Italian Symphony

Ever since the 16th-Century Florentines first evolved it (under the impression that they were re-creating the Greek tragedy), opera has been to Italians what cinema is to the U. S. public. Nearly every theme in literature has been through the operatic chutes. A total list of the operas written by Italians during the past four centuries would run well into the tens of thousands.

But 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.

The 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.

But 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.

Maestro Arturo Toscanini has done his best to call attention to his 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.

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