This essay explores a pivotal phase in the artistic development of Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), focusing on the years leading up to the creation of his first symphonic poem, Fontane di Roma (1916). During this period, Respighi faced a key artistic dilemma: whether to remain faithful to the tradition of 'absolute music' or embrace the world of program music and the symphonic poem. The decision would prove consequential, paving the way for the widespread acclaim that followed his turn toward programmatic composition. Yet before fully committing to this path, Respighi experimented with less conventional forms, most notably in his ambitious Sinfonia drammatica (1913-14), a nearly hour-long work marked by formal heterogeneity and continuous thematic transformation. The essay argues that Respighi's dilemma mirrored a broader historical condition that shaped the reception of early zoth-century Italian music, performance, and historiographical framing. After critically reassessing dominant historiographic approaches, the discussion turns to methodological issues in narrating Respighi's output. Subsequent sections investigate the cultural and institutional context of the Teatro Augusteo in Rome - home to the Accademia di Santa Cecilia's concerts - highlighting the concert programming, listening practices, and public expectations that formed the backdrop for the premieres of Sinfonia drammatica and Fontane di Roma. The final section reexamines Respighi's creative turning point within this multifaceted landscape, revealing its broader cultural implications for how we interpret and tell the story of his music today.
Ms. Plan.415 from the Biblioteca Comunale Planettiana in Jesi, surveyed several years ago in the Collective Catalogue of the National Library Service (OPAC SBN) under the title Arie e Danze, has recently returned to scholarly attention thanks to the publication of its description in "Clori. Archivio della cantata italiana". The manuscript dates to around the middle of the 17th century. In addition to about forty dances for keyboard, Ms. Plan.415 includes a hundred strophic ariette and canzonette for solo voice (mainly for soprano and alto) and continuo; most of these are attributable to some of the leading musicians of the time such as Giacomo Carissimi, Niccole Fontei, Giovanni Rovetta, Felice Sances, Barbara Strozzi, and they are based on verses by relevant poets, such as Benedetto Ferrari, Battista Guarini, and Giulio Strozzi. A handful of arie and canzonette directly come from collections of monodies or drammi per musica printed and produced in Venice between the 1640s and 1660s, and this shows a strong interest of the copyists in the vocal-dramatic production of that specific cultural and musical milieu. The manuscript is particularly interesting for scholars devoted to seventeenth-century opera, since it holds fragments of drammi per musica hitherto considered lost. These compositions will be analysed in this paper.
In Italian secco recitatives we sometimes encounter prosodic imperfections. This is mostly due to the limitations and conventions of the notation, and rarely due to errors of the composer, which may sometimes have escaped the attention of the editor of the score. It is up to the singer or vocal coach to remedy this by making small changes in the transition from the written to the performed text. The need for such retouching, already mentioned in some treatises, is still often inhibited by the widespread cult of Werktreue, especially when the performer uses reliable critical editions. The article explores this neglected aspect of performance practice, keeping the levels of restitutio textus and performance clearly separate. The first section is a list of the main writing conventions of recitatives. I then describe how prosodic imperfections have been approached in historical treatises and musicology, before presenting the main prosodic anomalies and their remedies in performance. I focus in particular on anomalies in the treatment of the synalepha, especially in Gluck. Finally, I examine cases of alleged errors caused by poetic licences, which should not be corrected by the performers.
Research carried out on the Orsini Archive materials (now preserved in the Archivio Storico Capitolino in Rome) has consolidated the hypothesis that the large musical collection of the singer Giovanni Battista Vulpio actually belonged to Prince Flavio Orsini (1620-1698), the last Duke of Bracciano. Further investigations have revealed extensive documentation relating to expenses for copying music, as well as a couple of bill for the binding of volumes, the analysis of which is the focus of this article. In most cases, these are payments to Tarquinio Lanciani for work done over a period of more than thirty years, from 1667 to 1689, on order of Flavio Orsini. The documents contain lists of arias and cantatas for one or two voices, identified by the textual incipit, and in some cases of commedie per musica, serenate or cantatas for voices and instruments listed with the title or, more rarely, with the name of the composer. Thanks to the textual incipits and other elements, it has been possible to advance a possible identification for almost half of the copied pieces, which are accounted for in a table in the appendix to the article. Generally, these are works by Roman authors of the seventeenth century (L. Rossi, Carissimi, Cesti, Caproli, Pasquini, Melani and Stradella, by far the prince's favourite). Furthermore, there are numerous arias from operas performed mostly in Venice and Rome, in the 1670s and 1680s, but also in other centres, shortly after their staging. The impressive quantity of music copied over a period of more than thirty years leads us to think that Flavio Orsini was motivated by collecting interests and not by having a musical repertoire for the needs of his court.
Italian opera in San Francisco, where it had arrived in 1851, still showed poor executive quality in 1894 - at least according to the testimony of Umbrian engineer and journalist Ettore Patrizi - as theatre companies sang it simultaneously in different languages. It was thanks to his strong "love of country" that the last few years of the 19th century saw the arrival at the California theatre of the first fully Italian companies (Del Conte, Azzali, Lambardi) and their success served as a stimulus for the American manager of the Tivoli theatre to organize the first seasons of Italian opera. Working assiduously until the beginning of World War I, Patrizi then invited composers and singers to San Francisco (from Mascagni to Leoncavallo, from Luisa Tetrazzini to Tarquinia Tarquini) and contributed to informing the public about the operas performed through the pages of the newspaper "L'Italia" of which he was the director. Last but not least, he supported the construction of a monument to Giuseppe Verdi in Golden Gate Park (1914).
