Susanna Pasticci
Associate Professor Ildebrando Pizzetti (b. 1880–d. 1968) left an indelible mark on Italian musical life in the first half of the twentieth century. After studying composition in his hometown, Parma, he directed the conservatories of Florence (1916–1923) and Milan (1924–1936), and in 1937 was appointed Professor of Advanced Composition at the Conservatorio di S. Cecilia in Rome. His music has always elicited intense reactions of appreciation or rejection. His style was manifestly cultured, far from traditional operatic models and influenced by the study of ancient repertoires (Greek music, Gregorian chant, and Renaissance polyphony). His early works were songs for voice and piano, orchestral and chamber music, cantatas, and sacred music, all expressions of elitist art in the context of early-20th-century Italy. His meeting with the writer Gabriele d’Annunzio, with whom he shared the utopia of a new “Latin music drama,” was decisive for his career. From this collaboration came Pizzetti’s first music drama, Fedra (Teatro alla Scala, Milan, 1915). It is a highly experimental work, in which the composer abandons cantabile melody and replaces it with vocal declamation modeled on the inflections of speech. He abolishes symmetry and closed forms and articulates form as a continuous flow in which dramatic meanings are conveyed by the motivic plot of the orchestra. These characteristics remained substantially unchanged in his subsequent works, up to the musical transposition of Thomas S. Eliot’s Assassinio nella cattedrale (Teatro alla Scala, Milan, 1958), in which the liturgical setting fosters the recovery of archaic sonorities modeled on Gregorian chant. Although throughout his long career Pizzetti tackled almost every musical genre (from instrumental music to sacred polyphony, from incidental music to film music), it is impossible to divide his production into youthful, mature, or late phases. His entire creative quest revolves around the poetics of the music drama, in which the aesthetic dimension is inextricably intertwined with that of ethics and religious faith. After his death, performances of his music became less frequent, although recently there has been renewed interest in his music. These fluctuations in his critical fortunes are reflected in the bibliography, clustered in two distinct periods: the early twentieth century and the last thirty years. Most recent studies are based on new archival research conducted in the cultural institutions that preserve the main body of Pizzetti’s documentary legacy: the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana founded by Giovanni Treccani in Rome, the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence.