Playing Music While Rome Burned

Antokoletz, Elliott

Playing Music While Rome Burned Music in Fascist Italy by Harvey Sachs W W Norton & Company, 1987.271 pp, $2495 Reviewed by Elliott Antokoletz Harvey Sachs's intention in Music in Fascist Italy...

...Sachs has provided us with one of the most lucid, meaningful and relatively objective historical perspectives regarding the conditions that led most Italian musicians—as well as prominent foreign ones—to blindly worship the Duce (Mussolini) as the savior of Italy and perhaps Europe...
...This early phase was also characterized by an overriding opportunism by composers and performers ranging from "true believers" in the regime (of which there were apparently many) to political know-nothings and cynics...
...Nevertheless, the author of Music in Fascist Italy has let the documentation speak for itself...
...he was presented with the Bela Bartok Memorial Plaque and Diploma by the Hungarian government in 1981...
...Sachs shows that Toscanini's gradual change of mind and his increasingly unequivocal, anti-Fascist public assertions may be measured to some extent in correlation with Mussolini's sharp turn to the right...
...Yet among the most unswervingly loyal Fascists were the Italian futurists, whose musical products glorifying war and the machine age were anything but a representation of musical order...
...Can we attribute it to the regime's own vainglory and lack of true artistic commitment, its detrimental authoritarian intrusions into the administrative workings of its institutions...
...Italian festivals liberally included the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and the other Jewish composers until the implementation of the racial laws in 1938, a performance of Alban Berg's Wozzeck in Rome even as late as 1942, and the music of most other modern international composers...
...In the second phase of Italian Fascism's evolution, which was firmly established when Mussolini launched his overt racist campaign in 1938, more musicians began to renounce their earlier illusions regarding Fascist salvation of the Italian nation and began to move into the anti-Fascist camp...
...both stood for order and reactionary revolution...
...Although he occasionally interprets the issues that emerge from the materials, he provides the'maximum of documentary evidence with a'minimum of bias on a subject that no civilized person can approach without some sense of personal and artistic involvement...
...The Fascist futurists (who, until about 1935, "were the oddest sreatures in Italy's musical menagerie,") and Mussolini's support of other modernists, should dispel any notion that there is a connection between music and political spheres...
...Elliott Antokoletz is professor of musicology at the University of Texas, Austin He has written several books on composer Bela Bartok, including Beta Bartok A Guide to Research (Garland, 1988) and The Music of Beta Bartok (University of California, 1984...
...The author's primary intention is not to condone or condemn, but to provide a better understanding of the conditions that elicited behavior that we can judge from our contemporary vantage point as abhorrent...
...It may come as a surprise that two of the greatest anti-Fascist Italian musicians, conductor Arturo Toscanini and composer Luigi Dallapiccola, supported Mussolini during his early rise to power...
...During the first phase of the evolution of Fascism, from 1922 through "the early 1930s, the arts enjoyed a certain freedom until the Fascists began to introduce restrictive laws...
...He offers a vast amount of detailed primary-source documentation regarding the day-to-day bureaucratic workings of the Italian musical institutions and, to a lesser extent, the role of the composers and performers themselves...
...Some technical discussion of the varied compositional types produced during the Fascist era, in contrast to Nazi Germany, would have provided a more concrete account of the history and nature of Italian music in the interwar period...
...The claim was made that there is a strong relationship between neoclassicism and Fascism...
...The political stances of Toscanini and lesser Italian musical figures are extensively explored by Sachs in the context of difficult political and psychological conditions...
...Playing Music While Rome Burned Music in Fascist Italy by Harvey Sachs W W Norton & Company, 1987.271 pp, $2495 Reviewed by Elliott Antokoletz Harvey Sachs's intention in Music in Fascist Italy is to explore, document and interpret the conditions under which Italian musical institutions, composers and performers struggled to survive during one of the darkest periods in human history...
...Sachs suggests that one could look at Italian musical development, or lack of it, during the Fascist period and conclude that the regime had little bearing on its undramatic musical developments...
...What are we to make of the general dearth of musical quality during the Fascist period...
...However, Sachs's concerns are almost entirely cultural and political rather than musical, and this is one of the shortcomings of the book...
...Sachs's evidence reveals that the Italian Fascist movement never really had any consistent ideological orientation toward either conservative or modern musical styles, but rather supported those opportunists who knew how to ingratiate themselves with Mussolini and present programs that might produce the most flattering picture of the regime to the rest of the world...
...In light of this book, we may also come to understand that certain musical styles in an authoritarian (or any) society have no inherent connections with the basic society's political assumptions...
...It seems that only a handful of musicians had recognized Fascism for what it was from the beginning...

Vol. 14 • June 1989 • No. 4


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.