Word: italianity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...where symphonic music is concerned, Italy has been strangely unproductive. Though proverbially musical, and as hungry for opera as for pasta, the Italian public can hardly be dragged to a concert hall. Of Italy's thousands of composers, perhaps only one, the late Giuseppe Martucci, ever turned out a really respectable symphony...
...Fascist State set about overcoming this shameful symphonic weakness. Officially smiled upon was a group of contemporary Italian orchestral composers, headed by the late Ottorino Respighi (Pini di Roma), lean-faced Ildebrando Pizzetti (Rondo Veneziano), gloomy, Venetian-born Gian Francesco Malipiero (Pause del Silenzio) and dapper, energetic Alfredo Casella (La Giara). Dominant influence on these composers was that of French Impressionists Debussy and Ravel, though Casella and Malipiero occasionally toddled in Stravinsky's footsteps...
...outside of Italy, the new Italian school of concert composers never raised enough dust to make a critic sneeze. And the Italians themselves obstinately continued to prefer their Toscas, Pagliaccis and Cavalleria Rusticanas...
...countrymen's symphonic music. So has Bernardino Molinari, the spry, white-haired conductor who is currently conducting a series of three broadcasts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. But last week, as he announced the program of his final broadcast, even patriotic Conductor Molinari had neglected his Italian contemporaries. Only modern pieces were Composer Respighi's Le Fontane di Roma, and Composer Pizzetti's suite of incidental music for D'Annunzio's drama, La Pisanella...
During a performance of La Boheme in London's Covent Garden, Italian Tenor Beniamino Gigli unintentionally lighted a stage stove in the garret scene. Intrepid Gigli, singing like a lark the whole time, edged into the wings, seized a bucket of water, doused the fire...