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Franco Sciannameo recalls his association with the grand seigneur of
twentieth-century Italian music in an interview with Luciano Martinis
and Agnese Toniutti. Video recorded at Fondazione Scelsi in Rome on
February 18, 2010.
The Birth of a Masterpiece
Franco Sciannameo
Introduction
The name of the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (born 1905 in
La Spezia, died 1988 in Rome) still means little to audiences worldwide,
despite the considerable amount of interest which his music has awakened
in recent years. For some people, though, myself included, Scelsi’s has been a
household name for a long time.
My association with Scelsi began in the late 1950s, when as a
violin major at the Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia in Rome I spent
many hours browsing the stock of the De Santis music establishment in
Via del Corso, a few blocks away from the Conservatorio. I took notes
about what interested me and of the scores I wished to purchase as
money became available. The Pocket Scores series of contemporary string
quartets published by Universal Edition in Vienna was at the top of my
‘most wanted’ list. The works of Berg, Schönberg, and Bartók, presented
with photoportraits of the composers on the inside covers, were, for me, a
‘must have’. Over the years I bought a lot of them, including an odd item,
almost an ‘intruder’ in the Universal series, which had found its place on
De Santis’s shelf just a quarter of an inch to the left of Schönberg: Giacinto
Scelsi’s Quartetto per archi (1944), published by Edizioni De Santis in 1948.
The typographical style of the publication was pretty much similar to the
Viennese pocket scores; it even boasted a photo-portrait of Scelsi in which
he strikingly resembled Béla Bartók. In addition, a list of Scelsi’s works,
composed since 1934, also published by De Santis, adorned the book’s back
cover. The music of the Quartetto, at first glance, looked just as complex and
intriguing as Berg’s Lyric suite.
‘Why does no one ever play it?’, I asked myself. Even my illustrious
violin teacher, Arrigo Pelliccia, the man who had championed in Italy the
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concertos of Berg, Schönberg, Krenek and others, was not familiar with
Scelsi’s music. ‘Some composers just have to wait for their turn; remember
Beethoven’s late quartets. The Viennese public was convinced he had
gone insane when it heard them for the first time!’, he said. It is also true,
though, that many composers committed their most intimate and daring
thoughts to the string quartet - at once a form, a genre, and an instrumental
ensemble. Consider the enigmatic opening of Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet,
Beethoven’s late quartets, Schubert’s ‘Death and the maiden’ and, in the
twentieth century, Bartók’s six quartets, Berg’s Lyric suite (whose hidden
message was deciphered many year later), Shostakovich’s Quartet no.8, and
the quartets of Sibelius, Janá˘cek, and others.
Generally, the string quartet did not flourish in Italy. In the first
half of the twentieth century, the most noticeable works were Respighi’s
noble Quartetto dorico (1924), Alfano’s Secondo Quartetto (1927), and the
poetic eight quartets of Gian Francesco Malipiero, dating from 1920 to 1964.
Dallapiccola never tackled the form, and Petrassi approached it only in 1958.
So it was even more surprising that Scelsi’s Quartetto, a major work composed
in 1944, went unnoticed. I still have that score in my possession. Several
exemplars have been part of the lending collections of some American
public and university libraries since the work’s publication in 1948. They
are still there, hidden on the shelves, just a quarter of an inch to the left of
Schönberg.
In the early 1960s I was asked by Edizioni De Santis to co-edit for
publication a group of works for harpsichord and strings by Martini, Felici,
and Guglielmi and, having become acquainted with the head of the firm,
Renato De Santis, I asked him if he knew what had happened to Giacinto
Scelsi. ‘That was some experience’, De Santis said. ‘That man was difficult to
deal with; he did not know what he wanted. Fortunately, though, he financed
the entire publishing process of his works, from engraving to printing, so
there were no losses to the firm.’ ‘Was he financially well-off?’, I asked;
De Santis replied, ‘Yes indeed, he is still financially well-off; he is Count
Giacinto Scelsi d’Ayala Valva, the last scion of an ancient Sicilian family
probably of Spanish ancestry. He lives like a recluse in his house on Via San
Teodoro, overlooking the Roman Forum.’
Months later I was invited by violinist Massimo Coen to join
the Quartetto di Nuova Musica, a newly formed group specializing in the
performance of contemporary music. There was much work available to
us - premieres at the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music, a recording
contract with RAI, a European tour and the prospect of a long-term
collaboration with a certain Giacinto Scelsi, the composer of much string
music (four quartets to date), who wished to have it recorded and performed
worldwide. ‘Scelsi has the material means to do what he wishes’, said Coen.
Count Giacinto Scelsi d’Ayala Valva, circa 1940
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Vieri Tosatti, circa 1947
‘Vieri Tosatti, the well-known Roman composer strongly suggests that we
take on the job; you should know that he too is involved in “editing” Scelsi’s
works; in fact, he has been doing it since the late 1940s, when some of
Scelsi’s compositions appeared in the De Santis catalogue.’
And so, for me, the Scelsi mystery began to unfold.
A meeting with Scelsi was set. The composer wished to meet each
member of the quartet and talk about his philosophies and the spiritual
reasons that had led him to change his compositional style and, indeed, his
life-style altogether. His music, in fact, had changed dramatically in the past
twenty years, from anguishly atonal to transparently microtonal, pervaded
by all kinds of Eastern influences. He played some tapes for us, the Quartetto
per archi, now called Quartetto no.l, performed by Quatuor de Paris; Xnoybis
(1964), for unaccompanied violin, played by Devy Erlih; and the Quartetto
no.2 (1961), performed by Societa Cameristica Italiana. The music of that
piece, which employs some cumbersome copper mutes invented by Scelsi,
sounded terrible to us! Midway through the listening, Salvatore, the cellist,
bouncing off his chair, screamed into Scelsi’s face, ‘Questa e la pazzia! You are
crazy, and your music is the reflection of it; you want all of us to become
insane!’
Needless to say, the meeting ended abruptly. The next time we met
at Scelsi’s house we brought along a new cellist, an American woman who
had landed in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship a few years earlier to study
with Enrico Mainardi. Donna was an excellent cellist and made no secret, to
Scelsi’s amazement, that one of the job’s attractions was for her the fact that
the composer was a real Count. Scelsi, sincerely amused by the statement (he
had a soft spot for foreign ladies), gave all of us permission to address him
as Count Scelsi; he did not like to be called Maestro. After all the quartet
members passed Count Scelsi’s stringent scrutiny, finally, one day, the score
and parts of Quartetto no.4 were distributed. We were given a few weeks
to analyse the material prior to rehearsing it under the supervision of both
Vieri Tosatti and Giacinto Scelsi.
In the meantime, a string quartet from Hamburg gave a concert in
Rome at the Goethe Institute. Its programme included Scelsi’s Quartetto
no.2. We were invited to attend the concert, at which the Hamburg players
performed honourably, and at the end of Scelsi’s piece the first violinist
invited the composer, who was present in the hall, to stand and take a bow.
An upset Scelsi, though, moved rapidly to front stage and in a stentorian
yet agitated tone of voice declared that the instrumentalists’ interpretation
did not correspond to his wishes; therefore he could not acknowledge the
audience’s applause.
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The German foursome must have not understood Italian or the
absurdity of Scelsi’s declaration, because one hour later they were the guests
of honour at a reception held in Scelsi’s home. Elliott Carter was among the
guests that evening, and upon learning that the Quartetto di Nuova Musica
was working on Scelsi’s latest quartet, he said that some day he would hope
that his two quartets (it was 1965) would be performed together with Scelsi’s,
so fond was he of Scelsi’s music. Mr. Carter then added that Darius Milhaud
also held Scelsi in high esteem.
Quartetto no.4 (1964)
As soon as we opened the beautifully copied score (identical to the
present Salabert edition), we realised that this quartet was the proverbial
‘different kettle of fish’. It was notated tablature-style, one pentagram
for each string of each instrument, as if the string quartet were a single
instrument with sixteen strings. Scelsi’s particular use of scordatura allows,
in fact, the player to perform double and triple stops otherwise impossible
under normal tuning.
Problems typically inherent to this type of mistuning can be as
serious as they are numerous. First, there are unbalanced pressures applied
by the hyper- and tensionless strings on the belly of the instruments (one
violin experienced a sound-post crack after a few days, and there were
constant problems in keeping the cello’s high-A-stretched-to-C in tune).
Next, different fingering systems had to be devised. And finally, the group
had to establish standard pitch for quarter and three-quarter tones played
below and above a given central note. Fortunately, Tosatti’s infallible ear
could detect an ‘out-of-tune’ microtone in the midst of any situation.
Rehearsals took place every other evening at Tosatti’s house for about a
month. Tosatti conducted and took notes of any eventual adjustments made
to the score, while Scelsi, keeping himself out of sight, was mostly concerned
with the overall aesthetics of the piece. I remember him saying, ‘There is
an arch somewhere in the piece which I want you to reach to; it should
sound like the culmination of a chorale.’ But he was never clear where in
the piece it was going to occur, and the notation in the score seemed unable
to identify it. One evening the search for the elusive chorale leading to
the quartet’s ‘golden’ moment finally revealed it, as Scelsi exclaimed from
the other room, ‘É qui, é qui!’. It was there all along, in bar 167, triggered
by a low pedal note in the cello, played fortissimo. We just were not getting
enough into the center of the sound to strike the right note - we had not
yet entered into the illusive third sonic dimension about which Scelsi was so
adamant. That was indeed a moment of discovery which unlocked, for the
four of us, the door to this complex man’s poetic. Luciano, our violist and
most sceptical member of the group finally let himself remark, ‘You know, I
really think that the Count is good! Il Conte é bravo!’.
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The Quartetto di Nuova Musica recorded Scelsi’s Quartetto no.4 in
the autumn of 1965. Vieri Tosatti conducted the session which also included
two compositions for soprano, string quartet and percussion belonging to
Khoom (1962), a set of pieces for soprano and various instruments. Michiko
Hirayama was the singer. In the late 1960s our recorded performance of
Quartetto no.4 was transferred to LP (Mainstream MS 5009) and released
in the United States. The album, entitled ‘New music for string quartet’,
included Pierre Boulez’s Livre pour quatuor: I, II & V, performed by the
Quatuor Parrenin and Earl Brown’s String Quartet (1965), performed by the
New York String Quartet. This album was probably the debut of Scelsi’s
music on commercial records. Early in 1966 we made another recording
of Quartetto no.4, this time for RAI in Rome and without Tosatti’s
participation. Scelsi, present in the studio, became actively involved by
setting up microphones and listening in the booth to various takes. It was
his suggestion to double-mike the cello for a more effective rendition of the
Chorale, now that we finally had found its hiding place.
Quartetto No. 4 was, at that time, Scelsi’s favourite piece of music,
and he was very proud to play our tape for special guests. I remember the
Roman critic Gianfranco Zaccaro being introduced to Scelsi’s music. He
wrote an essay ‘Un musicien hors du temps: Giacinto Scelsi’ after listening
to the work. On another occasion, avant-garde conductor Daniele Paris
enjoyed the intricacies of the Quartetto’s unusually notated score. Then came
the turn of French violinist Ivry Gitlis, in Rome for a performance of René
Leibowitz’s Violin Concerto. When the tape of Quartetto no.4 was played
for guests, Scelsi always requested the presence of members of the group.
In 1965-66 Scelsi was ready to emerge from self-imposed obscurity.
Tosatti had prepared for him the scores of most of his major orchestral
compositions, and many more works were in the making. Scelsi’s oeuvre was
taking shape. However, it was still a secret shared by only a few.
Through the efforts of the Italian conductor-pianist Piero Guarino
and the Greek composer Jani Christou, Quartetto di Nuova Musica was
invited to perform at the 1966 Hellenic Festival of Contemporary Music
in Athens, Greece. The selected programme consisted of quartet music by
Alfredo Casella, Franco Evangelisti, Luciano Chailly, and - with the world
public premiere of Quartetto no.4 - Giacinto Scelsi.
Scelsi travelled to Greece ahead of us. There he was treated like the
grand seigneur of contemporary music, and his quartet soon came to be regarded
as the gem of the Festival. When the audience demanded that Scelsi’s piece
be repeated, he was beside himself; for him it must have been an experience
just short of apotheosis. For us, as we rearranged chairs and music stands for
the encore, it was like entering a new era: the twenty-first century.
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Quartetto di Nuova Musica
from left: Franco Sciannameo, Donna Magendanz, Gianni Antonioni, Massimo Coen
Athens, April 19, 1966
A photograph of the Quartetto di Nuova Musica was taken
backstage by a reporter after the performance. It is a pity that Scelsi
declined to be photographed with the group. That evening at a reception
given by the Christous in their Athens penthouse to honour the festival’s
participants, Scelsi and two other gentlemen performed on an upright piano
a very dynamic and prolonged six-hand improvisation.
Upon our return to Rome, Piero Guarino, the leader of a string
ensemble to which we all belonged, asked Scelsi if he would consider writing
a piece for eleven solo strings. A month later we were rehearsing Anagamin,
a work strongly related to Quartetto no.4, which received its premiere in
Naples shortly thereafter.
Our next Scelsi assignment was to learn the Quartetto no.3 (1963),
a tamer work than its successor. That time also coincided with my joining
the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia for a tour of the
Soviet Union and the offer of a permanent position in that orchestra. I sadly
resigned from Quartetto di Nuova Musica.
Since moving to the United States in 1968 I have chosen not to
follow too closely the ascent of Scelsi’s music, his great success, the various
‘discoveries’ about his music on the part of newcomers, and the acidic
polemics which erupted after his death about the authorship of his music.
I have preferred instead to remember Count Scelsi as the extraordinary
man who re-invented his own persona by building a highly original musical
patrimony. Scelsi did not work alone; he needed collaborators. Many times
he said that he was not a composer at all, but only a messenger - un postino.
He was inspired from an Elsewhere; he himself taped sound sequences
executed on small electronic apparati, but someone had to take care of the
rest. That someone was Vieri Tosatti. The scores of the great orchestral
compositions and the string quartets were probably set by Tosatti. I am
certain that Quartetto no.4 and Anagamin were. Theirs was a collaboration
that lasted some thirty years - a lifetime, really - and it was a rare musical
intercourse between two highly sensitive human beings. Theirs was perhaps
a Faustian bargain, whose details can be known only to them. No one should
assume the right to criticise or reduce the value of their thoughts or their
actions. Tosatti was indeed wrong when, shortly after Scelsi’s death, he
decided to enter the polemical frenzy by launching his J’accuse, in the form
of an article entitled ‘Giacinto Scelsi c’est moi!’ published in the January
1989 issue of Il Giorale della Musica. Vieri Tosatti regretted that unnecessary
outburst. From the tranquillity of his villa outside Rome he wished to remain
silent on the entire Scelsi episode. He hoped that some day his own music
would also receive due recognition. Tosatti passed away in 1999.
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I would like to close my memoir with a curious note. Around the
time of my leaving the group, Quartetto di Nuova Musica asked Tosatti to
write a string quartet which, ideally, we would programme together with
Scelsi’s. Scelsi had other ideas, however. Of course, his ideal quartet concert
would have consisted of an all-Scelsi programme, but since we knew only
one of his quartets, he surprisingly suggested that we look into Faure’s String
Quartet op.121 (1923) - his last composition - as a possible companion to
Quartetto no.4. When, in 1968, Tosatti did finish his Quartetto d’archi (later
recorded by Quartetto di Nuova Musica), he was no longer collaborating
with Scelsi. In fact - and how strange - he had ceased composing altogether.
[View of the Roman Forum from Scelsi’s windows]
Creare - Issue V - February 2011
© 2011 by Franco Sciannameo
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