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‘Tutt' ora vivente’: Petrassi and the concerto principle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
Italian masters seem habitually to survive to a ripe old age. The proverbial example is Verdi, dying at 87, but Gianfrancesco Malipiero had turned 91 by his death in 1973, and his longevity has now been equalled, and seems likely to be surpassed, by Goffredo Petrassi. Long an eminent and respected figure in Italian musical life, and routinely named in the reference books as a significant 20th-century composer, Petrassi has never been well known in this country. His international reputation was at its height in the 1950s and 60s, and probably reached its apogee here with the London premiere, in 1957, of his Sixth Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the BBC for the 10th anniversary of the Third Programme. During those decades he travelled, conducted and adjudicated widely; he was closely associated with the ISCM (and was its President in the years 1954–56); as Professor of Composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, he exercised a powerful influence on his country's musical life. He is especially celebrated as a teacher: his Italian pupils have included Aldo Clementi, Riccardo Malipiero, the film composer Enrico Morricone and the conductor Zoltán Pesko, but composers of many nations have studied with him. Among his British pupils, one need only instance Peter Maxwell Davies, Cornelius Cardew, and the late Kenneth Leighton to see that his teaching was never stylistically prescriptive.
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page 3 note * Petrassi is more nearly a native Roman than either of them: born in the Campagna at Zagarolo, near Palestrina, youngest of a poor and numerous family, he has lived in the city ever since, as legend has it, he entered Rome at the age of seven, riding on a wine-cart.
page 5 note * Casella himself composed a Concerto for Orchestra, but some years after Petrassi.
page 6 note * It has not, I think, been noted that this self-dedication – commuted in the published score to the reticent ‘a G.P.’ – itself recalls, perhaps intentionally, another poem of Leopardi: A sè stesso, closely akin to Cow di morti in its pessimism. (‘…be quietened now. Despair for the last time. To our kind, fate has granted nothing except to die…’).
page 6 note † The Ninth Psalm is the Confitebor tibi Domine.
page 6 ntoe ‡ From the programme of the London Sinfonietta's Dallapiccola's Memorial Concert, 1 March 1976.
page 7 note * Though it arises strictly from the premises of the work itself, it seems possible that the motif is intended as a ‘negative’ of the Alleluia in Symphonie de Psaumes, which is itself specifically quoted in Petrassi's very late chamber-music memorial to Stravinsky, Sestina d'autunno.
page 7 note * Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘The Theologians’, translated by Irby, J. E.: in Labyrinths (London: Penguin, 1970), p. 152 Google Scholar.
page 9 note * It is not, of course, ‘the formula BACH’ referred to in Brindle's, Reginald Smith chapter on Italian music in European Music in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hartog, Howard (Pelican, 1961)Google Scholar, which contains what must still be one of the few accessible descriptions of Petrassi's work.
page 10 note * For Mario Bartolotto (p.50) it is a far less significant work than the Third Concerto: ‘Il Secondo Concerto in realtá non manifesta propositi di rinnovamento’. Brindle, Smith (p. 195)Google Scholar says it ‘shows no suggestion of [the] development’ achieved in Noche Oscura; for Weissmann, John S. (p.61)Google Scholar it is a transitional work whose ‘language did not disclose new elements’.
page 10 note * Weissmann, p.60. See p.21 of this issue for full references.