Villa San Giuliano
Villa and Park of San Giuliano Zandonai in Pesaro where… every plant opens its heart and sings.
Villa San Giuliano Zandonai and the Park, now owned by Giuliani - D'Orazio, rise on the slopes of Colle San Bartolo, in Pesaro, a place rich in history and of particular scenic beauty. The first settlement dates back to the last decades of 1939; the nineteenth century when the property belonged to the Sponza family. The site remained unchanged until the early 1930s.
Map of the Gregorian Cadastre, 1820, with the identification of the first building of the Villa
Starting from 1931, the year of purchase of the compendium by Maestro Riccardo Zandonai, the trend is reversed: the building and landscape transformations have been designed by several hands and promptly reported in writing.
By the way, we refer to the daily correspondence between the master and his friend Nicola d'Atri, in which the musician, who has become master, states that "the masons are already working to fix the house ...". The letters are part of the Letters preserved at the Study Center of Rovereto.
Photo by Riccardo Zandonai in the Pesaro period (1920s)
These documents, as well as the correspondence with his friend, architect and set designer Luciano Baldessari, will be illuminating precisely to define and rediscover a particularity of intervention on the places, which we can define as a scenographic score. It will be applied to the buildings and to the park by the Pesaro artisans who will act following specific indications provided by Zandonai and Baldessari.
Photo of Luciano Baldessari in his studio in Milan in the 1970s
For the musician, then, the scene of the opera, from the score becomes stone. In it he reflects himself, recognizes himself and engraves memories on the tombstones hanging on the walls. "... From the gà iba escaped is the nightingale ..." says Reginella in Giuliano. It is he, the composer, who escapes from the cage of daily worries and rests free on a branch of his park to warble new melodies, listening to the song of plants and other creatures.
Plaque placed by the Master on the northern facade of the Villa in 1937, as a quotation from Reginella in the work Giuliano
Plaque placed by Maestro Zandonai in 1937 on the gate at the entrance to the Villa in memory of the Opera Giuliano
Still in the opera set in castles, valleys, forests and woods, the stage choir sings in a low voice "... each plant opens its heart and sings ...". Also in this case Zandonai placed a plaque with this phrase on one of the two entrance pillars of the Villa. 1931 is the year of the transfer of the Maestro and his wife Tarquinia to the Villa; this is also the year in which he composes the symphonic poem "I Quadri di Segantini".
Giovanni Segantini is a Trentino painter like Zandonai and Baldessari. He left a considerable amount of works carried out with the most disparate techniques: pencil, tempera, oils, charcoals and more. His works are of great expressive power, and concentrated in a short life; in fact he died at the age of forty.
He was dear to the alpine landscapes and simple figures: peasants, shepherds, boys whom he represented, in the last period, in a Divisionist way. Among these bucolic subjects, Riccardo Zandonai found himself and his partner Tarquinia in his adolescent memory. He felt attracted to a painting of a boy sitting on the edge of a country slope. He plays the recorder next to his girlfriend lying on a spring meadow with a flowering peach tree in the foreground. The painting is called "The Idyll, like the piece by Zandonai, and is kept in the Museum of Aberdeen in Scotland.
Giovanni Segantini: Idillio, 1883, Art Gallery and Museum of Aberdeen (Scotland)
The musical composition takes up the sound of the painted boy; it opens with an oboe, continues with the clarinet and flute, and continues with the glissandi of the strings until the orchestral crescendo that will develop, with different dynamics, until the melody ends. The symphonic work, in addition to having Gershwinian assonances and echoes of Grieg, presents characteristics of originality referable to the "genius loci" of San Giuliano. Everything has remained as it was then.
Villa and Park are the fixed theatrical scene, where Zandonai, inspired by Baldessari, continues to celebrate his works through nature and the artifice he strongly desired, and which he transmitted to us. This is his legacy. The entrance from the Strada di San Bartolo is the incipit for the visitor to what he will find inside, completely restored with devotion by Dr. Michele D'Orazio and by Mrs. Giovanna Giuliani, his wife.
He will be happy as the Master was. And above all he will understand why "... the nightingale escaped from the gàiba" and why "every plant opens its heart and sings".
FRAMEWORK OF HISTORICAL AND LANDSCAPE VILLA
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The Villa stands on the slopes of the San Bartolo hill, near Pesaro, near the Caprile and Vittoria villas. The first nucleus of the building and the garden, as well as the monumental access avenue flanked by holm oaks, date back to the last decades of the nineteenth century when the property belonged to the Sponza family.
The building was later enlarged and had the singular configuration it still contains when in the 1920s it became the home of maestro Riccardo Zandonai, who arrived in Pesaro in 1898 as a young student of the Conservatory and remained here until he became its director. In the villa and in the garden echoes of the composer's artistic presence remain.
On the contrary, the architecture seems to have been inspired by a scenography the work "I cavalieri di Ekebù", by Zandonai himself represented for the first time at "La Scala" under the direction of Arturo Toscanini.
On the other hand, traces of the garden remain in the work Giuliano, from 1925 where between melodic and evil notes you can hear the forest murmuring "every plant opens its heart and sing", with evident inspiration from the voices of the pylons of the park, as still it recalls a plaque placed on the facade of the villa.
The building and the garden were purchased in 1966 by the Cangiotti family who carried out a careful restoration.
Baldessari, Riccardo Zandonai, Sketch Plan of Villa San Giuliano
Luciano Baldessari, Scenography of the Giuliano Opera (Architectural Details)
Thus the compositional scheme that determines the three-light window or the arch, conceived by Baldessari, is first assimilated by Zandonai as a logical and rational reference, and then created with the formal fragments also taken from sets by other authors (Stoppa), which are visually easier.
Armando Stoppa, Scenographic details of the works of Riccardo Zandonai
Riccardo Zandonai, Historical Photo of Villa San Giuliano, compositional matrix of the scenographic elements
Riccardo Zandonai, Trifora scenographic sketch of Villa San Giuliano
The same compositional and emotional procedure configures the park avenue, first with the helical platform indicated in Baldessari's project, and then with the topiary realization by Zandonai (the platform is replaced by the fountain) as shown below.
Luciano Baldessari, Scenography of the Giuliano Opera, Details of the Avenue and the Fountain
Riccardo Zandonai, Historical Photos of the avenue of the Villa San Giuliano Park and the fountain
For Zandonai, the wooded backdrop or the facade of the Villa are white scores on which to compose your own melody, using the expressive elements of another discipline as notes: scenography. In this sense we can speak of the scenographic department of the Compendium of San Giuliano.
Arch. Francesco Pio Dotti
RICCARDO ZANDONAI: BIOGRAPHICAL AND OPERATIONAL NOTES ON THE LIFE OF THE COMPOSER
( Sack of Rovereto 28- May-1883 - Trebbiantico di Pesaro 5-VI-1944)
Riccardo Zandonai, in some vintage photos
Son of Luigi and Carolina Todeschi, he inherited his first passion for music from the modest family environment: his father in fact played the bombardino in the village band and his maternal uncle entertained him with the guitar, an instrument that Zandonai learned to play in his early childhood, together with the clarinet. An old clerk, former military band trombone, taught him the first rudiments of theory and initiated him to study the violin. The cousin, friend and contemporary of Zandonai, O. Costa, assures us that even before the age of ten the future opera player had composed a series of melodic pieces, for band, gathering around him a small group of friends.
The first ordered study began a little later, with V. Gianferrari, director of the Rovereto music school, aged twelve to fifteen, during which he also learned harmony and piano, while his more or less occasional creative activity intensified and he was already managed to create a favorable environment in the area, from the welcoming homes of the De Probizer and Giovannini family to some strong friendships, including the one with L. Leonardi, author of the first authoritative biography of the musician, important. In 1898 Gianferrari advised him to undertake serious studies in Pesaro, at the musical high school of which Mascagni was director; here he was welcomed by the Kalchsmidt spouses, originally from Rovereto, in via d'Azeglio, and followed the complete cycle in just three years, graduating in composition in 1901.
On St. Peter's day of the same year, in honor of Mascagni, his "Cantata The Return of Odysseus" was performed, based on a text by Pascoli, together with other compositions by the recent graduates. Thus ended the first Pesaro period, during which Zandonai had clearly shown a certain impatience with Mascagni's teaching methods and approach. The catalog of his minor works is enriched with the lieder production and some dramatic scenes, including the Dante one that anticipates the masterpiece.
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Returning to Sacco, Zandonai resumed a practical and creative activity: he participated in the competition announced for the province of Tyrol by the ministry of worship and education of Austria, and won it with The Return of Odysseus. For the second edition of the same competition he prepared a one-act melodrama, The King's Cup, which was no longer performed, despite having received a favorable opinion from Mahler.
Another interesting theatrical experience of these years was The Golden Bird (1907). Among the trips to Italy, Milan was the favorite destination, and it was here that, through Dr. Tancredi Pizzini managed to enter Vittoria Cima's living room, where he met Boito, who introduced him to Giulio Ricordi. With the latter the composer committed himself to a melodrama in three acts and the following year Il grillo del focolare was born, dedicated to his first teacher and successfully represented at the Politeama Chiarella in Turin.
In 1911 he completed Conchita. Two important facts are also linked to this work, which constitutes a decisive stage in Zandonai's art: the meeting with Tarquinia Tarquini, who was his first interpreter and who became his wife in 1916; and the one with Nicola D'Atri, on the occasion of the premiere in Rome, whose influence was fundamental on the subsequent artistic choices of the musician.
Set design for Romeo and Juliet, 1921
Sketch for the third Act of Melenis
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The third melodrama, Melenis, which began immediately after Il grillo del focolare, was performed the following year, and Zandonai immediately worked for Francesca da Rimini. He composed the first two and a half acts in Pesaro and then, returning to Arcachon, where he had had a meeting with D'Annunzio, he stopped in Figino on Lake Lugano, in the villa of Dr. Pizzini, called "Villa Conchita", where he wrote the famous duet of the third act and the scene between Gianciotto and Malatestino of the fourth. The opera was completed in Sacco and staged at the Teatro Regio in Turin; previously Zandonai had played it at D'Annunzio in Paris in the house of Lina Cavalieri, present Tito Ricordi and Francesco Paolo Tosti.
From 1914 to 1919 there was a period of relative inactivity, understandable if one thinks of the particular historical moment crossed; the musician among other things had taken an openly anti-Hapsburg attitude and had been condemned for high treason both because he was reluctant to draft and for some of his compositions, such as the Hymn of the Trentino students (which dates back to 1901) and the Requiem Mass (1916) written for Umberto I. In recent years, the symphonic production of Zandonai has emerged, largely linked to the suggestion of Trentino (native land), while the musician fixes his residence in Pesaro, where he prepares La via della Finestra (1919), in a moment of stasis, partly overcome by Romeo and Juliet (1922), with the collaboration of Arturo Rossato who from now on will become his only librettist. A decisive turning point came three years later with the Ekebu knights who had their baptism at La Scala directed by Toscanini, then obtaining enthusiastic successes especially in the Nordic countries; in Stockholm, in 1928 the composer, for this work, was awarded the commandery of Gustavo Vasa.
The following work, Giuliano, of a mystical character, was performed in Naples in the same year. In the new home of Villa San Giuliano on the San Bartolo hill in Pesaro, from 1930 onwards the creative rhythm appears to have slowed down a bit, but new interests revive, for example for symphonic production (Quadri di Segantini, 1930) and, towards the end , film music; the directorial activity also takes up a lot of his time. A return to the theater took place in 1933 with A Match and La fararsa amorosa, staged a short time later at the Scala in Milan and at the Opera in Rome. In recognition of an intense life dedicated to music, in 1940 he obtained the appointment of director of the conservatory
Sketches for the First and Third Act of the Opera i Cavalieri di Echebù
"Rossini" of Pesaro: a task to which he dedicated himself with passion, raising the level of the institute with a series of initiatives, until 1943. At the same time he devoted himself to his latest work, Il Bacio, which remained unfinished; Rossato was also dead and the libretto was completed by Emidio Mucci. The events were now precipitating: Zandonai left his villa and took refuge in the convent of the Beato Santo on Montebaroccio, where the physical collapse occurred due to the intensification of the hepatic colic that had tormented him since his youth. Emergency operation at the Trebbiantico hospital, he was no longer able to recover and died on 5 June 1944.
The Zandonai case is quite particular in the history of Italian music of the first decades of our century: on the one hand a popular favor without defeat but without the excessive enthusiasm obtained by Puccini and Mascagni, on the other a fragmentary and discordant critical story, which has limited to suggesting some possible interpretations of the figure of the musician, linking him to the last Verdi or the Bizet-Mascagni line, to the French school of G. Charpentier and Debussy or to the Straussian symphonism.
Starting positions that are however acceptable and indicative at least because they insert the figure of Zandonai in his time, making him participate in what was happening in Europe, especially in the period of formation, when the particular language, the orchestral color, the harmonious flavor are outlined, up to to Francesca da Rimini who represents the moment of greatest balance and strongest inspiration of her entire career.
Zandonai was essentially a man of the theater, but to understand his poetics it is also necessary to dig into his minor production: from the symphonic one, where he shows off his innate skill as an instrumentalist, to the liederistic one which constitutes an essential premise for the original vocality, even to the youthful one of an occasional character (marches, choirs, melodic fragments) which denotes the most genuine predispositions of the musician for refined mixtures, for the adherence of the music to the word, for the vital energy of rhythm and harmony.
Sketch for the First Act of the Opera "Concita"
Thus L'uccellino d'oro in its modest proportions prepares us without uncertainty for the future theatrical production, in which we see the emergence, a few years later, the masterpiece, where everything appears enhanced to the maximum, the technique is now an acquired fact, the expressive values and dramatic they are stretched in all their fullness, closely following D'Annunzio's text, to whose archaic nature, the false-ancient, responds, creating a refined frame for human figures sculpted with singular acuity, the female ones as well as the more openly grim ones, which push the composer with resolutions of a veristic nature but theatrically and musically more complex and risky.
It is a mistake, however, to consider Zandonai the author of Francesca da Rimini alone: ​​the Grillo del focolare, for example, possesses, in its simplicity, a wealth of ideas and poetry that should take him away from the long forgetfulness into which he fell.
Conchita, on the other hand, has stood the test of time for her unique coloristic-environmental setting in Italian melodrama of the twentieth century, while conceding very little to the realism of the subject. Redeemed only in the third act from the rhetoric of the Roman environment, Melenis is interesting for us as a bridge of passage to Francesca da Rimini, for the particular treatment reserved to the protagonist. The post-Francesca period was underestimated by some as a whole, as if Zandonai's vein had suddenly faded.
This impression was evidently born from the questionable presence of La via della Finestra in 1919, only partially modified by Romeo and Juliet which, after Francesca da Rimini, became the most popular work of Zandonai but qualitatively much inferior to it, despite the freshness of some pages and the more loose harmonic-instrumental setting, but also more generic. Another discourse instead for I cavalieri di Ekebu which, despite the fragmentary nature of the libretto, represent a very happy moment that is comparable to that of the masterpiece.
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Inaugural Poster for the Romeo and Juliet Opera, Ricordi Editions, Milan
The fantastic material, in which demonic and nostalgic, dramatic and sentimental elements alternate, prompted the musician to build a strongly suggestive score with an environmental study captured with less coloristic complacency but more authentic adhesion: the choral parts, on the schemes of Swedish melodies , for example, they remind us of the limited hand of Zandonai as a teenager, while the psychological study of the characters is more varied and new, especially for the Commander and Sintram, but also for Anna and Giosta.
We must consider for a positive musician the desire to get out of the box but the excessive dispersion sometimes ends up not achieving the expected results. Giuliano's mystical experience demonstrates this, while La fararsa amorosa (with Una Match), although not reaching the level of the best works, is a stage to be carefully considered. Comic and caricatured cues are also found in previous works, generally caught with detachment and subtle humor.
Here they become substance, corroborated in both cases by Spanish music (in the wake of Conchita), as will be a little later with the Andalusian Concerto for cello. But many years have passed since Conchita and the attitude of the musician in this regard has radically changed, in a process of neoclassical simplification, moreover confirmed by the recovery of closed forms, by diatonic clarity (with which he contrasts the baroqueism of the famous bolero del podestà ), by the lower sensitization of the melodic line.
The culmination of this trend is the concerted finale of the second act, an example of exceptional skill. The distorting sense of the comedy of this work should also be underlined, which even makes us think of Prokofiev, and which ingeniously alternates with sentimental moments, in a work of skilful sutures. The authentic creative parable can be closed here, in 1933: in the course of five decades, from the Grillo del focolare, Zandonai said everything he was able to say, essentially remaining an isolated one, first due to the lack of adherence to the most blatant forms of melodrama. tearful, then for the unavailability for a true evolution. In any case, his fortune rests on some works of authentic value that should give him the right to a better place among some of his most celebrated contemporaries.
The blame for this isolation must perhaps also be sought in the musician himself, a man unable to compromise, obstinate in his decisions, implacable in his choices. His music, also considered under this aspect, is worth, more than any discourse, to portray man in an authentic and unequivocal way.
Inaugural poster for
the Opera Francesca da Rimini, Tragedy by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ricordi Editions, Milan
RICCARDO ZANDONAI - FRANCESCA DA RIMINI
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D'Annunzio's tragedy, of considerable dramatic intensity, owes much to the effectiveness of the libretto to the contribution of Tito Ricordi; which gives Zandonai's best-known score an opportunity to unfold with an equal, if not even more colorful trend. To the "pruning" of Ricordi D'Annunzio he gave unexpectedly, for immediacy, placet, remaining open to subsequent changes (which Zandonai showed him the difficulty in setting the reasonings of Dante and other poets on stage to music, D'Annunzio replaced the scene with "Nemica I had the light / friend I had the night ", with further contribution to melodramatic music): perhaps this, however, the greater scenic effectiveness of the libretto compared to the tragedy is due to a subsequent cold attitude of the poet, who saw the fame of his work obscured theatrical from the success of Zandonai. If D'Annunzio's dug-century Florentine nature disappears in Zandonai, a climate remains that reduces the historical fresco to an erotic and heroic miniature, between love and war.
Generally there is a tonal richness that underlines the psychological links of the drama, between the stylization of figures and the persuasion of human truth. The instrumentation is famous and indeed proverbial: vivid, very rich in harmonics: Italian despite the richness of the written and musical page, which leaves behind the easy effects of the worst, worst and poorest realism, which had built strange comments on similar stories of passion.
Here we are instead at the highlighting of treasures of the text and also at a system that gives greater power to the already legendary drama, which had precedents in the incidental music of the Scontrino (1901) and in the opera of Mancinelli (Paolo and Francesca, Bologna 1907).
Rich in echoes of recent experiences, from Richard Strauss to Debussy, Zandonai's page keeps in mind the Wagnerian magisterium: nevertheless we will never speak of eclecticism, but of the "reshuffle" of the culture at the time of the peak in musical Europe according to a personality among the more original than the Italian opera of the twentieth century.
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A pupil of Mascagni, Zandonai never forgets the most refined experiences of the master, between Iris and Parisina (the latter also from D'Annunzio, a tragedy in which the Livorno master boasted of having set "even commas" to music), as many traces reveal from that curious Puccini of the experimentation that the critics and the most experienced executions have not failed to show. That Zandonai and his Francesca were made of a musical paste not proper to the Italian melodrama scene is one of those clichés that time is taking care to reveal in all its inconsistency, starting from the moment in which melodrama became, in perception, cultured music or just music, no longer suffocated by provincialisms on the contrary, than those used to martyr themselves.
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