Archivio di Giugno 2015

Between 1883 and 1911, Ferruccio Busoni wrote a letter, some postcards and short messages to Antonio Zampieri and his sons in Trieste. Antonio Zampieri was a good musician and close friend to Busoni during his youth; he often helped him in the difficult relationship with his father Ferdinando. In this paper, besides giving the necessary pieces of information about Zampieri, his family and musical life in Trieste during Busoni’s childhood, the author takes the opportunity to analyse all life relations between father and son, with a particular attention to money matters.

In fact, Ferruccio’s letter to Zampieri dating from 1883 originates from Ferdinando’s request for a loan. In the following years, Busoni senior asks his son for more and more money, due to his being totally unable to organize everyday life, and his bad habit of making continuous debts. From Ferruccio’s letters 1884-1909 (the year of Ferdinando’s death) we can see the development of this very uneasy situation. Only in Busoni’s preface to one of his Bach Editions we can learn another, unexpected side of his musical education, and of his father’s role in it.

In this paper I present a history of friendship between Franz Liszt and a Silesian prince, Felix Lichnowsky, from their first meeting (beginning of 1840s) until the death of the prince in September 1848. During this period Liszt and Lichnowsky spent much time together (e.g. holidays in 1841 on the German island Nonnenwerth). Lichnowsky accompanied Liszt during his European tournées (in 1841 and 1842). The composer stayed at Lichnowsky’s estates in Krzyżanowice, Racibórz and Hradec nad Moravicí. These stays occurred between his concerts in 1843 and 1846. Liszt set to music a poem by Lichnowsky – in his Lied Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth, which became a tribute to Marie d’Agoult. In his last years the composer revised many of his works among which was his Elegy, a piano transcription of his Lied from 1841 Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth. This time it seems to be written as a posthumous homage to Lichnowsky, Marie d’Agoult, and other loved people who had passed away prematurely.

The first part of the article is devoted to the history of the genre “opera paraphrase” as it appears in the contemporary theoretical literature and in particular in Czerny’s treatises. The analysis of Réminiscences de Boccanegra is done in three stages: 1) the finding out of the thematic material chosen by Liszt from the Verdian score; 2) the analytical survey of Liszt’s arrangement of the chosen material; 3) the general form of the “new” piece and its narrative content. The analytical method follows the principles of Schenkerian theory.

The author aims to make an “analysis for a virtual performance” in order to be prepared for Riccardo Risaliti’s real performance, so that her discussion can be labelled under the category of “analysis for listening”.

The paper is devoted to a reconstruction of Simon Boccanegra’s image in Liszt’s Réminiscences on the basis of musical topoi well known to the audience, who is able to identify them and interpret them in a coherent plot. The musical topoi capable of connecting together the three main episodes of Liszt’s piece are: the rhythm of the funeral march, the recitativo on the same pitch and the “figure of death”, present in Verdi’s opera but transformed by Liszt in a new light. The similarities and the differences between Verdi’s score and Liszt’s paraphrase are described and interpreted in order to sketch the “new” image of the protagonist.

The relation between Liszt and Verdi is very long, but not continuous. Here a survey is proposed, where, in fact, a strong caesura emerges in the very middle: the paraphrases from Jerusalem to Rigoletto maintain the virtuoso imprint, which is strongly rooted in the cultural practice of the bourgeois concert. After a long rest the late Lisztian compositions on Verdi’s music follow opposite objectives and ideas. At the end of this course the Réminiscences de Boccanegra represent a diversion, not a logical conclusion, not only (or not mainly) on a technical-compositional level but in the ideal and spiritual contents.

With a superimposition of forms and conceptions, in Réminiscences de Boccanegra Liszt realizes an individual comment on Verdi’s laical spirituality, anticipated by the two previous piano transcriptions from Aida and Agnus Dei. The Doge’s blessing in the last scene of the opera is Verdi’s voice addressing a new Italy already torn by contrasts between Catholics and Liberals; Liszt clearly realizes this is the Hohepunkt of the whole drama and gives it the same central position in his Réminiscences. But while Verdi’s opera ends with this scene’s dark and ambiguous sound, Liszt repeats the opening theme at the end with an emphatic fortissimo and in the main key, achieving ideas of harmony and completeness wholly opposite to those of Verdi. Therefore with his Réminiscences the late abbé completely (and deliberately) overturns the forms and contents of the late anti-clerical Verdi and overturns his pessimistic disillusion.

The distance between the two men (not only two composers) thus becomes a symptom of a wider debate. Since this perspective is not strictly analytical, it is open to criticism as being too conservative or “continental”; but it is nevertheless worth the risk.

The article is a detailed account of the thoughts of the author during the study of the piece. The first step was to compare Verdi’s and Liszt’s text in order to check their structural differences; then the analysis tried to identify the impact of the single difference on the general meaning of each episode – chosen by Liszt for his paraphrase – in itself and in comparison with the whole opera. The author pays particular attention to the sequence of the episodes and to Liszt’s apparently groundless expansions of the Verdi’s themes. Decisions for performance regarding tempo, dynamics, phrasing and touch derive from this comparison, enriched thanks to the information given by the lyrics of the libretto.

Many other suggestions arise from observations regarding several aspects of Liszt’s Réminiscences de Boccanegra compared with the whole repertory of the réminiscences of Liszt. As a conclusion of his analysis the performer has to find out the sound properties able to underline Liszt’s design for the personality of Boccanegra partially different from that emerging from Verdi’s opera.

This essay explores Liszt’s late style in order to reconstruct the context in which the composer transcribed Verdi’s Réminiscences de Boccanegra. According to Straus, the common aesthetic theory on the late style does not fully grasp the characteristic features of a composer’s final output; this point of view is compared with Liszt’s idea about the stylistic development of a composer. By focusing on the last six years of Liszt’s life and works for piano solo, some distinguishing features are exemplified by means of two works: Tarantella de Cui and the symphonic poem Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe. Close reading of these works reveals the two complementary faces of Liszt’s late style – anachronistic and prophetic. This double nature allows us to identify Liszt’s late works as an expression of Spätstil, without excluding the indomitable will, in the composer’s autumn season, to impact on his own time.

Music analysis was exclusively conceived as the analysis of a score until computer science technology allowed us to fix in wave form images also the fleeting sounds of a performance. The first and most important principle in this context was to study the systematic deviations that each performer intuitively and more often unconsciously introduced in the graphic conventions of a score. For piano notation they particularly implied a great amount of nuances introduced in tempo and dynamics. Studies like these produced the tradition of computer expressive simulation in piano performance; its results, however, immediately introduced another even more important issue: why were deviations necessary? What were their aims? What was the proper meaning of “expressivity”? Musicological and cognitive sciences are trying to give answers to such questions. First of all a new historical branch of musicology arose in the last decades: the history of music performance, based on collections of a huge number of recordings and more recently of internet documents. But much more important were the studies on the very contents of expression: in music there are aspects, which can be scientifically studied, such as emotions, expectations, movements linked to performance and also to rhythmic and metrical structures, images linked to “intertextual” and “topical” conventions. The task of a performer, like that of an actor who reads a written text, is to highlight by means of particular expressive “deviations” and to give sense to the different aspects of implicit emotions, expectations, movements, images that moment by moment pass and flow in the time of the piece. The case of Liszt’s Réminiscences de Boccanegra is even more complex because of the historical, psychological and cultural relationships between two musicians that had different backgrounds and were active in different musical genres.