The Song of a Life: Francesco Paolo Tosti (1846-1916) (review)

Ortona is a pleasant, small seaside town on the Adriatic coast of central Italy, quiet and unpretentious, perhaps even uneventful. Beside the municipio and newly restored theatre stands the civic monument to her proudest son, Sir Francesco Paolo Tosti, many of whose memorabilia are lovingly preserved in the archives of the town's Istituto Nazionale Tostiano. Like many parts of the Abruzzo that hardly figured in either the humanist Renaissance or the Grand Tour, it remained relatively unknown, isolated from the great cultural centres. From this unassuming background, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century Francesco Paolo Tosti rocketed to international celebrity to an extent that must have been hardly comprehensible to many of Ortona's citizens. Today, this region still inspires an intense loyalty among its inhabitants, which accounts for the acute sense of betrayal felt by Ortonesi when Tosti took British citizenship. Time has healed this wound, and he has now assumed the status almost of popular hero.

Francesco Sanvitale's The Song of a Life itself represents a lifetime's work of unfailing devotion to Tosti's cause. Actually, the life itself occupies a mere sixty-nine pages of this large book, but nevertheless it charts his career in impressively copious documents from his origins in Ortona to the Italian court and then to a charmed existence as music master to the British royal family and welcome guest in the salons of the English aristocracy. From this account it would seem that his wit, good humour, and air of gentlemanly bonhomie endeared him to all, yet testimonies to another side of his character could also have been found. When in 1898 Tosti felt his position as impresario for royal concerts usurped by the Queen's Lady-in-Waiting, Marie Mallet, for a performance of Wagner he was determined to give no assistance:

The music last night was a great success and I need not have been so anxious, but Tosti was in a bad temper and frightened me by saying Marie Brema's voice would blow the Queen out of her chair and Norman Salmon had no fixed address and was mixed up in a divorce case. Imagine my feelings! I was in agony and on the verge of hysterics, however, Sir Arthur came to my aid, calmed Tosti gave me courage and now the Queen raves about Marie Brema and I am covered with glory. I fully expect I shall have a Wagnerian Cycle here at Windsor ere long. May I be here to see it. Tosti remained in a vile temper all evening and played the accompaniments abominably. I felt deeply for the artistes. (Victor Mallet, Life with Queen Victoria

(London, 1968), 134)

Since Sanvitale's intention is to praise Tosti, he does not dwell long on the malicious criticism levelled by at least some contemporaries that his appeal was wide rather than deep: such calumnies of the 'superficial listener' are dispensed with quickly. Even the passage quoted from Tosti's arch-critic Vittorio Ricci's article 'Francesco Paolo Tosti e la lirica vocale italiana dell'Ottocento' (Rivista musicale italiana, 24 (1917), 491–9) is a little selective, since elsewhere Ricci does not mince his words. (The entire text is translated as App. III in John Arthur Little, 'Romantic Italian Song Style in the Works of Francesco Paolo Tosti and Some of his Contemporaries' (DMA diss., University of Illinois, 1977): 'Among the defects, however, were a general superficiality accompanied by a lack of true suggestive force and of emotive power, a too frequent uniformity of melodic gestures, of rhythm and of dynamics; a poverty of harmonic texture and of accompaniment configurations; a scarce supply of coloristic effects . . .'.)

The bulk of Savitale's book exhaustively covers the Italian romanze, thankfully illustrated by an abundance of music examples; it gives detailed descriptions of many of the songs and their texts, and provides a mine of contextual...