Archivio di Febbraio 2017

The Liszt Institute Foundation recently purchased a batch of letters, cards, and postcards by Giovanni Sgambati (Rome, 1841-1914), Liszt’s most important Italian students. Sgambati was very active as a pianist, conductor, teacher, composer, and concert organizer; these documents attest to his contacts with fellow musicians, students, and music lovers. Their transcription and annotation provide an opportunity to reconstruct the lives of some significant figures, such as Count Pio Resse and the Florence music environment revolving around the Istituto Musicale; Sofia Buonamici, daughter of the noted Florentine pianist, Giuseppe; another major pianist, Ernesto Consolo, one of Sgambati’s best students, to whom his former teacher asked for information about concerts and sent his own compositions with valuable performance notes; such younger pianists as Aldo Solito de Solis (who committed himself to perform Sgambati’s music in concert, especially his G-Minor Piano Concerto) and George Boskoff; the Polish diplomat, Karl Zaluski, a friend of Liszt’s from 1860 and then of Sgambati’s, who was also a pianist, composer, writer, translator, and music writer. Comparison with Sgambati’s correspondence in the Sgambati foundation at the Casanatense Library, Rome, provided useful feedback to the information commented here.

Bianca Maria Antolini, Giovanni Sgambati’s unpublished autographs

Elza Bogáthy was associated with Liszt’s circle in Rome probably between 1868 and 1870. Two unpublished letters attest to their contact. There are no extant documents related to her life prior to this period, and also information about her family is very scarce. As a pianist she appeared as a soloist and as an accompanist in several concerts and other performances before 1877. For the most part, she played music by Liszt and Chopin. Fancsali’s article is based on reviews of her concerts in Kassa, Székesfehérvár, Vienna, Kőszeg, Kolozsvár, Pest, Nagyszeben, and Nagyenyed.

In the present essay twelve letters by the Roman student of Liszt, Pietro Boccaccini, are quoted in their entirety. They were written between August 1875 and December 1877 and addressed to his friend and pianist, Maria Giuli in Rome. The corpus of letters herein transcribed is kept at the Post-Unity Historic Archive of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. The analysis of this unpublished correspondence has led to new starting points of investigation into the biography of the Roman musician, providing more details about his life and at the same time indirectly enlightening the figure of Maria Giuli, herself a pupil of Liszt’s in Rome.

These missives depict a specific moment of Boccacini’s life, precisely the years he spent in South Italy while perfecting his piano expertise under the guidance of Beniamino Cesi. The main topic of this correspondence is, in fact, Boccaccini’s frantic attempt to attain a solid piano technique.

A deeper between-the-lines reading of these letters also allows considerations on what the relationship might have been between the Master, Liszt, and the student Boccacini: it provides hints that unfortunately are not validated in the collection of letters by Liszt and yet it urges a more thorough research on a chapter of the life of Liszt, during his stay in Rome, very poorly investigated till now.

The autograph collection of the Fondazione Istituto Liszt includes two unpublished short letters by George Sand. They are transcribed here for the first time. The first one is undated and addressed to an anonymous recipient. It is simply a proposal for an appointment. The second one is more interesting because it was written in La Spezia on May 4, 1855, near the end of Sand’s second (and last) journey to Italy. It is addressed to her friend Étienne Arago, a French politician who was then in exile in Turin. Sand proposes to him to come to La Spezia (which will not happen) and refers in a postscript to their meeting with the Italian politician and publicist Lorenzo Valerio, that took place in Genoa at the beginning of her trip.

As such, this second letter gives us the opportunity to add some details about the meeting that occurred in Genoa and the one anticipated in La Spezia, and to transcribe the unpublished letter Arago sent to Sand, again on May 4, a letter which complements the correspondence between Sand and Arago during her journey.

The paper compares some compositional techniques in Liszt with those in late Skrjabin, using a neo-Riemannian perspective. In particular, a study is made of Listz’s use of some families of chords, referred to as Weitzmann Regions, whose members are linked by parsimonious voice-leading. On this basis the paper talks about the Consolation n. 2, involving two tonal centers recalling the opposition between the main and subordinate tonalities in functional syntax. Furthermore, taking into account an interest in Greek music and its particular device known as metabolè, the paper points out a distinctive feature in Lisztian works: the re-reading of the same structure with minimal inflections of voices. In this perspective we can consider the several presentations of the opening theme in the B-minor Sonata, as observed by Lajos Zeke. This technical device also appears in Liszt’s late music, as can be seen on analysing R. W. Venezia, whose first section shows a minimal shift from a WT1 element to a WT0 element before returning to WT1, while the middle section consists of a half RP cycle.

With this in mind, the paper examines some techniques contained in Skrjabin’s late works, where parsimonious shiftings occur between objects with higher cardinality: octatonic collections, acoustic and whole-tone scales.

In the last section some twentieth-century developments of the minimal inflection technique are investigated, focusing on several non-triadic collections as studied by J. Straus. All of this shows the achievement of a generalized technique of parsimonious hybridization: starting with symmetrical structures, gradual departures from perfect evenness arise moving to near-evenness, according to the so called fuzzy logic. Meanwhile we can observe that, as in coeval science and philosophy, the focus is moved to transformations rather than to the objects themselves.