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Rating: Like a Portrait.
"The words, spoken almost always in a half-voice, interspersed with silences, seem often to lay down their realistic guise to say things he glimpses but cannot express with mere words"
And that is why there is music. Opalescent music, suspended like the sunlight of October. In the fog between two centuries. A life unravels in a maze that opens a thousand cultural doors, a thousand tragedies, the birth of doubts, dives into the unconscious and escapes from reality. From late Romanticism to war, between Venice in 1876 and Switzerland in 1948. Like a portrait, this of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari.
"I live in Switzerland because, being of a German father and an Italian mother, in this cursed war I found no homeland anywhere. My neutrality is congenital, not out of indifference, but due to flows of antithetical love. A hard yet fruitful experience"
Listening to Wolf-Ferrari is like dressing as Harlequin. Serenity of colorful music, made of torn patches of soul. Music quiet and ancient, like Mozartian watercolors, music with measured and twilight flavors. Small and late things. Melancholies of misty dawns over the sea, of soul crumpling like autumn leaves and flying away on the wind of a “Presto,” perfect geometries of notes like snowflakes. Wolf-Ferrari writes music "in the old way". He writes of strings, of violins, of harmonies, where everything was beginning to be experimentation, twelve-tone technique. Wolf-Ferrari still gives voice to beauty, while truth tears it, cloaks it in its noise.
"Every change, even the most longed-for, contains its melancholy, because what we leave behind is a part of ourselves. We must, in a way, die to enter a new life"
Listening to Wolf-Ferrari's Idillio-Concertino op. 15 for oboe and strings is like thinking of spring in the heart of October's fog. This music has a strange and trusting serenity. It is an almost “stubborn” serenity. Because "genius is the miracle of returning to harmony through the power of love". And Wolf-Ferrari often repeats that "genius is a duty".
The music of Wolf-Ferrari has no adjectives. It is only therapy, exorcism from oneself. Exorcism from the evils of the Second World War, from masks, from hypocrisies.
"Ah, these blessed nerves strained by the war! Everyone is touched, according to their nature. Among my friends, one, at forty, abandoned his profession as a musician and devoted himself to watercolor, another has become psychoanalytic; the poet Rilke, who was with me a week ago, has not written a single verse in these five years; the novelist Wassermann, whom I saw the day before yesterday, is so inaccessible as to make pity those who listen to him; though he has remained active and lucid"
Listening to Wolf-Ferrari is to melt in the painful and exhausted ecstasy of the Adagio from the concertino op. 15, or to breathe the bucolic lyricism and remote timbre of the English horn in the concerto op. 34, the last work of the great Venetian master. It is the childlike wonder of the "Preambolo" of op. 15, an enchanting and melodic sketch, almost a Gozzano poem set to music. A twilight full of always measured, clear, crystalline light. The timbres of the strings that cradle, classical harmonies, perfect, a safe harbor.
Or the impressive and playful finale of the concerto op. 34, "Allegro moderato, pesante", the last page of Wolf-Ferrari, which, with its fanfares, reinvents in 1947 a page of Haendel, or of the most sumptuous Vivaldi.
"One day Giacomo Puccini asked Wolf-Ferrari why he always wrote musical comedies and hesitated to measure himself with drama. - Because drama makes me suffer too painfully: and I do not know how to suffer through it! - replied the master shyly. And the man from Lucca good-naturedly replied: -In time, one gets used to it! – "
The quotes from this review are by Giulio Cogni – "Wolf-Ferrari, Uomo"
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