The Mysterious Affair of the Serenade

THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR OF THE SERENADE The time has come for the revaluation of Aldo Finzi, a Jewish composer who was on the point of winning, with his “playful comedy” when the anti-Jewish laws were about to be issued in Italy, the competition for a new opera which the La Scala Theatre had published. Aldo Finzi’s “Serenade to the Wind”, an injustice to be repaired. “ ... go, serenade to the wind, but don’t reveal that your singing - hides a secret longing - for a weeping moment - of an intimate torment...” On 11th February 1936 Wolf Ferrari’s “Il campiello”was staged at the Scala Theatre , conducted by Gino Marinuzzi with an all star cast: Mafalda Favero, Margherita Carosio, Iris Adami- Corradetti, Giuseppe Nessi, the very colourful and sunny only scene by Pieretto Bianchi. It can still be admired in the nowadays impossible to find volume that La Scala caused to be published in 1946 (1). Just seven years before, Toscanini had conducted, in addition to Fidelio, also Falstaff and Meistersingers in what was going to be his last Scala season before World War II (2). In December of the same year, on Bronislaw Hubermann’s invitation, he went to Palestine ( Jerusalem and Tel Aviv) to conduct the first Israeli orchestra and he was so impressed by the new life of the country he was visiting that he stated: “Here in Palestine I have found the country where I can be only Man as I conceive him” (3). These were the times and the place where a Jewish composer, on the eve of those anti-Jewish laws that were to alter radically the landscape of Italian music, was about to set to music a libretto by Carlo Veneziani, a “comedy of manners” racy and romantic, spicy and amusing, in which graceful satire and tart repartees combined to create the kind of wit which, to quote Falstaff,” creates wit in others”. The composer was Aldo Finzi, the opera “Serenade to the Wind”. *** Campiello, Falstaff, Meistersingers Toscanini and Palestine: where are the first ideas of a musician born, what ingredients does he absorb from the surrounding atmosphere, how many stimuli, lastly, lead him to a certain choice of style is a question that gives rise to interesting speculation, when one considers that to set comedies to music is much more arduous than composing tragedies - that the field of opera composing in those years was overcrowded with tragedies and tragi- comedies and that comedy had stopped at Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (1918) and that the comic spirit, studded with pungent irony (and other things) and the supreme example of Falstaff were by now a long way off and bound with the idea that it 1 couldn’t be recaptured, so that those who would have liked to try their hand in the same field were soon discouraged from doing so. Wolf-Ferrari however, did try, and with success, happily wedding Goldoni to the Teatro in Musica, thus taking a leaf out of Cimarosa’s book, giving a new life to the old theatrical masterpieces and making them alive and modern in up to date and vivacious scores that hid under their apparent facility a very complex and articulate style of composition. The example was there, at hand, in that year 1936 with Il Campiello which Ghisalberti had adapted from Goldoni and added to the already successfully attempted comedy of manners ( I Gioielli della Madonna, Il Segreto di Susanna) a vein of sentiment and sighs (“good-bye to Venice”) which Finzi who was on his part the creator of chamber arias suffused with nostalgia and melancholy and style- wise orientated towards a lyricism to which, thanks to his sensitive nature of cultured musician, he was inclined, must have liked very much Wolf-Ferrari had succeeded in blending his German- school technique with a typically latin cantabile style. The illustrious example of the Meistersingers proved that one could treat some moments in an opera of deep significance with a “conversation style” of a light and flowing character - which was later to be,” mutatis mutandis”, Puccini’s winning card. Toscanini’s journey to Palestine, the birth of the first Israeli orchestra under the leadership of our most famous conductor must have had a favourable influence on young Finzi, a ground for legitimate pride and inducing a state of mind propitious to the “lighthearted music-making “ that amuses both the composer and his hearers. Veneziani’s witty libretto by itself contributed to the success of the entreprise, made more desirable by the possibility to move freely in the ambience of the playful comedy, an area of the theatre which has always been open to any type of experiment, provided the text is easy to understand and the music easy to enjoy - and from the time of Rossini onwards, a source of torment and delight to composers. Finzi uses a freely atonal language, not in the sense of adhering to schools and movements that were just in those years advocating atonality, but of giving up the tonal plant ( no chromatic signs in the key). The central fact, the event round which the whole plot revolves, the serenade which an unknown voice sings behind the scenes (a typical feature of the melodrama, from the “gondolier’s song” in Rossini’s Othello to the Duke’s song in Rigoletto, from Jokanaan in Salome to Floria’s song in Tosca) is here introduced as an enigma - who may the singer be? - setting before the listener a question on the answer to which the whole plot hangs. Hence the comic situation: three characters for different motives pretend to be the author of the serenade which only at the end of the opera, when it doesn’t matter any more to know who its author is and the story has reached its solution, will turn out to have been sung by Pistola, the commissary. 2 An effect of suspense, very skilfully played, kept always alive by the continuous and insistent inquiries by a choleric Colonel and by a no less choleric Marshal of France. Colonel Dagobert, the stern and dictatorial father of pretty wayward Loly, by now at a marriageable age. The Marquise of Mavhalas would like to get her married to her son Severino, who won’t hear of it, while cousin Raimondo is wooing her in vain and Leandro, the tutor plies her with lessons on history and on good manners...Loly who on her part dreams, for she is a dreamer and a daredevil, of a different kind of life for herself; when Leandro gets himself into serious trouble by starting an affair with a neighbour, countess Gertrude, wife to count Alcidio, the girl is sorry for him, as she knows that he might lose his job and be no longer able to support his ailing mother, and helps him to avoid the scandal by taking all the guilt on herself. She pretends that her supposed lover is count Alcidio, who has nothing at all to do with the whole affair and is only a cuckhold husband. The latter, when the general scandal and the Colonel’s indignation have reached their climax, proves to be one of Napoleon’s Marshals, with an effect not unlike that of the “coup de theatre” in the Barbiere, when Lindoro reveals himself as the Count of Almaviva. Loly and Leandro, when all seems to be lost (the girl is to be sent to a convent, according to the best tradition of melodrama, Leandro dismissed from his job and challenged to a duel by one and all, like d’Artagnan) suddenly discover that they are tenderly in love with each other and thus set the intricate affair of the serenade on the way to its solution: Pistola finally confesses that he is the author of the serenade, addressed to Finetta, the chambermaid . All this takes place in Montappié, of uncertain location, a place that has a flavour of folk fairy tale, which might be Piedimonte (Cassino) or Pié di Monte, that is Piedmont, but it doesn’t matter a whit because everything is played on the tenuous and elegant thread of amorous fencing, malicious spite, witty and scintillating repartee and the story might be set in a different place or at a different time; but the year is indic ated as 1810, at the apogee of the Empire. * * * The two young lovers, Loly and Leandro, are entrusted with the most lyrical and intense moments of the opera. Loly above all, the absolute protagonist has the benefit of the grand aria of the final of Act One” Giudicate un po’ voi” (Judge for yourselves) which is comparable in importance to the Aria of Smoke in Il Segreto di Susanna (Susanna’s Secret) and of the ample tale in the third act “Una notte di maggio” (One May Night), while in the course of Act Two her cantabile “L’uomo di questa notte (the man of this night)” is also of remarkable importance. Leandro opens the third act with the air “Mi troveranno morto” (they will find me dead) and with Loly he gives life to the amplest page of the opera, the long, extenuated and caressing love duet of the final of Act Three, as many as thirty-six 3 pages of score, the peak of the work and at the same time its catharsis, where everything finds its acme and solution in the “long kiss” of the two lovers. To both, the respective parts offer moments of real vocal virtuosity, daring unusual intervals, open high notes, a variety of accents: Loly reaches the do sopracuto (C 6) an often natural B and flat B - even on her first appearing, “gay and childlike” she launches into a dangerous B flat - but Finzi who had in mind, when he wrote, th e Scala and the possibility of being performed in that theatre, had logically aimed at entrusting the part to a great soprano, and there were many at that time, as is apparent from the cast of Il Campiello which we have already mentioned.

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