Music: What Is Modern?

Much of the attention in contemporary opera is drawn by U.S., English or German composers: Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze, Werner Egk. But Italy, opera’s birthplace, still produces an impressive share of the breed —some 500 new operas a year. Each year the best of the current Italian operatic product goes on display at a remarkable opera festival—the Teatro delle Novita, winding up its 17th season in the Alpine hill town of Bergamo, and known as the “gateway to La Scala.”

Two Extremes. The Bergamo festival has launched such well-known Italian composers as Gian Francesco Malipiero and Giorgio Ghedini on their operatic careers (a notable exception: Gian Carlo Menotti, who, says a friend, “found his Bergamo in America”). The two new works at this year’s festival displayed the extremes of two warring contemporary Italian styles. The Admiral, by Arturo Andreoli, 58, a longtime coach at La Scala, was a typical example of verismo (an operatic movement comparable to literary “realism”), made popular in the late igth century by Mascagni, Leonca-—vallo, Puccini. Based on a one-act play by Chekhov, the opera had to do with a )’: drunken bum masquerading as an admiral at a wedding party. Exposed when he fails to identify a snatch of Morse code, the -phony admiral exits, announcing with sad dignity: “If I were really a nobleman, I would challenge you all to a duel.” The Admiral was studded with the kind of lush melody the Italians love—Andreoli borrowed much of the opera’s outdated style from Mascagni.

In contrast, The Sentence, by Giacomo Manzoni, 28, was a shrill, spare twelve-tone work that made fiendishly difficult demands on the singers and left the orchestra pit littered, in the words of one critic, with “the murdered bodies of the instruments.” Set in China in the 1940s during the Japanese occupation, the opera told of a wife who betrays her husband to the enemy, is tried by the village council and dismissed with the existentialist in junction: “We neither condemn nor absolve you. You alone can decide whether you were right or wrong, and your soul throughout eternity will be your judge.”

Talented Local. In the opinion of Bindo Missiroli, an insurance broker who founded the Bergamo festival in 1937 (it was interrupted by the war), post-Puccini Italians of both the verismo and the twelve-tone school are “still the world’s greatest opera composers. In Germany the modernists use the voice as another instrument, seldom giving importance to the word. Italians want to under stand what’s going on.” The biggest hit of the festival last week was the world première of a 143-year-old one-acter titled Pygmalion, composed not by a modern twelve-toner but by a talented local boy named Gaetano Donizetti. Written in 1817, when Donizetti was 19, the forgotten opera was rediscovered by Missiroli in an orchestrated version in a box of manuscripts found in Donizetti’s house in Bergamo. Equipped with a spirited libretto, it had a fine, rich overture and enough tuneful arias to satisfy any Donizetti fan. “Of the three one-act operas given in Bergamo last night,” wrote one critic, “the most modern was Pygmalion.”