first wife and her lover when he discovered them in bed together… and a court then deeming that no crime had been committed. I wanted you to hear the music before you got to imagine the violence. Anyway, I think you can see that the reputation of Gesualdo certainly falls into that nexus of the sacred and the profane. The performers by the way were the European Vocal Ensemble from the Chapel Royal of Paris directed by Philippe Herreweghe.

Ok. Some more instrumental music. When Tomaso Albinoni published his collection of concertos in 1722, the use of the term concerto was sort of transitioning from meaning just a small group of instruments playing different lines of music… to a small group of instruments often playing together accompanying a solo instrument. And this what is happening in Albinoni's Concerto for Violin in F. Here is the second slow section played by the Academy of Ancient Music with Christopher Hogwood directing and Andrew Manze playing the solo violin part. It’s only a bit over three minutes long and even though it was written only a generation after the Corelli I played a while back… it is an altogether more modern sound.

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That was the Academy of Ancient Music with Christopher Hogwood directing and Andrew Manze playing the solo violin with the slow section of Tomaso Albinoni’s Concerto for Violin in F.

Ok. So back to some sacred music… and if a sadly not entirely factually supported set of anecdotes that became gospel for a couple of centuries is even half true… I’m about to play you one of the most influential pieces of music of all time.

Alright prepare yourselves for 30 seconds of slightly obscure music history. The story goes that at the Council Of Trent in 1562 which was principally set up by the heads of the  Catholic Church to come up with strategies to combat Protestantism… one of the subjects on the agenda was that complex choral music with multiple vocal lines singing the text was obscuring the message of the words. So, to put it another way, once you have three, four or five people singing different melodies or even the same melodies but at different times… then it got heard to hear the words. So, it was proposed to ban music with multiple melodic lines meaning that all music composed for religious observances in the catholic world would have been words sung in unison. But this did not happen. And the story that persisted for centuries was that it was the next piece of music I am going to play that prevented this... that in composing his Mass in memory of Pope Marcellus, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina proved to the catholic hierarchy that music could be written that delivered both multiple voices and clarity of text.

I was about to say, now you can be the judge… but I’m guessing that like me not many folks out there will be able to closely follow the intricacies of sung Latin. But.. don’t let that stand in the way of enjoying some beautiful music. Here is the final section of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcellus or the Mass in memory of Pope Marcellus. It is about 6 minutes long and is performed by the Westminster Abbey Choir conducted by Simon Preston.

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That was the final section of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcellus or the Mass in memory of Pope Marcellus from 1562. It was performed by the Westminster Abbey Choir conducted by Simon Preston.

So the selection of opera I played earlier from Monteverdi was all about drama. But opera, especially in Italy I would argue, can be comic. And one of the funniest is The Barber of Seville or ‘Il Barbiere di Sevillia’ with words by Cesare Sterbini and music by Gioachino Rossini which premiered in 1816. The song, or aria, I am going to play you is the character Don Basilio, a scheming music teacher trying to thwart the lovers at the centre of the plot from getting together… advising his boss… the aged Dr Bartolo… that the best way to handicap his rival is by starting a little slanderous rumour and letting it grow. He sings… ‘La calumnia è un venticello’… ‘slander is a gentle breeze’. It is about 4 minutes long. Will Humburg conducts the Failoni Chamber Orchestra and the singer is Franco de Grandis.

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That was ‘La calumnia è un venticello’… or ‘slander is a gentle breeze’ from The Barber of Seville or ‘Il Barbiere di Sevillia’ with words by Cesare Sterbini and music by Gioachino Rossini. Will Humburg conducted the Failoni Chamber Orchestra and the singer was Franco de Grandis.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have another couple of pieces coming up but before I get to them I want to give you some information that I hope you find useful… If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than a dozen, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes.

I hope you have enjoyed this Music Of Italy episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, to finish this episode to sort of bookend the way I started with some orchestral music from an opera… the overture to Verdi’s Nabucco, here is another bit of orchestral music from an opera written pretty much fifty years later… Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, or Rustic Chivalry, from 1890. In a very clever bit of dramatic structure about two thirds of the way through the opera there is an orchestral interlude, an Intermezzo… a pause before the bloody conclusion of the opera. And here is that four minute pause. This is the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli.

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That was the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli with the Intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni’s ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’. This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… In 1707 in Rome – Alessandro Scarlatti – wrote an oratorio, which is a term for a piece that has something of the drama of an opera but is usually based in a Biblical story and is presented as a concert… called ‘Cain, or the first Murder’. Here is the opening orchestral ‘sinfonia’ which is a bit like an overture and this is the Ottavio Dantone conducting the Accademia Bizantina.

Thanks for listening.