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The moresca, and the related forms of weapon dance, either spread in the Mediterranean basin or in several countries of Central and Southern Europe, was a kind of 16-century choreography. Born as a battle between Saracens and Christian knights, this dance inspired different kinds of mimic spectacle that served as a part of comedies and pastoral plays. The article analyses the relationship between the moresca intermingled in the pastorals of Dubrovnik and Siena, both marked by a strong presence of dances, songs and choruses to increase the fantastic and sentimental emphasis of the performances. Both Dubrovnik’s and Italian’s plays were characterized by shepherds, nymphs, and rustic men (the Croatian vlasi, i.e., Walachians or Morlacks), as well as fantastic and comic elements. Like in Sienese dramaturgy, the music in Croatian pastorals supports a narrative function. It serves as a guide through the development of the plot, namely in some pieces by Nikola Naljeskovic and Marin Drzic. At salient points, they insert choruses or mimic scenes in the vein of Sienese moresca. In what is concerned the instruments played to accompany pantomimes or songs, only rarely there are quotations in courtly form. Actually, the terms taken from Slavic folklore prevail, even though the music on stage was played by the consort.

The paper focuses on the co-existence of national identities, the concepts of Central Europe as a geographic space, and Mitteleuropa as a cultural space. In particular, it examines the development of a cultural unity need after the fall of the Austrian Empire, namely from the time of independent small states after the WWI, to the time of the iron curtain that reshaped the continent into two halves, West and East, thus delating the spirit of Mitteleuropa. As Milan Kundera wrote in 1983, at end of WWII the civil frame of Central Europe disappeared, and only the idea of a cultural community survived for a long time. On the one hand, the "nostalgia" of Mitteleuropa, and the new policy after the fall of the Berlin’s wall, permitted to discover the driving role of Czech musicians from Poland to Italy, in particular from Austria to Southern-Slavic regions. On the other hand, this trend helped to clarify their engagement in promoting a kind of Pan-Slavism, and the spread of a German-Slavic mixture of musical culture, in and out Austrian borderlines.

After the territorial unity of Italy in 1861, romanists, ethnographers and musicologists addressed their efforts in collecting poems and folk music, aiming to demonstrate the interconnection among different regions. At the end of the nineteenth century, the impulse to identify the unity of the country through dialects became a dogma, in order to consolidate the unachieved “Italianness”. Alongside to this presumed linguistic similarity, an obsessive mix of nationalism and irredentism provoked the political campaign, which brought to the war in 1915. Cesare Caravaglios (1893-1937), a band conductor and a scholar, devoted his research on Neapolitan songs and cries of street vendors. Influenced by the Berlin’ school of ethnomusicology, during the 1930s he promoted the pioneering method of recording folk music by means of “phonofilm”. In his book "The Songs of Trenches, a Contribute to the War Folklore" (1930), Caravaglios emphasizes the importance of war songs, collected from several regional traditions, either as a way to encourage soldiers in the trenches, or to reaffirm the concept of a national cultural unity. In this regard, he remembers his own experiences with the 39th Regiment, and his involvement in the battles near Gorizia against the Austrian troops. As suggested by modern ethnomusicology, his book records twenty songs without harmony, respectively classified in three fields: anonymous songs in various dialects as a common patrimony of soldiers, written folk songs made popular by soldiers, contrafacta or songs derived from the nineteenth-century Risorgimento sources. Captain Caravaglios’ proposal was close to the Fascist mythography that celebrated WWI as the authentic link among Italians, despite the categories of people and nation, viewed as spontaneous phenomena by previous Liberal policy.

Despite the difficulty of classifying the art music of Istria and Dalmatia, and according to several degrees of subordination, adaptation, and autonomy from Venice and Italy, the essay examines the multilingual society of the aforementioned regions and the extraordinary development of a rare Slavic-Romance cultural symbiosis during the sixteenth century. The main topics focused are: 1- the linguistic and cultural frame, 2 - the professional music from Koper (Capodistria) to the free Republic of Dubrovnik (Rugusa), 3 - the music for Protestants and the policy of Catholic Church at the time of the Counter Reformation, 4 - the value of incidental music on stage, either in Croatian or Italian theatre, between autonomy and imitation, 5- the traces of traditional music in Dalmatia and its presence in Venice, 6 - the academies and their philosophical debates in ruling music as a discipline for the states and the nobility.

As an obsessive keyword, the Pannonian mud appears in several writings of Miroslav Krleza. It represents the core of Croatian periphery, in particular the Podravina region, which was for long time untouched by modernity, and oppressed by feudal governments even after the fall of the Austrian Empire, from 1918 onwards. In this timeless place watered by the river Drava, the mud acquires a paradigmatic role like a phenomenon that causes historical conflicts. However, its ambiguous status of metahistorical symbol of a long lasting collapse is a contradictory factor, because of the consequences arising from it are unpredictable. As a contribute to this paradoxical attitude some images occur in Krleza’s word: a hat from Styria, the smoky taverns, the cobbled S. Mark square in Zagreb. These are the evidences of a pitiless self-representation in form of a sectarian, dangerous double-face populism shifting from left to right. In the meantime, Krleza’s topoi are enclosed in a new viewpoint on the national art, which was free from political influences at the time of the polemics regarding the social engagement of the artists, that flourished during the 1930s when the communist party of Yugoslavia was under the guide of the Soviet Union. The incredible and grotesque situations, the low status of peasants, deserters and robbers, the rebellious or submitted people unable to leave the muddy paths are the theatre in which the anarchic and expressionist experience of the novelist develops. Because of his eccentric style, Krleza has become the most important Croatian-Yugoslavian writer, and a true intellectual of Central Europe, who refused either the Habsburg civilization, or the Southern Slavic authoritarianism after the first world war.

The absence of instruments and players in the famous “Musique aux Tuileries” (1862) of Édouard Manet, where he represents himself and his own entourage, remains an unsolved problem. On the one hand, the article offers a possible solution of this oddness considering the lack of interest on music in the context of the repertoire. On the other hand, from an aesthetic point of view, the exclusion of musicians from the scene could be explained through the fall of the “aura”. Whatever it may be, the rejection of music marks a separation between the primitive concept of mass music, i.e., the classical repertoire played at the garden of Tuileries, and the future avant-garde.

The article explains the role, the scope and the methods of the 19th-Century music historiography in Italy in comparison to positivism, which fostered a scientific methodology to reshape history of arts and literature. Aiming to discover the value and the ideal place of musical oeuvre, some historiographers described the periodization by means of different paradigms and philosophies, drawn from the theory of evolution of Darwin and Spencer, and the positivism of Hyppolite Taine. Some essays, such as "L’evoluzione nella musica" (1898, 1911 enlarged ed.) and the monograph "Riccardo Wagner" (1890), written by Oscar Chilesotti and Luigi Torchi, are examined at the light of those philosophies. In these essays the focus of the research shifts from the biography of composers to the history of music, showing the relationship with national traditions.

The national identity of Slavic Mitteleuropa is examined by means of a new approach to different cultural paradigms, namely the historical events out of which the popular canon in music flourished at the end of eighteenth-century Poland and in nineteenth-century Bohemia, Slovenia and Croatia. This phenomenon must be analysed within a framework in which cosmopolitism and nationalism co-existed in a mix of functional and autonomous music, superseding the boundaries of subordination, adaptation and autonomy.

The first part of this essay explains the poetry features for music of abbot Francesco Buti from Narni. The second one contains the modern edition of poems for Li Fiori, a group of polyphonic “villanelle” set to music and published in 1632 by the German nobleman Girolamo Kapsperger. Performed in a private concert in Rome, probably under the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, this work is the unique example of a music collection of 16th-century Italy entirely devoted to flowers. Buti’s poetry resumed the ancient Greek legends of the jasmine, violet, rose, purple anemone, hyacinth, narcissus and iris aiming at transforming them as means to enhance the catholic ethic. In some cases, e.g. in reference to the jasmine, Buti was inspired by the contemporaneous iconography, in particular Guido Reni’s, Guercino’s and Cartari’s pictures (cf. the “Aurora” at Rospigliosi-Pallavicini Palace, another “Aurora” at Ludovisi Casino, the treatise of Vincenzo Cartari “Le imagini dei dei degli antichi”, 1626). The core meaning of “Li Fiori” metaphors, which establish close ties with the Counter-Reformation mentality, is the slogan “talking/painting” drawn from Horace’s “Ars poetica” and Marino’s “Dicerie sacre” (1614). The poems, taken from the score of Kapsperger’s music, are conceived in an unusual structure. They intermingle different kinds of verse to which Buti adds a refrain. The absence or the ambiguous use of rhymes, and the irregular length of verses, in some cases increase the difficulty to establish the authentic form of the lines. Regarding the lexicon, some terms are retraceable also in the libretti written by the poet twenty years later for the French Royal Opera House at the time of Louis XIV’s reign.

A penchant for folk music is recurrent in Giuseppe Tartini’s oeuvre. In particular, four movements from his violin sonatas are based on the well-known theme of the Arie del Tasso, which attracted the attention of Rousseau and Goethe during their stay in Venice. Central to his work as composer and theorist is the idea of closeness to nature ‒ far from the “bare” transcription of gondoliers’ songs in the way of a musicographer interested in ethnology. For Tartini, following the so-called “musica naturalis” of the ancient Greeks and the “music of the nations”, the term “popolare” is equivalent to simple, and simplicity is the main feature of nature. In his writings, the concept of nature frequently occurs in opposition to “artificioso”, i.e. artificial and unspontaneous. It undergoes a remarkable change of meaning between 1754 and 1767. In line with the scientific methods established by Descartes and Newton, the “Trattato di musica sopra la vera scienza dell’armonia” of 1754 stresses the mathematical foundations of harmony both with reference to the ancient numerical basis of acoustics and to empirical acoustics after Rameau. Tartini thus defines harmony as a natural phaenomenon, imbued with a universal value as the basis of both traditional and “national” music. While acknowledging the different ‘shape’ of traditional and art music, he believes that both are dominated by the ratio of harmony, in the same way as different languages can be governed by the same grammatical structure (where ratio is synonymous with sensus). On the contrary, the “Commercio di lettere sui principj dell’armonia” (letters adressed to the mathematician Giordano Riccati) revises earlier ideas as the result of a perceived incompatibility between art and traditional music (or the so-called “music of the nations”). Tartini accepts the diversity of cultures within the framework of a parallel second nature, thus identifying otherness as an emerging category. In this sense, harmony cannot embody two separate musical domains or explain their otherness. This dualism implies a clash between ratio and sensus. At the same time, Tartini’s interest shifts to the virtual opposition between nature and nurture. The 1760s thus mark a turning point for Tartini representing nature through the diatonic genus. In his quest for a unifying quid, he recognizes the diatonic genus of Greek music as a common archetype in folk song, ancient melody and art music. His “De’ principi dell’armonia musicale contenuti nel diatonico genere” of 1767 considers the diatonic mode as the pivotal genus that significantly remains uncorrupted in time and space. Though Tartini does not support these assertions with aesthetic theories, his anthropological point of view notably undermines the earlier concept of nature subordinated to rationalism. In this sense, he anticipates the modern debate on folk and its definition.

The fulfilment of the operatic reform, managed by Christoph Willibald Gluck and his librettist Ranieri Calzabigi in 1760s’ Vienna, is a well-known topic. This event, whose seeds date back to the 1740s, has been examined according to theatrical and literary experiences in France and Italy. However, the question of acting influence on opera can be reconsidered at the light of the latest discovery of symbols collected and labelled as drammatica – metodo italiano. Engraved in some writings, this set of signs is often connected to music and offers the matter for a new critical survey about the discourse on music declamation before and after Calzabigi. From the 1830s onwards the theory of acting in Italy was supported by handbooks which gathered symbols of pronounce, expression, gesture and, most important, tone of voice. Apart from the effort to establish a supranational graphic system in Italy and abroad, another common trait, which could be recognized in the treatises, concerns the deemed rules useful not only for actors, but also for orators and opera singers. In relationship to the aforementioned reform of Gluck and Calzabigi, running from 1762 to 1784 via Vienna, Paris and Naples, it is interesting to focus on Calzabigi’s theory, who claimed his primacy for the creation of the so-called music of declamation (musique de déclamation). In 1784, the Italian poet reasserted his experience in “trying” the symbols of acting for his Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and five years later for his Alceste (1767). Aiming to outline the slides and the nuances of the voice, Calzabigi interspersed between the lines of his librettos a lot of symbols, and then he “invented” other signs to give evidence to the melody of verses on which the composer could write the score. Where could Calzabigi find that semiography? Probably in the unique source of his time, i.e. the performing practices of actors, unfortunately not yet recorded by 18th - century Italian treatises, even though the symbols are retraceable in the contemporary theatrical and rhetorical tradition of Great Britain. The article deals with the various meeting points between acting tragedies and singing operas, as testified by playwrights and musicographers, at the time when the Italian “dramma per musica” was conceived as an unlikelihood mixture of arias and recitatives sung by virtuoso-singers, who usually disregarded the narrative. To point out the reaction to this unacceptable trend there are some books of Benedetto Marcello ("Il teatro alla moda", 1720), Luigi Riccoboni ("Dell’arte rappresentativa", 1728), Gianvito Manfredi ("L’Attore in scena", 1734), Gianrinaldo Carli ("L’indole del teatro tragico", 1746 and "Osservazioni sulla musica antica e moderna", 1744-1786), Giuseppe Tartini ("Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell’armonia", 1754), Francesco Algarotti ("Saggio sopra l’opera in musica", 1755), who claimed the dramatic superiority of recitativo secco or obbligato, and the beauty of the aria parlante. Owing to its particular speaking tone linked to declamation, the aria parlante was the preferred dramatic tool by a group of theorists like Algarotti, Milizia and Planelli. At the same extent it is described in detail by John Brown in his own "Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera" (1789). The book of the Scottish painter and music amateur is the unique source that explains the features of the aria parlante as follows: “Aria parlante,—speaking Air, is that which, from the nature of its subject, admits neither of long notes in the composition, nor of many ornaments in the execution. The rapidity of the motion of this Air is proportioned to the violence of the passion which is expressed by it. This species of Air goes sometimes by the name of aria di nota e parola and likewise of aria agitata”. At the end of the century this kind of aria represented an ideal conjunction between the emotional unmeasured intonation of the words and the regular beats of the song. To clarify this difficult compromise there are some articles written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Dictionnare de musique", 1768). Nevertheless his Italianized taste, the philosopher refused the Italian recitative preferring that of the domestic tragédie lyrique. The reason of Rousseau’s choice is recognizable in the articles "Accent" and "Acteur". The verses, as Rousseau affirms, contain three kinds of accent: the grammatical one is the result of the alternation of low and high sounds depending on the rhythm of short and long syllables, the logique one is related to the sequence of the words, and finally the pathétique one which takes its shape from the dynamic quality of declamation. Denis Diderot, in the third "Entretien" of his "Le fils naturel" (1757), affirms that the composer can help the actor if only he is able to imagine the nature of declamation. In his famous dialogue "Le neveu de Rameau" (1765) he defines melody as a line flowing over declamation, so the composer is obliged to grasp the sound of words and transform it into music. During his stay in Naples Calzabigi pursued his project of music declamation. In 1784 he wrote the libretto of "Ipermestra" in collaboration with the composer and castrato Giuseppe Millico, a follower of Gluck. Alike in Vienna at the time of "Orfeo", once again he joined to the libretto the symbols of declamation in connection to verses and acted them for the composer. Further, in 1792 he addressed to count Alessandro Pepoli a letter in form of pamphlet for his opera "Elfrida" (music of Paisiello). In this essay he clarifies that the authentic melody is embodied in the verses, and the task of the composer is to discover the true music of the poem. In view of this paradox, what remains unexplained is the reason why the Italian thinkers, at the end of the century, were not able to develop a debate like that of the colleagues in Great Britain: among them the actor Joshua Steele, author of the meaningful "Essays Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols" (1775), and the theorist John Walker who edited in 1787 the book "Melody of Speaking Delineated, or Elocution Taught like Music by Visible Signs".

La nascita delle moderne filologia, musicologia ed etnologia nel XIX sec. ha contribuito ad approfondire anche in Italia lo studio scientifico della poesia e della musica non cólte. I termini popolare e nazionale, tuttavia, erano passibili all’epoca delle interpretazioni più varie, in virtù del diverso approccio delle tre discipline alla materia. Gli storici della letteratura si occupavano infatti di poesia con scarsa sensibilità per la musica, i musicologi di musica antica senza alcuna preparazione letteraria, gli etnologi indagavano i fenomeni nel loro accadere e solo in qualche caso formulavano ipotesi sulla storicità delle tradizioni. La prima generazione di studiosi delle tre branche postulava inoltre l’unità linguistica del paese, come dimostra la teoria monogenetica del tetrastico da cui si è generato lo strambotto, secondo la quale i dialetti sarebbero varianti dello stesso nucleo sorto in Sicilia e migrato in Toscana, come accadde per la poesia colta secondo l’opinione di Carducci. Tesi duplicata da Nigra con l’origine celtica della canzone e sicula dello strambotto, fondata sul pregiudizio della diversa indole razziale delle genti del Nord e del Sud, che non nega però la comune origine latina dei due ceppi. L’identificazione del popolo creatore collocato in via esclusiva nel passato e le dialettiche di trasmissione dei canti hanno occupato il dibattito in relazione alla musica, guardata come il medium privilegiato per la veicolazione del testo popolare. I musicologi, dal canto loro, non hanno mai usato il concetto di classe e si sono limitati a descrivere come popolare una parte dell’antica polifonia profana. Il trend si è radicalizzato sul finire dell’Ottocento, a causa della reazione nazionalista che agì negativamente anche sulla filologia. Basti pensare ai “cantari leggendari” forzatamente assimilati all’epica romanza e germanica. In questo caso il popolo che canta è facilmente omologabile al concetto di nazione, cui si richiamavano in musica i vari Torchi, Parodi, Silva e Tommasini. Non stupisce quindi l’accoglimento della “filologia delle origini” da parte di Favara, il quale, come d’Annunzio, era affascinato dalla melodia primordiale e dagli archetipi del popolare. Laddove il popolare coincide con la musica e il dialetto, in cui si riconosce il perenne dionisiaco separato dall’apollineo al quale si piega la lingua. Le due categorie metastoriche hanno consentito così di superare l’impasse di un bilinguismo culturale che avrebbe reso inconciliabili lo studio del canto folklorico e la filosofia di Nietzsche, poiché lo studioso non attendeva alla ricerca in senso diacronico, ma alla registrazione nell’ hic et nunc di fenomeni che nei modi si ripetono sempre eguali nel tempo. Per cui la settorializzazione dei saperi, invece di aprire una fenditura nei processi di classificazione regolati su dinamiche di creazione-ricezione dal basso all’alto e viceversa, favorì l’occultamento del concetto di classe e delle relative stratificazioni culturali multiple. Before and after the territorial unity of Italy in 1861, some scholars concentrated all their efforts on unifying the language and the culture of the country, without taking into consideration both the regional inner division and the dialects. The investigation on the studies about vernacular poetry accompanied by music testifies that there was a passage from a research phase based on the regional songs to a phase devoted to the general survey of the new state. For instance Costantino Nigra (La poesia popolare italiana, 1876) and Alessandro D’Ancona (La poesia popolare, 1879) promoted some comparisons among different dialects and languages whose unity was partially based on the Medieval strambotto in hendecasyllabic lines, sung by heart and performed by popular singers and courtesan poets during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Despite any evidence that these intellectuals traced the way of folk strambotto which, migrating from Sicily to Tuscany as the cultivated poetry of the time, became the basis of the modern Italian language of Dante and Petrarch – it is necessary to remind that the Sicilian literati engaged at the court of Friedrich II wrote some poems on the patterns provided by the French trobadours, which were firstly transcribed in Bologna and then in Tuscany, thus stimulating the work of the great Tuscan poets. In view of a self-making tradition, the ethnologists and the historians of Italian literature emphasized this paradigm and transformed it into a symbol of a common origin of the Italian people. Besides the comparative method established by D’Ancona, Ermolao Rubieri distinguished three directions in creating the popular songs: songs invented by people for people as a folk level, songs composed for people as a popular level and, finally, cultivated songs adopted by the people as another type of popular genre (Storia della poesia popolare, 1877). At the end of the 19th century other researchers, influenced by Nietzche’s and d’Annunzio’s ‘philology of history’, rejected these categories, embracing the theory of folk/popular as unwritten tradition of the present and of ancient times. Ezio Levi recognized the roots of the Italian spirit in the oral poems and legends of mountebanks and lutenists, i.e. the heritage that was seen in opposition to the elitist written tradition of the court and the church, which represented a minority (Poesia di popolo e poesia di corte nel Trecento, 1915). At the same time, the ethnomusicologist Alberto Favara collected hundreds of Sicilian folk items, refusing any comparison with other Italian lands because he was not interested in the historical reconstruction and in the contaminations among cultivated and folk songs (Il canto popolare nell’arte, 1898). From this point of view, Favara applied a synchronic method showing that there has not been any change between past and present in refernce to the spontaneous creation of folk songs.

The article deals with some case studies on theatrical spectacles with music, as the “mascherate” composed by Orazio Vecchi in Modena. Further, it examines some excerpts of the sixteenth-century Italian polyphony, which have not written for the stage, thus recreating the musical landscape inspired by popular songs and the onomatopoeic lexicon drawn from pastoral dramas and comedies before Vecchi’s "Amphiparnaso" (1597). In the second part, applying the criteria of narratology, the author analyses the works of Alessandro Striggio ("Il cicalamento delle donne al bucato", 1567), Gaspare Torelli ("I fidi amanti", 1600) and Adriano Banchieri ("La pazzia senile", 1607 2edn., "La prudenza giovenile", 1607, "La saviezza giovenile", 1628). This approach to the matter is required by the plot of the mentioned madrigal comedies, as suggested by stage directions, subtitles and various details joined to the introductions and intermedi. The co-existence of musical and stage traits acquires more evidence in Banchieri’s oeuvre, in which various accurate references to the scenarios occur, particularly referred to the staging of "Prudenza Giovenile". L’articolo presenta alcuni casi di testi di carattere teatrale posti in polifonia, di citazioni di canti popolari o polifonici usati in spettacoli teatrali ed elenca le concordanze tra le mascherate messe in scena da Orazio Vecchi a Modena e i brani da lui mandati successivamente in stampa. Ciò allo scopo di dimostrare che la creazione di un paesaggio sonoro di ascendenza rappresentativa è un patrimonio comune derivato dalla favola pastorale e dalla commedia, anteriore alla rivoluzionaria opera compiuta da Vecchi con l’"Amphiparnaso". Nella seconda parte l’autore ricorre alla narratologia per esaminare le composizioni di Alessandro Striggio ("Il cicalamento delle donne al bucato", 1567), di Gaspare Torelli ("I fidi amanti", 1600) e di Adriano Banchieri ("La pazzia senile", ed. 1607, "La prudenza giovenile", 1607, "La saviezza giovenile", 1628), poiché esse contengono didascalie e intermedi che funzionano come veri e propri scenari di teatro. In questo senso rivestono particolare importanza le indicazioni di Banchieri per un’autentica rappresentazione della "Prudenza giovenile".

Alberto Fortis’ “Viaggio in Dalmazia” (Padua, 1774) described for the first time the Morlacks (Cr. “Vlasi”) of the inner Dalmatia as the true model of a primitive group, whose characteristics became a source of inspiration until 1830s for some Italian writers and ballet composers devoted to exoticism. Contemporaneously, Homer’s paradigm, introduced by Melchiorre Cesarotti in the foreword to the Italian version of the poems of Ossian (1763), as quoted by Fortis, was in turn transformed by the composer and doctor of Split Giulio Bajamonti. Even though published in Italian, Bajamonti’s “Morlacchismo d’Omero” (Venice, 1797) must be considered as the first contribution to the romantic Croatian literature. In fact, the essay recognizes in the poetry and music of the Morlacks the authentic national spirit of South Slavic people. At the light of Vico’s “Scienza nuova” (1744) the author renews Homer paradigm to show close ties between the Morlack’s way of life and the Homeric heroes’ behaviour in the Iliad. Further, he compares the Morlack “guslar”, who plays by heart epic verses, to the ancient Greek bard. The figure of the Morlack disappeared around the 1840s, at the time when some intellectuals of Dubrovnik and Venice edited articles and novels on Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins in the Italian periodical “La Favilla”. With the aim of creating a unifying language in the Balkan area and the Slavic lands of Mitteleuropa, writers such as Ivan August Kaznačić, Medo Pucić, Niccolò Tommaseo and Francesco Dall’Ongaro promoted in Trieste the Serbo-Croatian literature based on the unwritten tradition of the guslari’s epic songs. These intellectuals, as supporters of the Illyrian Movement born in Croatia, exalted the South Slavic epic in rejecting the well known Italian and “Gothic” literatures (i.e. English and German). The Romantic vision of a standardized South Slavic type substituted the previous wild Morlack but not his culture. This phenomenon involved two composers of the 1860s, Nikola Strmic di Valcrociata and Pietro Platania, who wrote new operas on this topic, always characterizing the South Slav as primitive, honest, hospitable and vindictive.

The article focuses on an unknown phenomenon developed within the frame of the Counter-reformation Italy, in which interact the Catholic faith and a sort of transfer from painting to literature. At the time, the Latin-American flower maracock (maracuja), renamed granadilla by the Spanish conquistadores, was transformed by the Jesuits into Flos passionis/passionflower, whose components were forced to represent Christ crucifixion. From 1608 to the 1660s, priests and poets, like the well-known G. Botero and G. B. Marino, wrote poems on the passionflower on the basis of some unreal images spread by the Jesuits. Aiming at experiencing a new form of ancient ékfrasis, they had described the Passionflower without any reference to the authentic flower. These poets and intellectuals dealt with different paradigms employing metaphors to give the flower a distorted meaning presenting it either as the book of nature, or as the symbol of a mysterious gift given by God, in which are contained both the “officium occultandi” and the “ratio docendi”. All these strategies had the final goal to consider the flower as a means in nature to reveal the secrets of Christ’s Passion after his death. However, the comparison among poems and botanical treatises shows a diminished interest about this kind of “ut pictura poësis”, especially when the descriptions and the drawings of the true granadiglia increased without any religious implications since 1630s.

Il volume analizza la formazione del repertorio sinfonico e operistico di Toscanini attraverso le testimonianze e le incisioni. Aggiunge indagini nuove sui rapporti con la regia, con ai cantanti e con i solisti e riconsidera la sua attività radiofonica negli Stati Uniti

Knjiga je rezultat zdruæenih napora nekolicine istraæivaËa koji se bave predmetom ne osobito dobro istraæenim u muzikologiji; djelo pomno razraeno, s uvodom Sanje Majer-Bobetko, a s nakanom da prikupi eseje, Ëlanke i rukopise koji su se pojavljivali u Hrvatskoj i inozemstvu otprilike od druge polovice 19. stoljeÊa do prvih desetljeÊa 20. st. Raznovrsna graa tog pregleda sabrana je i navedena u popisu izvora, s odnosnom bibliografijom. Svaki od autora, Sanja Majer-Bobetko, Zdravko BlaæekoviÊ i Gorana Doliner, raspodijelili su svoja izlaganja na svjetovnu, crkvenu i tradicijsku glazbu, hoteÊi razjasniti metode kojima su se sluæila Ëetvorica znaËajnih povjesniËara: Franjo KuhaË, Vjenceslav Novak, Vjekoslav KlaiÊ i Franjo MarkoviÊ. Nadalje, posebna je pozornost posveÊena glazbenoj periodici, Ëasopisima Gusle, Glazba i Sveta Cecilija, pa i nekim drugima, kao πto je Ëasopis Vienac, koji je takoer objavljivao clanke o glazbi.

The article focuses on Toscanini’s authoritative skill at the light of conducting emergence during the second half of the 19th century. It examines in particular the role played by repertoire and the related problems of interpretation, developed in Europe at the time of maestro’s early youth. From this point of view some details of his biography are regarded in relationship to previous experiences, namely those of A. Mariani and the unknown French musician M. K. The author suggests also an unexplored musicological topic through the comparison between several handbooks and various Toscanini’s records. Even though it is incorrect to consider at the same extent different fields of sources, as the treatise and the performance, one can admit that the sketches of baton movements can be compared with the rehearsals and concerts recorded by the Italian conductor. Furthermore a short meditation on "Die Meistershaft des Maestro" (1958), an essay of Th. W. Adorno dedicated to Toscanini’s conducting, is joined. The negative judgement of the philosopher, who describes the interpretation of Toscanini as non romantic but also a mechanized manner influenced by the modern mass culture, opens today some hermeneutic perspectives of hearing.

The essay "Il morlacchismo di Omero" (1797), written in Italian by Giulio Bajamonti, is the first contribution to the romantic Croatian literature. At the light of Vico’s "Scienza nuova" (1744), Bajamonti introduces Homer’s paradigm to demonstrate that the way of life of the Vlach (i.e. Morlack), who inhabited the interior of Dalmatia, shows close analogies with the heroes of the Iliad. Like Homer and the Highland bards of the Ossian’s poems (Macpherson), the Vlach sings the ancient epic verses accompanied by a gusle. Following this paradigm Bajamonti recognizes in the Vlach’s poetry the authentic national spirit of the South Slavic people. The article analyses: the passage from the exotic Vlach, as a model of the primitive group or the bon sauvage of the Enlightenment (abbé Fortis), to the incorrupted Slavic people different from the Dalmatians devoted to the Italian culture; Bajamonti’s friendship with Ðuro Ferić, Michael Denis and Melchiorre Cesarotti, translators of the ancient Slavic songs, Homer and Ossian, in the floating context of the Bardendichtung and primitivism; Bajamonti’s romantic point of view, who, as Herder, rejects also any classicistic misinterpretation of the people’s poetry ; Bajamonti’s aim in establishing the confrontation with the ancient Greek without Ossian, and the reason why he substitutes the Gaelic bard with his own Vlach.

La vita e l'opera di Stanislav Tuksar e il suo contributo alla musicologia internazionale. In particolare gli studi di estetica della musica e di storiografia, nonché il suo lavoro di editor della "International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music" e i saggi importanti sul rapporto tra le culture nazionali e il cosmopolitismo nell'Europa centrale, in relazione alla Croazia e agli Slavi del Sud dal sedicesimo al diciannovesimo secolo.

Il messaggio etico dei testi di Francesco Buti per i "Fiori" di Girolamo Kapsperger (villanelle a 1,2,3,4 voci e Bc. del 1632) e la ricercata semplicità della musica giustificano la scelta anacronistica e stilisticamente inappropriata della titolazione di genere scelta da Kapsperger o dall’editore Masotti. Il termine villanella allude in questo caso a un giardino in cui i fiori formano un mazzetto di allegorie per il buon cristiano. Più specificamente i soggetti riguardano i miti classici collegati ai vegetali, ai quali si ispira l’autore per riprendere le leggende sull’origine dal sangue o dal latte degli dei, da cui nacquero per metamorfosi il gelsomino, la viola, la rosa, l’amaranto, l’anemone, il giacinto, il narciso e l’iris. Qualche sospetto di incongruenza può destare la vicinanza delle liriche sui fiori a quelle più astratte sui vizi e le passioni. Tuttavia, il trattamento riservato ai temi floreali, che divengono sotto la penna di Buti espressione del pensiero cattolico, elimina qualsiasi iato concettuale tra le une e le altre. Sensibile al fascino delle digressioni botaniche di Giovambattista Marino, il giovane Buti conferisce ai fiori un ruolo metaforico per trarre dai relativi mitologemi altrettanti insegnamenti morali. In virtù della loro forza evocativa i testi si inseriscono nel più ampio panorama della poesia per immagini, sulla base di un ideale estetico che tramuta l’atto verbale in ‘pittura parlante’, giusta la definizione oraziana ripresa dal napoletano nelle "Dicerie sacre" (1614). L'ispirazione a comporre i "Fiori" nasce nell'ambito della civiltà dei giardini romani e si colloca nel contesto del mecenatismo del cardinale Francesco Barberini, nipote di papa Urbano VIII. Inoltre, la raccolta di Buti-Kapsperger è la sola opera basata sul tema floreale di tutta la polifonia rinascimentale e barocca. The sixth book “Li Fiori” of Girolamo Kapsperger, printed in 1632 for one, two, three and four voices with continuo and Spanish guitar, is the unique collection dedicated to flowers in 17th-century Italy. The German maestro, as a protégé of Pope Urbano VIII, performed this music a year before in an unspecified Roman academy within the context of the Barberini’s family – it must be noted that the ambiguous term academy could be translated as private concert. However, verses and music do not belong to the villanella genre, because the structure of polyphony and poems is more refined than that used by other composers of authentic villanella and, for its characteristics, this work could be enclosed in the repertoire of canzonetta. The choice of the title must be explained in relation to cardinal Francesco Barberini’s patronage, who created a big garden in Rome full of plants imported from all parts of the world, and the term “villanelle” (from the Italian “villa”) is probably an allusion to the nature loved by the cardinal. The poems, written in a very complicated way, contain a mixture of different meters based on the ancient Greek mythology, whose subjects are the flowers born by metamorphosis from pagan Gods’ blood and milk. As Giovan Battista Marino’s “Lira” (1614), “Sampogna” (1620) and “Adone” (1623), Buti resumed the legends of the jasmine, violet, pink, purple anemone, hyacinth, narcissus and iris aiming at transforming them in a means to enhance the catholic ethic. In some cases, for example in reference to the jasmine, Buti was inspired by the contemporaneous iconography, in particular Guido Reni’s, Guercino’s and Cartari’s pictures (cf. the “Aurora” at the Rospigliosi-Pallavicini Palace, another “Aurora” at the Ludovisi Casino, the treatise of Vincenzo Cartari “Le imagini dei dei degli antichi”, 1626). The core meaning of “Li Fiori” metaphors, which establish close ties with the Counter-reformation mentality, is the slogan “talking/painting” drawn from Horace’s “Ars poetica” and Marino’s “Dicerie sacre” (1614). To this regard it can be mentioned the extraordinary case of the “Granadiglia” poem. At the time, this Latin-American flower, known as maracock or maracuja, was renamed granadilla by the Spanish conquistadores, and then transformed by the Jesuits into Flos passionis/passionflower, whose components were forced to represent Christ crucifixion. From 1608 to the 1660s, priests and poets, like Giovanni Battista Botero and Marino, wrote poems on the passionflower on the basis of some unreal images spread by the Jesuits. Aiming at experiencing a new way of ancient ékfrasis, they had described the passionflower without any reference to the authentic exotic flower. These poets and intellectuals dealt with different paradigms employing metaphors to give the flower a distorted meaning, presenting it either as the book of nature, or as the symbol of a mysterious gift given by God, in which are embodied both the “officium occultandi” and the “ratio docendi”. These strategies had the final goal to consider the flower as a natural means to reveal the secrets of Christ’s Passion after his death. However, in the 1630s the comparison among poems and botanical treatises showed a diminished interest about this kind of “ut pictura poësis”, especially when the descriptions and the drawings of the true passionflower began to be widespread without any religious implication. It is not a mere accident the presence of granadiglia close to the “red cardinal flower” in the mentioned Barberini’s garden, as emphasized by the botanist Giovan Battista Ferrari in his book “Flora, cultura de’ fiori” (1638), a treatise dedicated to the same cardinal.

Alla tradizione della storia pensata e scritta dai filosofi, i quali deducevano il reale dall’universale secondo logiche aprioristiche, reagirono con forza i musicologi italiani L. Torchi e O. Chilesotti nella seconda metà del diciannovesimo secolo. La soggezione spontanea ai dettami del positivismo e dell’evoluzionismo permise a questi studiosi di affrontare qualsiasi tipo di linguaggio musicale, di rifiutare l’estetica romantica del sentimento associato ai simboli sonori e di dedicarsi alla raccolta dei reperti avanzando confronti sagaci sul piano delle forme e dei generi. Scopo del loro metodo, influenzato dalla coeva scuola degli studi storici della letteratura italiana, era dimostrare “come” e non “perché” si attuano le funzioni creative. Negli scritti di Torchi, ispirati alla filosofia di Comte, ciò avviene attraverso i processi di somiglianza e successione, utili a spiegare lo sviluppo dell’arte musicale. Seguace di Spencer, nell’ "Evoluzione nella musica" del 1898 Chilesotti introduce i concetti di sviluppo dal semplice al complesso e di persistenza delle forme elementari nei linguaggi evoluti. A sua detta il modello appartenente a uno stadio avanzato non cancella di necessità quello anteriore, ma lo ingloba assumendo una struttura polimorfa. Sul piano storico la tesi è convalidata dalla sopravvivenza dell’antico recitativo dei cantori al liuto del Cinquecento in seno al melodramma del Seicento. Posto accanto ad arie e ad altre forme chiuse, il recitativo ha generato un’espressione complessa costituita di elementi eterogenei, frutto di un processo dialettico di divaricazione.

Il messaggio etico dei testi di Francesco Buti per i "Fiori" di Girolamo Kapsperger (villanelle a 1,2,3,4 voci e Bc. del 1632) e la ricercata semplicità della musica giustificano la scelta anacronistica e stilisticamente inappropriata della titolazione di genere scelta da Kapsperger o dall’editore Masotti. Il termine villanella allude in questo caso a un giardino in cui i fiori formano un mazzetto di allegorie per il buon cristiano. Più specificamente i soggetti riguardano i miti classici collegati ai vegetali, ai quali si ispira l’autore per riprendere le leggende sull’origine dal sangue o dal latte degli dei, da cui nacquero per metamorfosi il gelsomino, la viola, la rosa, l’amaranto, l’anemone, il giacinto, il narciso e l’iris. Qualche sospetto di incongruenza può destare la vicinanza delle liriche sui fiori a quelle più astratte sui vizi e le passioni. Tuttavia, il trattamento riservato ai temi floreali, che divengono sotto la penna di Buti espressione del pensiero cattolico, elimina qualsiasi iato concettuale tra le une e le altre. Sensibile al fascino delle digressioni botaniche di Giovambattista Marino, il giovane Buti conferisce ai fiori un ruolo metaforico per trarre dai relativi mitologemi altrettanti insegnamenti morali. In virtù della loro forza evocativa i testi si inseriscono nel più ampio panorama della poesia per immagini, sulla base di un ideale estetico che tramuta l’atto verbale in ‘pittura parlante’, giusta la definizione oraziana ripresa dal napoletano nelle "Dicerie sacre" (1614). L'ispirazione a comporre i "Fiori" nasce nell'ambito della civiltà dei giardini romani e si colloca nel contesto del mecenatismo del cardinale Francesco Barberini, nipote di papa Urbano VIII. Inoltre, l’uso dell’ékfrasis è evidente nella poesia sulla passiflora o Flos Passionis. Denominato dai conquistadores spagnoli granadilla, il fiore, grazie ai gesuiti diviene il simbolo della crocifissione di Cristo e contiene in sé l’“officium occultandi” e la “ratio docendi”. La diffusione di immagini in assenza del fiore autentico induce un folto gruppo di poeti a metaforizzare i componenti della passiflora in relazione alla croce. Tuttavia, l’interesse per questo soggetto diminuisce allorquando i trattati di botanica e i protestanti ritraggono la vera passiflora, contestando ogni forma di devozione ad essa collegata. The sixth book “Li Fiori” of Girolamo Kapsperger, printed in 1632 for one, two, three and four voices with continuo and Spanish guitar, is the unique collection dedicated to flowers in 17th-century Italy. The German maestro, as a protégé of Pope Urbano VIII, performed this music a year before in an unspecified Roman academy within the context of the Barberini’s family – it must be noted that the ambiguous term academy could be translated as private concert. However, verses and music do not belong to the villanella genre, because the structure of polyphony and poems is more refined than that used by other composers of authentic villanella and, for its characteristics, this work could be enclosed in the repertoire of canzonetta. The choice of the title must be explained in relation to cardinal Francesco Barberini’s patronage, who created a big garden in Rome full of plants imported from all parts of the world, and the term “villanelle” (from the Italian “villa”) is probably an allusion to the nature loved by the cardinal. The poems, written in a very complicated way, contain a mixture of different meters based on the ancient Greek mythology, whose subjects are the flowers born by metamorphosis from pagan Gods’ blood and milk. As Giovan Battista Marino’s “Lira” (1614), “Sampogna” (1620) and “Adone” (1623), Buti resumed the legends of the jasmine, violet, pink, purple anemone, hyacinth, narcissus and iris aiming at transforming them in a means to enhance the catholic ethic. In some cases, for example in reference to the jasmine, Buti was inspired by the contemporaneous iconography, in particular Guido Reni’s, Guercino’s and Cartari’s pictures (cf. the “Aurora” at the Rospigliosi-Pallavicini Palace, another “Aurora” at the Ludovisi Casino, the treatise of Vincenzo Cartari “Le imagini dei dei degli antichi”, 1626). The core meaning of “Li Fiori” metaphors, which establish close ties with the Counter-reformation mentality, is the slogan “talking/painting” drawn from Horace’s “Ars poetica” and Marino’s “Dicerie sacre” (1614). To this regard it can be mentioned the extraordinary case of the “Granadiglia” poem. At the time, this Latin-American flower, known as maracock or maracuja, was renamed granadilla by the Spanish conquistadores, and then transformed by the Jesuits into Flos passionis/passionflower, whose components were forced to represent Christ crucifixion. From 1608 to the 1660s, priests and poets, like Giovanni Battista Botero and Marino, wrote poems on the passionflower on the basis of some unreal images spread by the Jesuits. Aiming at experiencing a new way of ancient ékfrasis, they had described the passionflower without any reference to the authentic exotic flower. These poets and intellectuals dealt with different paradigms employing metaphors to give the flower a distorted meaning, presenting it either as the book of nature, or as the symbol of a mysterious gift given by God, in which are embodied both the “officium occultandi” and the “ratio docendi”. These strategies had the final goal to consider the flower as a natural means to reveal the secrets of Christ’s Passion after his death. However, in the 1630s the comparison among poems and botanical treatises showed a diminished interest about this kind of “ut pictura poësis”, especially when the descriptions and the drawings of the true passionflower began to be widespread without any religious implication. It is not a mere accident the presence of granadiglia close to the “red cardinal flower” in the mentioned Barberini’s garden, as emphasized by the botanist Giovan Battista Ferrari in his book “Flora, cultura de’ fiori” (1638), a treatise dedicated to the same cardinal.

Selezione e raccolta di saggi di Francesco Luisi in occasione dei suoi sessantacinque anni. Il volume giubilare riunisce gli interventi più originali sulla musica per il teatro del Cinquecento, secondo distinzioni di utenza e genere. L'autore analizza esempi di musica nata per il teatro o per esso adattata, di musica piazzata come intermedio tra gli atti e di musica in forma di canti inseriti nel corso dell'azione con funzione decorativa o drammatica. Si intrattiene altresì sulla qualità degli eventi sonori in relazione ai generi della tragedia, della commedia, della favola pastorale e della sacra rappresentazione. La seconda parte riguarda lo studio delle allegorie musicali e degli aspetti performativi collegati alle immagini di affreschi e dipinti della stessa epoca che riportano esempi di pagine in polifonia. Il ruolo della musica nello spettacolo e la simbologia delle formule iconiche del Cinquecento, ove si annidano i valori intellettuali e civili dalla società nobiliare e borghese ante litteram, costituiscono l'obiettivo principale del libro.

The book “Themes and Portraits of Music in Istria from 16th to 19th Centuries” is a revised collection of essays previously published in Italian, Croatian and Slovenian. It can offer a comprehensive survey on various aspects of music history of Istria between 16th and 19th century. In a wider sense, it considers the role of music in different contexts examining the patronage of churches, academies and noblemen within the frame of a multilingual area, in which Italian and Slavic cultures co-existed, Divided between Venice and Habsburg government, and now between Slovenia, Croatia and Italy (with the small town of Muggia), the peninsula, till today, represents an unsolved issue if the historians watch to Italian music as the unique “national” model of music art. On the contrary, until 19th century Italian music was a supranational/cosmopolitan phenomenon that covered both the coastal towns, namely inhabited by Italians, and the inner cities, where Slovenians and Croats settled. The first chapter is devoted to Gabriello Puliti, a Tuscan friar appointed organist and chapel master in Trieste, Muggia, Koper, Piran, Labin, Pula. Puliti, the most representative composer who increased the 17th-century monody in Istria, worked as a protégé of some local noblemen and the Habsburgs, as Ferdinand archduke of Graz. His three voices “mascherate” (“Ghirlanda odorifera”, 1612), composed in honour of Tranquillo Negri, a nobleman and poet of Labin, are compared to the carnival masquerades described by the chorographer Giacomo Filippo Tomasini (cf. the 17th-century manuscript “Commentari storici-geografici della provincia dell’Istria”). The primary poetic source of “Ghirlanda” is Giulio Cesare Croce’s “Le ventisette mascherate piacevolissime” (1603), and the theatrical suggestion in these “Ghirlande” is frequently emphasised by the openings of the poems where the characters are represented by the motto “Noi siamo”. They represent an imaginary gallery of the Italian comedy based on parodies of several dialects and languages. Puliti’s approach to this genre is linked in various ways to musical painting. Almost every piece is marked by some distinctive features, whose purpose is to depict the characters in a very refined manner. To this end Puliti resorts to three different degrees of mimesis: onomatopoeic sounds, the imitation of human voices, and the abstract imitation of words through mensuration and the intensive use of the “coloured” notes (“Augenmusik”). Probably Puliti entered to the Palladia Academy of Capodistria (now Koper) with the nickname “Accademico armonico detto l’Allegro”. This academy was an important circle of intellectuals that in seventy years of activity (from 1567 to 1637) promoted some pastoral plays with music (cf, “Filliria” 1585, “Selve incoronate” 1590 and other pastorals) and published an important treatise titled “Dieci de’ cento dubbi amorosi” (posthumous, 1621). To demonstrate the extraordinary effect of music in human behaviour, this platonic dialogue contains a series of references drawn from Plato, Horace, Macrobius, Boetius, Ficino and Jewish theologians collected in Francesco Zorzi’s “Harmonia mundi” (1525). In choosing different sources from the classic and medieval philosophies, Giambattista Zarotti, one of the authors of the dialogue, exceeds the lavish quotations, which are used as a tool for a new proposal. He aimed at giving a modern commentary on the debate on music and feelings, evaluating the ancient theories on the basis of modern music. Another study focuses on the unknown book “Ghirlande conteste” (1588), a set of intermedi staged in the island of Cres and published by Stefanello de Petris in honour of Sebastiano Quirini. These mythological spectacles, with chorus, consort and singers, exalt the benefits in behalf of the island, given generously by the cleaver count Quirini. The accuracy of description lets us acquire a detailed reconstruction of the sceneries and performances of musicians, even though, as it is custom in theatre, the score was not printed. The following chapters deal with Antonio Tarsia’s monodies written for the Koper’s cathedral, which are compared with the contemporaneous work of Giovanni Legrenzi, and two treatises written by Gianrinaldo Carli during his stay in Padua (1740/50), on the concepts of genius and “sentimental music” applied to Giuseppe Tartini’s instrumental works (“Dell’indole del teatro tragico”, “Osservazioni sulla musica antica e moderna”). Influenced by the English Enlightenment, on the example of Richardson’s “Pamela”, Carli developed a revolutionary idea of “sentimental theatre and music” inspired by nature. He promoted both a simple music and a simple stage upon realistic performances, without any implication with the cultivated tragedies of the conservative Italian writers of his time. Finally, the author analyses the operas “Pittori fiamminghi” (1893) and “Nozze istriane” (1895) of Antonio Smareglia, in which the technique of the Wagnerian leitmotif appears. Smareglia, educated in Milan and Vienna, as an Italian-Croatian-German speaking rejected the national ideas of his time. Involved in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Central Europe, he did not accept the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy and, as a consequence, he developed a special feeling for a supranational drama based on the Italian librettos translated into German. Alike some artists and writers, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Smareglia experienced and shared the unhappiness of the so-called “Austrians without Austria”.