3 Italian Opera Composers June 2020

Italian Culture June 2020 Dear Italian Culture Friends I thought that it might be interesting to look this week at the work of three Italian Opera Composers who later composed some liturgical works. In the case of two of the composers, we invariably think of their operatic output. These are Giuseppe Verdi and Gioachino Rossini. The third of them, Cherubini, also wrote a number of operas before turning to liturgical music In 1831 Rossini travelled to Spain with a friend, a banker named Alexandre Aguado, owner of Chateau Margaux, famous for its Bordeaux wine (claret). While he was there, he was commissioned by Fernández Varela, a state councillor, to write a setting of the liturgical text, the Stabat Mater. Although he began the work in 1831, it was not until 1841 that the final form was completed. It was premiered on Holy Saturday 1833 in the Chapel of San Felipe el Real in Madrid but this was the only performance of that version. The choice of Holy Saturday was appropriate as the work tells part of the story of the previous day, Good Friday, and perhaps it was the rush to complete it in time for that first performance which caused Rossini’s dissatisfaction with that version and caused him to continue to revise it. In fact, the first version was not solely the work of Rossini. It was a twelve-part piece of which Rossini had written Parts 1 and 5-9. His friend, Giovanni Tadolini, had written the rest but Rossini claimed it as his own work. Rossini, the product of a musical family from Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast - his father was a trumpeter and his mother a singer - had published his first composition at the age of 18 and the next year he was contracted to write operas and manage theatres in Naples. During the years 1810- 1823, he wrote 34 operas for performance in Naples, Milan, Venice and Ferrara. Among these the most popular and successful were: The Barber of Seville (“Il barbiere di Sivigla”), The Italian Girl in Algiers (“L’Italiana in Algeri”) and Cinderella (“La Cenerentola”), of which opera a recorded performance was broadcast on Radio 3 last Saturday evening. In 1824, he was contracted to manage the ‘Opéra’ in Paris and in 1829, at the age of 37 he composed his final opera ‘William Tell’. No-one knows why he abandoned his career as an opera composer - he had become very wealthy from his compositions and he suffered ill-health - but he continued to write other music, which on the whole he decided not to publish. His final version of the “Stabat Mater”is in the form usually performed today and comprises the 6 parts originally written by Rossini. The music is thoroughly operatic. The most famous aria (sic) is probably “Cuius animam” and the best- known recording is probably that of Luciano Pavarotti with Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma, conducted by the notable opera conductor, Carlo Maria Giulini. Many, possibly dozens, of composers from many countries included a Stabat Mater among their compositions. Among them are numbered: Emanuele d'Astorga, Antonio Vivaldi, Joseph Haydn, Antonin Dvorak, Giovanni Battista Draghi (known as Pergolesi), Luigi Boccherini, Alessandro Scarlatti, Marco Rosano, James MacMillan, Charles Villiers Stanford, Francis Poulenc, Karl Jenkins and Luigi Cherubini (regarded by Beethoven as his greatest comtemporary). The Sardinian Folk/Rock artist, Andrea Parodi, used to include a version in his concerts. It was, I believe, a traditional Sardu version. Giuseppe Verdi was probably an agnostic but he had such love and respect for his great friend, Alessandro Manzoni, the author whose most famous book is "I Promessi Sposi" (The Betrothed), a set-book for Italian schoolchildren. Within a year of Manzoni's death,Verdi wrote a Requiem Mass dedicated to his friend. Again, this is a thoroughly operatic work and, appropriately, its first performance was given at Teatro La Scala, Milan. The Mass is one of his "Quattro Pezzi Sacri" (4 Sacred Pieces). The "Laudi alla Vergine Maria" (1887- 88) were written in the period following the successful launching of Otello at La Scala and it set lines from the final canto of Dante's Paradiso. His model in writing this music was the Renaissance composer Pier Luigi Palestrina. It may be significant that ‘Otello’ includes a rendition of the "Ave Maria". He also wrote "Ave Maria sulla scala enigmatica" as a sort of compositional challenge when a Professor Crescentini published in a Milanese journal a curious 'enigmatic scale' and invited readers to try their hands at harmonising it. For his own amusement, Verdi used the Ave Maria text to do so, as a musical game, but nevertheless he allowed it to be published. The fourth sacred piece was a setting of the "Te Deum" in which he brought out the text's inherent drama and profound human feeling. Commenting on his choice of text he remarked drily that it was not to be regarded as a hymn of thanksgiving on his part but on that of the public, which was now free of having to listen to new operas by him. The "Stabat Mater" was his last completed work and he wrote it shortly after completing the "Te Deum" and so perhaps the decision to write it on the occasion of Manzoni's death was a convenient coincidence. Maria Luigi Carlo Zenobio Salvatore Cherubini was a Florentine and a contemporary of Beethoven and Haydn and he was admired by both of them. He learned to play the violin at the age of 6 and, a child prodigy, he composed his first liturgical works when 10. He studied music in Bologna and Milan and at the age of 23 in 1783 he premiered the first of two comic operas in Venice. It was "Lo sposo di tre e marito di nessuna". (The spouse of three and husband of no-one). In 1785, he travelled first to London and then to Paris where with the help of his friend, another composer, Giovanni Battista Viotti, who introduced him to Maria Antoinette, he received a commission to write an opera, "Démophon", which was a critical and commercial success. Other operas followed, including his most famous "La Medée". However, the French Revolution caused him to distance himself from the former aristocracy and seek government employment. He had already changed the Italian form of his name to a French version and he was to spend the rest of his life in France except for brief visits to London and Turin and a short period as Napoleon's director of music in Vienna in 1805-06. His operas went out of fashion, although still admired by Haydn and Beethoven, and he turned increasingly to writing liturgical music, including 7 Masses. Having survived the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, his Requiem Mass (1816) commemorating the execution of King Louis XVI was a great success. The work was greatly admired by Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann. He became the Director of the Conservatoire in Paris and among other awards he received the Légion d'honneur". He was a friend of Szymanowska, Rossini, Chopin and especially of Ingres and he died in Paris at the age of 82 and is buried at Père Lachaise. Ravenna. It is thought that Ravenna was an Etruscan city and perhaps it got its name from the Etruscan name for themselves “Rasenna” or “Rasna”. It is famous for its well-preserved late Roman and Byzantine architecture, with eight buildings comprising the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna". Early Ravenna consisted of houses built on piles on a series of small islands in a marshy lagoon – a situation similar to Venice several centuries later. The Romans ignored it during their conquest of the Po River Delta, but later accepted it into the Roman Republic as a federated town in 89 BC. In 49 BC, it was the location where Julius Caesar gathered his forces before crossing the Rubicon. Ravenna prospered under Roman rule. Emperor Trajan built a 43 ml long aqueduct at the beginning of the 2nd century. After a revolt of Germanic peoples in the city in the Marcomannic Wars (160- 188 AD) Marcus Aurelius decided not only against bringing more barbarians into Italy, but even banished those who had previously been brought there. In AD 402, Emperor Honorius transferred the capital of the Western Roman Empire from Milan to Ravenna, partly for defensive purposes: Ravenna was surrounded by swamps and marshes and was perceived to be easily defensible. It is also likely that the move to Ravenna was due to the city's port and good sea-borne connections to the Eastern Roman Empire. The late 5th century saw the dissolution of Roman authority in the west. The last Western Emperor was deposed in 476 by the general Odoacer, who ruled as King of Italy for 13 years, but in 489 the Eastern Emperor Zeno sent the Ostrogoth King Theodoric the Great to re-take the Italian peninsula. Odoacer lost the Battle of Verona and retreated to Ravenna, withstanding a siege of 3 years by Theodoric, who took Ravenna in 493 and Ravenna became the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy. Theodoric built many splendid buildings in and around Ravenna, including his palace church Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, an Arian cathedral and Baptistery, and his own Mausoleum just outside the walls. The orthodox Christian Byzantine Emperor Justinian I opposed both Ostrogoth rule and the Arian variety of Christianity. In 535, his general Belisarius invaded Italy and in 540 conquered Ravenna. After the conquest of Italy was completed in 554, Ravenna became the seat of Byzantine government in Italy.

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