Italy is now the sick man of music
OrchestrasThe thoughtful Elisabeth Braw has run a musical slide rule up and down Europe’s protruding leg. What she found is that the country that prides itself on being a fount of music has fewer performances in most towns than remote parts of Scandinavia. And even its major centres – Rome and Milan – are outperformed many times over by London and Berlin.
The 90,000-resident Tuscan city of Lucca prides itself on being the birthplace of not only Puccini but also his fellow composers Alfredo Catalani and Luigi Boccherini. Between November 2023 and June 2024, residents will be able to attend a mere six performances of classical music: four performances of Rossini’s Barber of Seville and two of Verdi’s Il Trovatore. After mid-March there are no more concerts. In Udine, with a population of nearly 100,000, the next eight months feature a total of two performances. Pisa offers eight performances of two operas. ‘We only have a few professional orchestras, and they’re mostly opera orchestras and mostly perform the opera repertoire because when you specialise in the opera repertoire it’s hard to switch to other repertoire,’ said Paolo Alli, a former member of the Italian parliament and president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, who is an established choral conductor. ‘We don’t even have a radio orchestra or radio chorus like many other European countries do. Italy’s greatness in opera has been a blessing and a curse. We have Palestrina and other renaissance and baroque composers, and we have opera, but we don’t have the symphonic repertoire.’
The trouble, she concludes, lies in a failing education system.
Read on here.
The stats regarding the number of classical music performances in many of the Italian towns are not accurate. In Udine there are far more classical music performances than just two as stated in this article. Amici della musica runs a series of concerts there as well as a festival. Even smaller towns like Voghera has a series of ten classical concerts including chamber music and orchestral concerts.
Although the core of this article is correct (it is indeed a shame that in Italy music is not being taught in primary schools, except the teacher does it by own initiative), it is nevertheless very poorly researched. The author only looked up at “Operabase”, which is notoriously imprecise.
(a small – and easy – research at Teatro del Giglio in Lucca, for exemple, brings different results). Both Maestro Alli and of course Michele Mariotti are respected professionals, Mariotti is one of the best Italian conductors around, with a lot of international experience, so he knows what he is talking about, but saying that “we are a slave of opera culture” (Alli) seems a bit excessive to me. Opera is being done generally at very high level in Italy. By the way, there is a Radio Orchestra in Italy (the Orchestra Nazionale della RAI in Turin) and at least three symphonic orchestras of international level (RAI, Accademia di Santa Cecilia and Filarmonica della Scala), plus excellent orchestras in many Opera Houses and also outstanding Ensembles. Yes, Italy has problems, musical education for children is mostly private (but from Italy’s Conservatories come legions of excellent musicians, you find them in almost all great European Orchestras). And it is indeed a deep shame, as Maestro Alli says, that the Concilio Vaticano Secondo abolished traditional sacral music in churches – we only hear inferior, cheap and facile songs with guitar during church ceremonies. And the Italian government is all but absent in shaping Italy’s musical life – this is a problem of cultural level of our politicians, I believe, and of lacking and overpoliticized structures. But there is a musical life in Italy, even outside of the established institutions, made possible by many excellent musicians.
A very poorly researched, simplistic article.
The article has errors, or course, but it also contains important truths. That Italy with a population of 60 million only has three notable symphonic orchestras is truly problematic and cannot be hidden behind the errors in the article.
Italy has around 12 or 13 full time opera houses. Milano, Torino, Genoa, Rome, Venice, Naples, and Palermo are excellent houses. The USA with over 5 times the population only has one full time house, The Met. (And it squeezes its entire season into only 7 months.) The next two cities for number of performances are Chicago and San Francisco that only have half year seasons. They barely make the top 100 cities in the world for opera performances per year.
In some respects, I don’t have an issue with Italy not having a strong symphonic culture. I’m rather happy that Italians do not think like Germanic and Nordic peoples, all that regimentation, authoritarianism, conformity, bourgeois discipline, and hierarchies. Italy and the Italians are wonderful exactly because their humanistic understanding of individuality does lend itself to symphonic forms of social organization. Yes, it can sometimes cause problems, but I also notice that come vacation time, all those Germans and Nordics flood toward Italy like tidal wave and are most often sad to leave.
That is not entirely correct in reference to Lucca. The philharmonic orchestra of Lucca has many performances. They just did a Bruckner 8th and Liebestod a few weeks ago. They have a touring schedule throughout Italy and sometimes Europe.
Thoughtful, Mrs Braw?
Mi spiace, no di sicuro.
People should really write about what they know, not about what they think the reality it.
Wow, what a completely bonkers article! Yes, there are issues in the country, as in most, though some of the educational ones are actually being addressed and, unable to support the Meloni government on practically any other issue, there is increased funding going into the arts for the first time in decades. But the real strength of Italy lies not in the ‘major’ venues and cities but in the fact that there are a ton of performances in wonderful places and theatres all year round. I won’t belittle anywhere by naming a ‘small’ city but you can see from the excellent careers that Italian artists have that there are plenty of opportunities for them to perform. Would that we had anything approaching that in the UK.
Italy is producing some fine young harpsichordists. What could be more important?
Remember, music starts in the home. Though the schools can aid, the basis of music appreciation starts at home. How can a child appreciate melody when rap is all they hear? Or how can children learn to appreciate the simple elegance of music when all they know are massively over produced dance numbers by Ms Swift and Beyoncé. But the schools are not the first line blame. It is the home.
Elisabeth Braw wrote that in Lucca “between November 2023 and June 2024, residents will be able to attend a mere six performances of classical music: four performances of Rossini’s Barber of Seville and two of Verdi’s Il Trovatore”. Sure? On 9 (for the students), 11 e 12 November the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Ivan Fischer played “Gianni Schicchi” (directed by Grischa Asagaroff, with Nicola Alaimo, Benedetta Torre, etc.) and other music of Puccini. On 29 November the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Adam Fischer played in Teatro del Giglio. And on 16 October the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala conducted by Riccardo Chailly played in Basilica San Frediano.
Also in Teatro del Giglio: 13 and 15 October La Bohème, 16 and 18 November L’elisir d’amore, 12 and 14 January Il Barbiere di Siviglia, 17 and 18 February Madama Butterfly, 15 and 17 March Il trovatore.
And many concerts.
The big celebrations for Puccini’s centenary will be announced later