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Notes 58.1 (2001) 170-172



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Review

Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono


Gioachino Rossini. Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono. Poesia di Giovanni Marchetti. Prima esecuzione: Roma - Aula Massima del Palazzo Senatorio sul Campidoglio le sera del 1° gennaro 1847. A cura di Mauro Bucarelli. (Edizione critica delle opere. Sez. 2: Musiche di scena e cantate, vol. 6.) Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1996. [Introd., p. v; indice, p. vii; abbrevs., p. viii; tavola delle fonti principali, p. ix; premessa, p. xi; criteri dell'edizione, p. xiii-xx; pref., p. xxi-xxxiii; fonti dell'edizione e problemi particolari, p. xxxv-xxxvi; organico, p. xxxvii; personaggi, p. xxxix; indice dei pezzi, p. xli; score, 367 p.; commento critico, p. 371-415. Cloth. L 180,000.]

It is a truism of historical study that we find it difficult to appreciate the naive enthusiasm expressed at the start of a promising, yet ultimately failed, enterprise because it is impossible to suppress our knowledge of the unfortunate result. Although history may forgive a composer who unwittingly glorifies a nascent tyrant in song, music's ability to recreate an innocent past in the sadder-but-wiser present frequently dooms the laudatory composition to oblivion. In the case of Gioachino Rossini's Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono, additional factors contribute to the work's absence from both the concert stage and numerous studies of its composer's oeuvre. The fall from fashion of the secular cantata as a genre lessened the chance that this tribute to the controversial Pope Pius IX would survive beyond its 1847 premiere. Further, since this particular cantata borrows music from four of Rossini's operas, each belonging to a different publisher, the composer did not attempt to arrange for its publication as a separate work. The present score, edited by Mauro Bucarelli and issued by the Fondazione Rossini in 1996 as part of its critical edition of Rossini's works, is therefore our first point of contact with this troublesome yet impressive composition.

Pope Pius IX, who led the Roman Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878, remains a divisive figure today. Remembered chiefly for opposing the political unification of Italy and for issuing some devastatingly anti-Semitic edicts, Pius IX's recent beatification by Pope John Paul II has reopened old wounds among both liberals and Jews. And yet when he rose to the papacy after the death of the ultra-conservative Gregory XVI, Pius IX (born Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti) was hailed as the answer to Italy's national aspirations. The Giobertian formula of a peacefully consolidated federation of states under papal control seemed, with the ascent of Pius IX, not only possible, but also desirable, and when the newly elected pope granted amnesty to political exiles and prisoners in July 1846, hopes were raised throughout the Italian peninsula. [End Page 170]

As explained by Bucarelli in an ample introductory essay (like the critical commentary, given only in Italian), although Rossini had retired from operatic composition after completing Guillaume Tell in 1829, he remained a powerful voice on the Italian cultural scene. A political moderate who favored unity without bloodshed, Rossini welcomed the new pope with his "Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX," yet another adaptation of the "Coro dei Bardi" from La donna del lago (1819), which he had already reworked in 1844 for the unveiling of a monument to Torquato Tasso. On the same day that Rossini led a force of 500 in a performance of the "Grido di esultazione," Giuseppe Spada, a historian, music lover, and financier with ties to the powerful Torlonia family of Rome, asked the composer to write a full-length cantata. The text that Spada offered, written by the Marchese Giovanni Marchetti degli Angiolini, placed Pius IX's act of clemency at the center of a neo-Guelph vision of an idealized Italian state. Worn down by chronic illness and mental fatigue, Rossini protested that he no longer composed new music, but he agreed to provide Marchetti with a pre- existing chorus that could be...

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