Musica Degenerata
Davide Casali (clarinet)
Pierpaolo Levi (piano)
rec. 2022, Cigole, Italy
Tactus TC870004 [58]

In 1939 Mussolini and Hitler signed what was called the ‘Pact of Steel’, establishing a military and political relationship between the two countries. In the years preceding this agreement, Mussolini had increasingly come to realise the necessity of a closer alignment with Nazi Germany. In 1934 the Italian dictator had declared that “there has never been anti-semitism in Itay”, with the clear implication that there never would be. In January 1938, however, he issued an order to the Ministry of Popular Culture to reduce Jewish music on the radio. In June of the same year Mussolini ended his relationship with his Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, a relationship which had begun in 1911. A full anti-Jewish campaign was launched in July 1938, including the publication of what was called the Manifesto del razzissmo fascista (Manifesto of Fascist Racism) and further action was soon taken, culminating early in the 1940s with laws excluding Jews from any role in the performing arts.

This ‘convenient’ change of direction by Mussolini seriously affected the lives and careers of the composers represented on this disc – as well as of others who are not. As Harvey Sachs puts it “By the autumn of 1938 Jewish composers and performers had effectively been eliminated from Italian musical life, and the fascist press did not refrain from gloating” (Music in Fascist Italy, (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, p.186). Though he is unrepresented on this disc, the case of Vittorio Rieti (1898-1994) is representative. Of Jewish descent he was born in Alexandria, but later based himself in Rome and served in the Italian army during World War I. In the 1920s he spent some time in Paris, where he was much taken with the music of Les Six. In 1940 he emigrated to the USA, where he continued to compose, while also teaching, at various times, at such institutions as the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Chicago Musical College and New York Musical College. His was one of the happier stories amongst the outcomes of the application of Mussolini’s anti-semitic laws.

The same might be said of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family which had lived in Florence since Spain’s expulsion of the Jews and Moors in 1492. In his early teens Castelnuovo-Tedesco studied piano and composition at the city’s Royal Institute of Music. He went on to make a career as a composer in the interwar years, initially by the production of short piano pieces and song settings and later by works such as his Fioretti (1920) for voice and orchestra, and an opera, La Mandragola (1923), based on a play by Machiavelli. He was now established as an important Italian composer; his reputation spread wider still when, in 1930 his Symphonic Variations for violin and orchestra was premiered by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Toscanini. Two violin concertos followed, also premiered by Toscanini, with Heifetz as the soloist in both. In 1939 the composer realised the urgent necessity of leaving Italy and managed to make his way to the USA with the support of both Toscanini and Heifetz. Initially he lived in New York, before moving to Los Angeles, acquiring American citizenship in 1946. In California he taught – his pupils including André Previn and John Williams (the famous composer of film scores). Astonishingly Castelnuovo-Tedesco himself wrote music for around 200 films, including Time Out of Mind (1947) and The Loves of Carmen (1948). Castelnuovo-Tedesco is represented on this disc by a short early piano piece – Epigrafe. It was composed with one of the masterpieces of Renaissance Italian sculpture in mind: the mausoleum of Madonna Ilaria del Carretto (1379-1405), the beautiful second wife of Paolo Guinigi (1372-1432), who ruled the city state of Lucca from 1400-1430. The splendid tomb of his second wife Ilaria, in Lucca’s cathedral, possibly carries a portrait of the dead lady; several images of the tomb can be found by a simple image search online. Epigrafe (Epigraph) is less than six minutes in length but is a respectful, serious and elegant piece, which has both lyricism and gravity in this performance by Pierpaolo  Levi.  An interesting side-thought is prompted when seeing that the score of this work of 1922 carries at its head some lines from Ben Jonson’s poem ‘Epitaph on Elizabeth, L.H.’:

Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die;
Which in life did harbour give
To more virtue than doth live.

Later, during his life in the USA, Castelnuovo-Tedesco would set many of Shakespeare’s sonnets. but it is surprising to discover that as early as 1922 he was already seeing relationships between his music and the poetry of the English Renaissance.

Sadly, many other Jewish composers based in Italy fared less well than Rieti or Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Take, for example, the case of Leone Sinigaglia (1868-1944) Most of his best work was written before he was 40. He was born in Turin and in 1894 he spent some time in Vienna, where he was acquainted with Brahms. While in Vienna he wrote his interesting concerto for violin and orchestra. During 1900 he was in Prague, working with Dvorak, who inspired Sinigaglia to make use of the folk songs of his native Piedmont. After returning to Turin in 1901 Sinigaglia transcribed many of these songs, hitherto only transmitted orally.  Some of his arrangements of such songs for orchestra, such as his Rapsodie piemontese (1904), for violin and orchestra (played by Kreisler) which was dedicated to Dvořák; Danze piemontese (1900); Rapsodie piemontese, for violin and orchestra (1904); and particularly Piemonte, a suite for orchestra (1912), became quite popular. Toscanini conducted performances of several of these works. It is also interesting to note that in 1921 (in My Life of Music, 1921, p.271) Sir Henry Wood could write that “Sinigaglia’s orchestral works have always been well thought of in England for their delicacy and for their Piedmontese atmosphere”. Wood himself had conducted British premieres of works by Sinigaglia in 1909 and 1912. As he grew older, Sinigaglia wrote less and less – perhaps the last of his significant compositions was his violin sonata, published by Ricordi of Milan in1936. But Sinigaglia was not to be allowed a quiet fading away. In 1944, the German army occupied Turin and a detachment of Nazi troops sought out his house, planning to arrest him and send him to Auschwitz. However, Sinigaglia suffered a heart attack when arrested, from which he died, before this plan could be carried out. This was the dreadful end of the life of a talented musician (and, incidentally a talented mountaineer) who had been a friend and colleague of, amongst others, Brahms, Dvořák, Mahler (with whom he corresponded), Toscanini and many others. At least he was spared the hideous cruelties of Auschwitz. His 12 variations, the first work on this disc, take as their theme Schubert’s beautiful song ‘Heidenröslein’, a melody which Sinigaglia clearly loved. Sinigaglia’s score was originally published as for oboe and piano. It sounds delightful in this version for clarinet and piano. The initial statement of the theme is beautifully played by Davide Casali, with good support from Pierpaolo Levi. Sinigaglia’s ensuing variations are frequently very beautiful, the interplay of clarinet and piano impressive throughout. It makes me want to hear more of this composer’s music.

Among the musicians who were not spared the horrors of the concentration camps was Guido Nacamuli, who died in Buchenwald. According to the information with this CD he was born in Alexandria in Egypt but one website records his birthplace as Istanbul. More certain is that he lived and worked in Trieste. It has proved difficult to find further information about Nacamuli, although the Museo Ebraica in Trieste contains a Guido Nacamuli archive. Some of Nacamuli’s music can be heard on this disc – one of a set of five piano pieces, published in 1926 by Fabbri in Trieste. Four of the pieces in the set respond to poems by Ada Negri, Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Ungaretti (he clearly had good taste where poetry was concerned!). The one recorded here is ‘Rimembranza’, which relates to a poem, ‘Andenken’, by Hölderlin.  The booklet notes accompanying this disc, by Alessandro Carrieri and Pierpaolo Levi contain an interesting observation on this piece “in order to render an aura of memory he [Nacamulli] applies an ambiguous scoring – inserting, without any tonal logic, enharmonics”. This suggests to me that the score is not a ‘representation’ of a specific memory but rather what Hölderlin’s poem seems to me to be about, the very process of remembering. As such I find it a fascinating response to the poem.

Musical life thrived in Trieste in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the new anti-semitic laws in the late 1930s seriously damaged the city’s musical culture. Many Jewish music teachers were dismissed from their posts; performers and composers either abandoned the city for a place of safety or were imprisoned and sent to concentration camps.

An Austrian Jew, Kurt Sonnenfeld (1921-1997) was born in Viena, and left that city in 1939 after the German annexation of Austria in 1938, with its overt antisemitism. However, when living in Milan in 1941, he was arrested and despatched to an Italian prison camp, at Ferramonti in Calabria. Despite the obvious difficulties of life in the camp, some of the Jewish internees, including Sonnenfeld and Lav Mirski (1895-1965), a Croatian musician, were active in the organisation of concerts and a choir. Both men were liberated from the camp after the surrender of Italian forces. Mirski became director of opera at the Croatian National Theatre, while Sonnenfeld resumed life in Milan, only to find that his parents had been deported to a camp in Belarus (then under German occupation) where they had been killed in 1942. Sonnenfeld was unable to obtain an academic position, but supported himself by composition and the teaching of private students. His post-war works included a cello sonata (1950), Milan by Night (1972), a Symphonic Rhapsody for timpani and piano and Rainbow Concert (1995) for piano and orchestra. The piece included here, which dates from 1939, amidst the warning signs of Mussolini’s adoption of antisemitic policies, is Il trenino capriccioso (The capricious little train) a lively and witty piece, full of unexpected twists and turns, perhaps written with a sideways glance at the Mussolini regime’s claims to have made Italian trains more punctual!

Aldo Finzi was born in Milan. In his youth he studied with Giuseppe Martucci in Bologna. Soon Finzi had an impressive reputation amongst young Italian composers. By the early 1930s his works included a number of symphonic poems, such as Cirano de Bergerac (1929) and L’Infinito (1933). His Toccata, which is in three sections, with a coda, can be seen as a significant contribution to the revival of Italian instrumental music, belonging in the line of compositions following Casella’s Toccata of 1903. Finzi’s Toccata was described by Hubert Culot as “a brilliant virtuoso essay” when reviewing a Belair Disc, The Music of Aldo Finzi. The performance on that disc, by Oxana Yablonskaya is superior to that byPierpaolo Levi on the present disc, being played with greater fluency and absolute certainty of technique. It is a fine piece, one of the most rewarding works on this interesting disc. Finzi was alert to the dangers of Mussolini’s adoption of the German anti-semitic attitudes and actions and, accompanied by his son, went into hiding; in 1944, the composer and his son were hiding in a house in Turin. However, the SS discovered their hiding place. To save his son Aldo Finzi gave himself up immediately. The stress and anxiety caused by this and the events of the previous few years surely contributed to Finzi’s death in 1945.

When I received this disc and first looked at the names of the composers, the one name which meant very little to me was that of Renzo Massarini. A little research, and listening to his Tre Preludi suggests that he is perhaps amongst the most interesting of these eight composers.  As a young man he volunteered for service in the Italian army during World War I, interrupting his studies in Rome with Respighi to do so. Harvey Sachs tells us (Music in Fascist Italy, 1987, p.89) that the first Venice Festival internazionale di musica (in September 1930) included premieres of music by Massarani, alongside first performances of compositions by, amongst others, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Alfano, as well as works by Casella, Stravinsky, Turina and Prokofiev. Sachs also cites (p.185) Casella’s judgement (Christian Science Monitor, August 29, 1925) that Massarani was, along with Vittorio Rieti and Mario Labroca (1898-1973) -, “one of the most important Italian composers under the age of 30”.  Sachs also observes (p.185) that “Massarani was an ardent fascist  […] who had participated in the march on Rome [in 1922] and that he held artistic-bureaucratic positions under the regime”. In 1934 he composed Squilli e danze per il “18 B.L.”, for performance at a large event near Florence celebrating the so-called march on Rome. It seems that a version of this work was played in the Music Competition at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. However, with Mussolini’s adoption of antisemitic policies in 1938, Massarini found performances and publications of his work banned. In the following year he ‘chose’ (?) to emigrate to Brazil, working as a music critic and an orchestrator. Massarini himself refused to permit performance or circulation of his pre-war compositions, perhaps because he now realised what a serious error of judgement his support of Mussolini had been. In any case, many of his works had already been lost or destroyed during the war.

It is our good fortune that that Massarini’s Tre preludi do survive; they are piano pieces of a high order, varied in manner and mood, reflecting the composer’s familiarity with both jazz and the music of Stravinsky. The first prelude is full of unexpected rhythmic shifts, which can easily disorientate the listener, though with familiarity the effect is one of exhilaration, rather than bewilderment. By way of contrast the second is, in the words of the booklet notes, “a tender lullaby, filled with lyrical nostalgia and a nod to ancient music.” Pierpaolo Levi’s performance is perhaps a little under-characterised. It is worth hoping that some other pianists take up these interesting preludes.

Glyn Pursglove

Contents
Leone Sinegaglia (1868-1944)
12 variations on a theme of Schubert [1898]
Emilio Russi (1876-1965)
Nocturne [c.1908
Humoresque [c.1908]
Guido Nacamuli (1895-1945)
Giorno di Festa
Rimembranza
Il volo
Azzurro
La Veglia
Alberto Gentile (1873-1854)
Serenatella, op.10, no.2 [1922]
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968)
Epigrafe [1922]
Renzo Massarani (1898-1975)
Tre Preludi [1936]
Kurt Sonnenfeld (1921-1997)
Il termino capriccioso [1939]
Aldo Finzi (1897-1845)
Toccata (rev.Simonetta Heger) [1931-37]

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