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Alfredo Casella and the rhetoric of colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2012

Laura Basini
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Abstract

While the political impact of Italy's 1936 Ethiopian invasion has long been recognized, its cultural history has only recently come under scrutiny. This paper investigates one musical legacy of Mussolini's colonial project by means of a case study of Alfredo Casella's Il deserto tentato (The Attempted Desert, 1937). Performed on the first anniversary of the Empire's founding and dedicated to ‘Mussolini, fondatore dell'Impero’, the work depicts the arrival of a group of Italian airmen in Ethiopia and their welcome by the indigenous peoples. I set the text against contemporary propaganda such as speeches, visual imagery and popular song, exploring tropes central to fascist imperialist rhetoric: virility, civiltà and aeronautical prowess. The opera's integration of historical musical references into a modern musical setting not only represents the theme of endowing the Ethiopian people with a history, in this case embodied by the Italian musical past, but also exemplifies a contemporary desire to make the past present in everyday fascist life. The historiography of Casella's work, what is more, characterized by the same ‘missing debate’ as the broader discussion of Italian colonialism, raises questions about the effects of Italy's ‘memory wars’ on accounts of twentieth-century Italian music history.

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Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , July 2012 , pp. 127 - 157
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Quoted in Del Boca, Angelo, Gli Italiani in Africa orientale (Rome, 1976), Vol. I, ‘Dall'unità alla marcia su Roma’, 3Google Scholar.

2 Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini, Vol. X: Scritti e discorsi dell'Impero (November 1935–4 November 1936) (Milan, 1936), 117–19.

3 Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were unified as the Colonia di Libia in 1934. On Italian colonial history, see Lablanca, Nicola, Storia dell'Italia coloniale (Milan, 1994)Google Scholar; also Del Boca, Angelo, Gli italiani in Africa coloniale, 4 vols. (Rome, 1976–84)Google Scholar. For a briefer, English account, see Bosworth, R.J.B., ‘The Rise and Fall of the Italian Empire’, in his Italy and the Wider World, 1860–1960 (New York, 1996), 94–113Google Scholar. A chronology of the main events in Italian colonial history is found in Ben-Ghiat, Ruth and Fuller, Mia, eds., Italian Colonialism (New York, 2005), xiv–xviiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 On the ‘Day of Faith’, see Gentile, Emilio, ‘The Theatre of Politics in Fascist Italy’, in his The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, Fascism (Westport, 2003), 109–26, particularly 118Google Scholar.

7 Scholars have traditionally viewed the Ethiopian campaign as ‘the high point of support and consent for the fascist regime’; see Morgan, Philip, Italian Fascism (Basingstoke, 1995), 143Google Scholar. Similar interpretations are to be found in Colarizi, Simona, L'opinione degli italiani sotto il regime, 1929–1943 (Rome, 1991), 193ffGoogle Scholar; and De Grazia, Victoria, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar. Recent work by historians Axel Körner and Kate Ferris has challenged this view, outlining instead ‘a multiplicity of personal choices and responses’; see Ferris, Kate, ‘“Fare di ogni famiglia italiana un fortilizio”: The League of Nations' Economic Sanctions and Everyday Life in Venice’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 11/2 (2006), 117–42, here 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also her Everyday Life in Fascist Venice, 1929–40 (Basingstoke, 2012), here 154; and Körner, Axel, The Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From Unification to Fascism (New York, 2009), 270ffGoogle Scholar.

8 See Morgan, Italian Fascism, 182ff., and Scott, William R., The Sons of Sheba's Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington, 1993)Google Scholar; also Harris, Joseph E., African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia 1936–1941 (Baton Rouge, 1994)Google Scholar.

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10 Palumbo, ‘Introduction’, 12.

11 Such myths include that of ‘italiani brava gente’ (the good Italians), an image that conveys the notion that Italian colonialists were less violent, more humane occupiers than others. Such an image, still prevalent in popular culture, has encouraged the forgetting of such events as the committing of 80,000 Libyans to concentration camps, or the killing of a quarter of a million Ethiopians by chemical aerial bombings, the latter of which contravened the 1925 Geneva Protocol (the use of chemical warfare was not admitted officially by Italy until 1995). See Rochat, Giorgio, Il colonialismo italiano (Turin, 1973)Google Scholar and Del Boca, Angelo, I gas di Mussolini: Il fascismo e il guerra di Etiopia (Rome, 1996)Google Scholar. On ‘italiani brava gente’, see also the work of Focardi, Filippo, for example ‘“Bravo italiano” e “cattivo tedesco”: riflessioni sulla genesi di due imagini incrociate’, Storia e memoria, 1 (1996), 55–83Google Scholar; Bidussa, David, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan, 1993)Google Scholar; and Doumanis, Nicholas, Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean: Remembering Fascism's Empire (New York, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 4ff. On the ‘missing debate’, see Del Boca, ‘Il mancato dibattito sul colonialismo’, in his L'Africa nella coscienza degli Italiani, 111–27; or, for one English version of the argument, his ‘The Myths, Suppressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism’, in Palumbo, A Place in the Sun, 17–36. These studies intersect with wider discussions of contemporary Italy's memories of the fascist era, and with still broader considerations of the politics of post-war European memory. Examples of studies of Italy's ‘memory wars’ include Foot, John's Italy's Divided Memory (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bosworth, R.J.B. and Dogliani, Patrizia, eds, Italian Fascism: History, Memory, and Representation (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 See Isabella Abbonizio, Musica e colonialismo nell'Italia fascista (1922–1943), Dottorato di ricerca in storia, scienze e techniche della musica, Università degli studi di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, 2008–9.

14 Casella published widely in several languages, including French and English; he worked to promote communication between composers across the globe and to bring foreign works into Italy. In the late teens he founded the Società italiana di musica moderna, and in the early 1920s the Corporazione delle nuove musiche; he was also head of the Italian section of the International Society for Contemporary Music. He taught generations of students at various institutions in Rome. Among other administrative activities, he co-directed the Venice Festival internazionale di musica contemporanea and the Settimane senesi at the Accademia chigiana, Siena. On Casella's early years, see Calabretto, Roberto, ed., Alfredo Casella. Gli anni di Parigi. Dai documenti (Florence, 1997)Google Scholar and Morelli, Giovanni, ed., Alfredo Casella negli anni di apprendistato a Parigi. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia, 13–15 maggio 1992 (Florence, 1994)Google Scholar; for thematic studies of his work, see D'Amico, Fedele and Gatti, Guido M., eds., Alfredo Casella (Milan, 1958)Google Scholar and more recently De Santis, Mila, ed., Alfredo Casella e L'Europa: Atti dei convegno internazionale di studi, Siena, 7–9 giugno 2001 (Florence, 2003)Google Scholar. Casella's own writings include the anthologies 21+26 (Rome, 1931) and I segreti della giara (Florence, 1941); selected passages of the latter are translated in Music in My Time: The Memoirs of Alfredo Casella (Norman, OK, 1955).

15 Grande, Adriano, Poesie in Africa (Florence, 1938), 73–4Google Scholar, cited in Del Boca, L'Africa nella coscienza, 108.

16 Casella, Music in My Time, 213–14.

17 For a detailed account of the genesis of the work, including unpublished correspondence between Casella and Pavolini, see Ivano Di Lillo, ‘Alfredo Casella and Il deserto tentato’, in his ‘Opera and Nationalism in Fascist Italy’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Cambridge, 2011), 94–129, especially 109–16. Alessandro Pavolini had helped to establish the Maggio musicale fiorentino in 1933, and had flown in the Italian air force during the Ethiopian campaign; a prominent fascist, he held various administrative posts in the regime and was captured and killed alongside Mussolini in April 1945.

18 Alfredo Casella, Il deserto tentato, Op. 60, Mistero in un atto di Corrado Pavolini, Riduzione per canto e pianoforte di Pietro Scarpini (Milan, 1937), plate number 123926. For a colour image of the set by Gianni Vagnetti, see Monti, Raffaele, ed., Pittori e scultori in scena (Rome, 1986), 194Google Scholar.

19 See Robson, Mark, Italy: Liberalism and Fascism, 1870–1945 (London, 1992), 106ffGoogle Scholar; also Spackman, Barbara, ‘Fascist Women and the Rhetoric of Virility’, in her Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis, 1996), 34–48Google Scholar.

20 Spackman goes so far as to identify virility as the ‘principal node of articulation’ of fascism's discursive formation; see her Fascist Virilities, ix.

21 See Mussolini's 18 December 1935 speech to farmers in Pontinia. Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini, Vol. X, 29–31, here 30.

22 Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini, Vol. X, 49–64, here 63.

23 Ibid., 117–19.

24 See also contemporary writings such as journalist Bruno Roghi's 1936 Tessera verde in Africa Orientale: ‘Di questa terra vuole fare il suo paese. La generosità, emanente da questa fascistica concezione della Guerra d'Africa, ne fa un pioniere di civiltà e di progresso’. [From this earth we have to make its country. Generosity, emanating from this fascist conception of the War of Africa, will make of it a pioneer of civilisation and of progress.] See Roghi, Bruno, Tessera verde in Africa Orientale (Milan, 1936), 200Google Scholar, cited in Del Boca, L'Africa nella coscienza degli Italiani, 36.

25 See Savona, A.V. and Straniero, M.L., eds., Canti dell'Italia fascista (1919–1945) (Milan, 1979), 261–2Google Scholar. For a discography of this song and others on Empire-related subjects, see 262–3.

26 On newsreels, see Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley, 1997), 175ffGoogle Scholar.

27 Silk, Gerald, ‘“Il Primo Pilota”. Mussolini, Fascist Aeronautical Symbolism, and Imperial Rome’, in Lazzaro, Claudia and Crum, Roger, eds., Donatello Among the Blackshirts. History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca, 2005), 67–81, here 67Google Scholar. For a consideration of aviation images in Il deserto tentato in the context of a more general early twentieth-century fascination with aviation, see also Comisso, Irene, ‘Alfredo Casellas Oper Il deserto tentato zwischen Mythologisierung des Flegwesens und faschistischer Propaganda’, Acoustical Arts and Artifacts: Technology, Aesthetics, Communication, 3 (2006), 139–69Google Scholar.

28 Mattioli, Guido, Mussolini aviatore e la sua opera per l'aviazione (Rome, 1935)Google Scholar. See also Radaelli, Cesare, Iniziando Mussolini alle vie del cielo (Milan, 1933)Google Scholar. On the significance of air power in the Ethiopian campaign, see Rochat, Giorgio, ‘The Italian Air Force in the Ethiopian War (1935–1936)’, in Ben-Ghiat, and Fuller, , eds., Italian Colonialism, 37–46Google Scholar.

29 For another photograph of the pilot Mussolini, ‘fondatore dell'impero fascista’, see Silk, ‘Il primo pilota’, 75.

30 See Di Lillo, ‘Alfredo Casella and Il deserto tentato’, 118. For the mention of coralità, see F.A'.s review in ‘Corriere dei teatri’, Corriere della sera (7 May 1937), 5.

31 Il fuoco (1900; rpt Milan, 1996), 127. On Monteverdi reception during the fascist period, see Dell'Antonio, Andrew, ‘Il divino Claudio: Monteverdi and Lyric Nostalgia in Fascist Italy’, this journal, 8/3 (1996), 271–84Google Scholar. ‘Neomadrigalism’ is Mila, Massimo's term; see his ‘Il neomadrigalismo della musica italiana’, in Cronache musicali 1955–1959 (Turin, 1959), 220–23Google Scholar. Other composers using the style included Pizzetti and Malipiero. See Nicolodi, Fiamma, ‘I “ritorni” e il mito dell'antico’, in Chigiana, 37/17 (1980), 15–33Google Scholar; and Carlo Piccardi, trans. J. Lassere, ‘Le néomadrigalisme’, in Dissonanz, 32 (May 1992), 17–25. On earlier Italian ‘revivalist’ trends, see for example Morelli, Giovanni, ed., Oscar Chilesotti. Diletto e scienza agli albori della musicologia italiana: studi e ricerca (Florence, 1987)Google Scholar.

32 Guido Pannain, ‘Il rinascimento e la musica in Italia’, Rivista musicale italiana, 29 (1922), 600–20, here 616.

33 ‘F.A’, ‘Corriere dei teatri’, 5.

34 It may not be too fanciful to suggest that the presence of historicized style for the music of the Ethiopian mountains – that imitative counterpoint shared with the Aviators – mirrors a contemporary belief that in the Ethiopian campaign Italy was merely reclaiming what had once been hers during the reign of the Roman Empire in Africa.

35 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, 2001), 27Google Scholar.

36 For an image, and discussion, see Stone, Marla, ‘The State as Patron: Making Official Culture in Fascist Italy’, in Fascist Visions. Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed. Affron, Matthew and Antliff, Mark (Princeton, 1997), 205–38, here 206Google Scholar. On the amalgamation of ancient and modern in fascist images, see also her The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, 1998), and the work of Fogù, Claudio, including The Historic Imaginary. The Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 ‘About “Returns”’, Christian Science Monitor, 13 October 1928. See also Casella's ‘Neoclassicism in Italy’, Christian Science Monitor, 7 January 1928. For discussions of interpretations of musical neoclassicism as suited to or emblematic of fascism, see Santi, Piero, ‘La musica del fascismo’, Musica/realtà, 2 (1981), 100–103Google Scholar; Taruskin, Richard, ‘Music and Totalitarian Society’, in The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford, 2005), volume IV, 744Google Scholar; and for a contemporary view, Theodor Adorno, ‘Atonales Intermezzo?’ in Anbruch, 11 (May 1929), 187–93 (‘Casella's neo-classicism is unmistakeably based on Fascism’, 187).

38 Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 7.

39 Del Boca, L'Africa nella coscienza degli Italiani, xi.

40 Massimo Mila, ‘Casella fu il solo che ci liberasse completamente tanto dal profumo casalingo quanto dall'odore di chiuso della scuola’; see his ‘Itinerario stilistico, 1901–1942’, in D'Amico and Gatti, eds., Alfredo Casella, 29–68, here 31; Gavazzeni, ‘Il teatro’, in the same volume, 69–86, here 85.

41 John C.G. Waterhouse: ‘Casella, Alfredo’, Grove Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 12 February 2012).

42 Sachs, Harvey, Music in Fascist Italy (New York, 1988), 138Google Scholar. Even Mila de Santis's excellent discussion of the nuances of fascist aesthetics, in her most recent work on Casella during the fascist era, omits Il deserto tentato from discussion; see ‘Casella nel ventennio fascista’, in Illiano, ed., Music in Fascist Italy, 371–400). For more examples, see Di Lillo, ‘Alfredo Casella and Il deserto tentato’, 96–7.

43 See Nicolodi, Fiamma, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Bologna, 1984), 257Google Scholar.

44 Examples by Casella include the Tre canzone trecentesche (1923) and Scarlattiana (1926).

45 Francesco Santoliquido, ‘La piovra musicale ebraica’, Il tevere (14–15 December 1937), 1 and 3. For further examples of such writings, see Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista.

46 Emilia Zanetti is one of the very few who has written about this; see her ‘Gli ultimi anni’, in D'Amico and Gatti, eds., Alfredo Casella, 17–28, particularly 20–25.

47 Sarfatti, Michele, The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. , John and Tedeschi, Anne C. (Madison, WI, 2006), 97Google Scholar. See also Zimmerman, Joshua D., ed., The Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945 (Cambridge, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gillette, Aaron, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 On the intersection between fascist racial politics and postwar memory, see Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, ‘A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation’, in Dubiel, Helmut and Motzkin, Gabriel, eds., The Lesser Evil. Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (London, 2004), 137–53Google Scholar. On the possibility of viewing Il deserto tentato as a ‘safe card’ that appealed to a regime long suspicious of Casella's aesthetics, see Di Lillo, ‘Alfredo Casella and Il deserto tentato’, 115–16.