Italian Music

Continued...
Again like Petrassi in Salmo IX, but to a greater extent, Salviucci tries to bind his multi-sectioned score into a unity. Different movements share the same motivic material; there is also a recurring theme. Confined to the orchestra, this highly expressive melody, made up almost entirely of sighing appoggiatura figures, first emerges on trumpets at the climax of the opening chorus (just after figure 11) and soon reappears, this time on the bass clarinet, after the end of the following section (figure 17). We have to wait for its third appearance until almost the end of the work, in the second bar of figure 52, where it is heard on cor anglais and clarinets. After such a long absence, this last statement confirms the recapitulatory function of the latter part of the final chorus. Salviucci emphasises the symmetrical design of his text by returning here to some of the material exposed in the orchestral introduction. But this is no simple restatement: the ideas return in a new order and are recomposed to fit the new context. The climactic descent over a dominant pedal E at figure 2 returns at figure 48; the passage that originally preceded it, from the fifth bar of figure 1, now returns at figure 54. In between, the music that opened the work also reappears, much disguised, at figure 51, to set the final line of text; the very last word itself, »Alcesti!«, is set to the cadential progression first heard at bars 8-9 and repeated at bars 6-7 after figure 3.

This repeated cadence gives the lie to an observation by the conductor, critic and composer Gianandrea Gavazzeni, in an article originally dating from April 1939 (see »Aggiunta sul l’Alcesti«, in Gavazzeni, Il suono è stanco, Bergamo, Conti, 1950, pp. 325–31). Alcesti, thinks Gavazzeni, marks the »crisis« of an element that had always seemed fundamental to Salviucci’s work: his contrapuntalism. This is »music without harmonic consciousness. With no need for harmony. Chords do not come into being because no one summons them, no voice arises to call them forth.« But the sonority first heard at bar 9 of Alcesti – which one might hear as a partial statement of the tonic triad in a modal E minor, overlaid with C sharp and F sharp appoggiaturas; or perhaps as a ›Viennese‹ triad, G, C sharp, F sharp, over E in the bass – is certainly a chord, and is treated as one. The notion that Salviucci did not pay much attention to the vertical dimension of his music cannot be allowed to stand. In his article on the composer for the New Grove, John C. G. Waterhouse points to the »poignant false relations« which ensure that the score of Alcesti sounds »unlike anything else«. A quick look at the orchestral transition after figure 5 will show what he means; this is music that, by the sheer number of such semitonal clashes, clearly demonstrates the care with which Salviucci attends to harmony even in passages of four- and five-part counterpoint.

Gavazzeni complains that an excessive use of counterpoint reduces the »inventive surprises« in Alcesti to mere »corners« or »folds« in the musical fabric, and serves to heighten the work’s blemishes, in particular, a certain rhetorical over-emphasis. In a section like the beginning of the central chorus, it is true, one is reminded that Salviucci was also a pupil of Respighi. But where is the harm in that? For another critic, Fedele d’Amico, such points, where dense contrapuntal build-ups explode into »elementary, peremptory statements«, express something like the essence of Salviucci’s compositional character (see Renato Badalì, »Profilo di Giovanni Salviucci«, in Agostino Ziino (ed.), Musica senza aggettivi. Studi per Fedele d’Amico, 2 vols., Florence, Olschki, 1991, ii, pp. 675–84). Gavazzeni prefers the invocation to daylight: the first timid appearance of lyricism in its composer‘s work, he suggests. Here, as the texture thins, this critic finds the best clue to Salviucci’s possible further development. Certainly they are a beautiful few bars. But their effectiveness surely depends on the complexity of the music that surrounds them. Against Gavazzeni‘s negative judgements, one wants to affirm the quality of Salviucci’s achievement in Alcesti: the virtuosity of contrapuntal technique, the range of expressive characters, the control of large-scale musical architecture. This is a score that really ought to be better known.