Italia

By the close of the 19th century, Italy had become the epicenter of the opera world. The staged sagas of Verdi and Puccini, teeming with volcanic drama and heart-melting melodies, had whisked audiences across time and place with gripping tales of kings, queens, and gods. Meanwhile, Mascagni and Leoncavallo hewed closer to home with their theatrical visions, contributing to the new verismo style of opera focused on stories of everyday life.

But at the dawn of the 20th century, a new crop of composers emerged to take Italian music in a new direction. Or rather, an old direction. Known as the Generazione dell’ottana (Generation of the ’80s), these young composers made it their mission to recapture the full breadth of Italy’s musical traditions. Before opera began dominating our stages, they reminded their compatriots, instrumental music was revered as the pinnacle of Italian art.

At the front lines of this movement stood Alfredo Casella. An artist of international pedigree — he studied under Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire and was mentored by Mahler — Casella devoted much of his early career to promoting the music of pre-19th-century Italy. He co-led a major revival of Vivaldi’s vast catalog and produced orchestral suites that paid homage to decorated composers of Italy’s past, including Scarlatti and Paganini.

Casella’s breakthrough arrived in 1910 with the premiere of Italia, the 27-year-old’s sweeping, patriotic love letter to his homeland. Unlike works penned foreigners that captured Italy in picture-perfect musical postcards — such as Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence — Casella’s goal was to evoke the joys, sorrows, and passions of the Italian people.

To accomplish this, he turned to Canti della terra e del mare di Sicilia (Songs of the Land and Sea of Sicily), a book of regional folk songs that reflected the lives of the island’s working class. Similar to verismo opera, Casella aimed to probe deep into the Italian soul, using these source materials to shine light not on the gilded glory of the country’s cultural riches, but the workday songs and devotional prayers his countryfolk kept close to their hearts.

“It was natural,” Casella later wrote in his memoir, Music in My Time, “that when I wished to create a national music, I should look for a basis in the national folklore. It is a phase of nationalism which always characterizes the dawn of a new school or the first steps of a personality who is trying to create a national style.”

The first of Italia’s four interconnect­ed movements sets the scene with seismic drama. Unison strings invoke a song of Sicily’s Caltanissetta province, in which a man pronounces a curse on his mistress, as hammered chords from winds and brass slash through the texture like shrapnel. This fiery mood turns tender later in the movement as a new melody emerges, a moving lament sung by workers in the province’s sulfur mines, who recount their realities of hard labor and resilience.

The chime of a distant bell, conjuring a mood of pastoral calm, marks the beginning of the second movement. Soaring above a bed of shimmering strings, the English horn sings a hymn of faith often heard during Good Friday processionals. The third movement returns us to the world of manual labor — this time a lively tune sung by women at work in the marble quarries of Trapani, tasked with striking ropes against freshly excavated marble blocks.

Rest assured, Casella’s vision of Italy is not all workplace toil and religious solemnity. For the finale, he escorts us from shadowy sulfur mines to the sun-drenched mountains of Naples, where we hear the jaunty opening strains of “Funiculì, Funiculà,” a popular Neapolitan song composed in 1880 by Luigi Denza. Written to celebrate the opening of the first funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius, the song generates an explosive energy in Casella’s wild orchestrations, as bright fanfares erupt in the brass, fleet-fingered flutes whip across the stage like gale-force winds, and pounding drums drive the music to its ecstatic conclusion.

Casella took particular pride in using Denza’s beloved tune in his homegrown rhapsody. Twenty-five years earlier, Richard Strauss, believing “Funiculì, Funiculà” to be a traditional Italian folk song, had used the tune prominently in his tone poem Aus Italien, leading to a plagiarism lawsuit from Denza. Strauss lost the court case and was forced to pay royalty fees to the Italian. But when Casella approached Denza for the rights to use his tune in Italia, Denza was only too happy to personally sign off on Casella’s request.

— Michael Cirigliano II

Michael Cirigliano II is a freelance writer who has worked with The Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His newsletter, Shades of Blue, explores the human stories behind classical music’s most melancholy moments as a means to cultivate calm, connection, and healing.