Music and Fascism in Italy

Respighi never wanted to join the National Fascist Party, even if the same was generous with honors and honors towards him
The freedom of Ottorino Respighi who never wanted to join the party


Lee. G. Barrow, one of the most attentive musicologists to the Author of the Roman Trilogy, wrote: "Ottorino Respighi is undoubtedly the best known and most performed Italian composer from Puccini onwards, as well as the most eminent Italian composer not strictly operatic after Antonio Vivaldi ». Our man can therefore be considered the spiritual heir of these great musicians. However, in the land that gave him his birth, his music is not present in the concert halls as it should, suppressed by that iconoclastic fury that has erased everything attributable to the fascist period.


At the same time, he joins the orchestral staff of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna as a viola and with this instrument he leaves for Russia as the First viola of the Imperial Theater of St. Petersburg, which has set up an opera season dedicated to Italian opera. . The reason for this trip is compositional: Respighi wants to study with Nicolaj Rimskij-Korsakov, the master of orchestral color. He succeeds in his intent and for five months he deepens with him the art of the symphony and the symphonic poem.

Envious fellow musicians, and today some ideologized musicologists, justify this rapid rise of Respighi with the proximity of his music, grandiose and aimed at honoring Italy and its past, to fascist ideals. Thus writes Alberto Cantù in the volume dedicated to him: "Among the Italian composers of the historic twentieth century, Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) is certainly the one who had and has the least need for external pressures, promotional festivals, conferences and monographic occasions to find that diffusion, fortune and international fame that the author of the three Roman symphonic poems smiled almost immediately, on the basis of drumsticks such as Toscanini, De Sabata and Karajan, the day before or yesterday; Maazel, Muti or Sinopoli, today. "

Despite having lived in the period in which most of the Italians raised their right arm with conviction in the Roman salute, Respighi never wanted to join the National Fascist Party, even if the same was lavish with honors and honors towards him. This must make us reflect on the meaning of art, which is an expression of freedom, of intellectual independence which cannot be harnessed by an ideology even if this largely corresponds to our feelings.

Another consideration is that Italy, in the period from 1922 to the Second World War, was able to offer the world bright artists, who must not be canceled for political reasons and we, today, far from that time and steadfast in conquered democracy, have the duty to assign everyone their own place in the history of art, according to what they have been able to create with their works and not on ideological preconceptions.



Massimo Carpegna