Ottorino Respighi – Fountains of Rome (1916)

I don’t like this piece as much as its sequel Pines of Rome (1924).  The best thing about the later piece, as I wrote in my post about it, is the third movement, which somehow manages to sound like it was influenced by music written decades later, like some kind of surrealist lounge music.  There’s some of that here too, particularly when the celesta comes to the fore.  I’m thinking, for example, of the passage in the last movement in which the violas play a haunting lullaby against a backdrop of bird-like flute and violin trills and syncopated celesta chords.  Or the passage in the first movement in which a long oboe melody is suspended over a lush string accompaniment that cuts in and out like it was being played on a sampling keyboard, followed by disjunct descending triads in the celesta, piccolo and flutes.  But when Respighi isn’t inadvertently channeling the late 20th century’s weird blend of nostalgia and surrealism, the music often sounds like a cutesified version of Debussy — or, to be anachronistic, like Oliver Wallace’s score for Lady and the Tramp (1955).  I know, I know, he couldn’t have predicted how the musical vocabulary of the 1910s would be turned into Hollywood fluff in the decades to come — but it still sounds pretty cheesy, and not weird hypertrophied alarming-cheesy either.  I have the same problem with the choir in Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe (1912):  I just can’t get past the associations that have developed since the piece was written.  And then there’s the big, bombastic brass music in the third movement.  I almost always feel like someone boring is yelling in my ear when I hear this kind of thing, and this is no exception.  I will say, though, that Respighi sure knows how to orchestrate — in particular, how to use harps and the very high register of the violins to their best advantage.

Ottorino Respighi – Pines of Rome (1924)

Lately everything seems to remind me of the early Stravinsky ballets.  In this case, though, the influence is undeniable, and I’m sure Respighi was well aware of it himself.  The first movement of Pines of Rome, “The Pines of the Villa Borghese,” has Pétrouchka written all over it:  simple, cheerful, repetitive modal melodies, with an emphasis on winds and percussion, and contrasting phrases juxtaposed without any transitions between them.  Maybe it’s a little shinier thanks to the presence of the glockenspiel and celesta, but there’s no way anyone familiar with early 20th century notated music could possibly hear the passage at rehearsal 7 —a dorian-mode melody in eighths and sixteenths, based mostly on the minor tetrachord, played by the trumpets in similar motion over staccato repeated chords in the harp, celesta and piano, accompanied by tambourine and triangle, and accented by grace-note bursts in the winds — and not think of the Shrovetide Fair.  And then there’s the opening of the last movement, “The Pines of the Appian Way,” whose snaky English horn melody, full of grace notes and constantly returning to a single pitch, set over a low martial-sounding ostinato, clearly evokes the “Ritual of the Ancestors” section of The Rite of Spring.

Evoking Stravinsky’s Russian ballets isn’t usually a good move for a composer, because you’re bound to come up short.  And while I do like the piece, it can’t compete with Igor on his own turf.  But the third movement, “The Pines of the Janiculum” — that’s another story entirely.  It was intended to represent a hill in Rome as seen in the moonlight, but what I hear is something different:  the perfect fusion of surrealism and cheesiness, the effect that I tried to achieve in my recent chamber orchestra piece Dayglo Attack Machine but was unable to pull off.  It starts simply enough:  a virtuosic but quiet piano flourish that leads into a long clarinet melody, all accompanied by muted strings playing a chorale-like accompaniment based on a combination of B-major tonality and stacked fourths.  But then something strange happens:  solo strings and celesta enter in another key, playing lush, thick, chromatic music in parallel motion, as Bing Crosby’s backup band were practicing off in the distance.  This leads to an oboe solo that drifts loose over a texture of pianissimo string trills and mechanically ticking celesta and harp.  Harmony becomes unmoored, moving by thirds without any real modulation, every chord made pungent with added sixths and seconds.  At the climax of the movement, there seem to be multiple unrelated layers of music going on at the same time, as the strings wander aimlessly in a chromatic world that’s somewhere between Wagner and Vertigo, the winds continue the diatonic melodies of the piece’s first half, and the celesta, harp and piano explode into a virtuosic frenzy — but still pianissimo!  At the end of the passage, the flutes, oboes, violas, celesta and piano play disjunct major triads while the violins and cellos continue to play a long, slow melody, creating a distinctly Messiaen-like effect.  And at the end of the movement, the musicians are instructed to play a gramophone recording of a nightingale singing.  In 1924.  Eat your heart out, Einojuhani Rautavaara.

There’s other good stuff in the piece.  At the end of the last movement, Respighi manages to make big and triumphant, maybe my least favorite musical affect, appealing to me thanks to some unexpected rhythms and harmonies.  Really, I enjoy the whole thing except for the bombastic second half of the second movement, “Pines Near a Catacomb.”  (Seriously, isn’t being loud and in-your-face in a graveyard in bad taste?)  But that third movement seems to have been written for me personally.