Italian Middle-of-the-Road
Rataplan! Rataplan!
Gaspare Scuderi,
Native of Sicily,
Dwelt in Milan;
Wrote about opera
Musicologically,
Though his own try was a
Flash in the pan.
And that double dactyl about sums up everything I know about Gaspare Scuderi, thanks to the little blurb provided by Angelicum Records. The standard English-language dictionaries apparently never heard of him. Dead these sixteen years, he seems to have had some standing as a scholar and critic. The flash-in-the-pan referred to above was his opera Donata which is said to have achieved worldwide success after its premiere in 1938 ,, though I find nothing to support the argument. Scuderi died shortly after he completed a second opera, Melfe, and there is no indication that it has ever been produced.
Reading between the lines, I gather that Scuderi made whatever reputation he had as a composer mostly through the smaller forms and especially through his songs. It would be nice to suggest that he is a latter-day representative of the great tradition of Italian art-song, but there really never was such a tradition. When the Lied was in its heyday in the lands to the north, Italian musical energies were turned largely to opera for the melding of words and music. To be sure, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi wrote songs, but they were rarely exemplary of their most profound musical thinking; instead they were more apt to be album-leaves, potboilers, jeux d'esprit, or apprenticepieces--pleasant, even charming, but trivial. In the final flicker of Italian composition, composers like Respighi, Malipiero, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Pizzetti, and Dallapiccola seem to have taken the genre more seriously, but frankly their songs are not their best or most representative works, nor have they ever attracted much attention from performers, an odd item here and there to the contrary.
If there is an Italian song tradition outside opera, it is a quasi-popular tradition, of whom the standard-bearer was surely Paolo Tosti, music tutor to Queen Victoria's children and a knight of the realm at her hand. The catalog of my record collection contains more than five pages of listings of Tosti songs, recorded by everyone who was anyone. The most popular are in the sentimental drawingroom style, and there was a time when even tiny children could shrill the heartbreaking refrain of "Addio": "Goodbyeeeeee forever, goodbyeeeeee forever, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!" Then there were lesser lights like Pinsuti and Davico and Gastaldon. And of course all those composers of "Neapolitan" songs (some of them now thought of as anonymous folksongs; Richard Strauss made that mistake when he borrowed ''Funiculifunicula" for his Aus Italien!).
Whatever middle ground, if any, exists in musical composition in present-day Italy, it has almost certainly been obscured by the egocentric posturing of the self-styled avant-garde at one end of the spectrum and mass-produced "music pop" (a wonderful phrase, redolent of cream soda!) at the other. Perhaps Angelicum thought it time to demonstrate that such a middle ground still exists. But what do I know? The original record is presumably in New York, where oddly there are minimal provisions for hearing it; besides, getting there and back costs me ten dollars and six hours. It's a silly situation, but I've done what I could. The solution rests with a higher power.
