Aspects of Alfano: Turandot, Mussolini, and the Second String Quartet

Franco Sciannameo reappraises the achievement of the little-known Italian composer

The photograph reproduced below was taken on 23 October 1926 at the Palazzo Chigi in Rome. The occasion was the visit to Prime Minister Benito Mussolini of a group of noted Italian composers. They descended upon the capital from various parts of Italy like ‘a bunch of poor believers in search of a patron saint in an increasingly pagan world’, wrote Adriano Lualdi, the gentleman in the picture wearing a bowtie. These composers presented Mussolini with a programme initiative, to take place in Bologna, which would showcase the finest of Italian contemporary music. Mussolini, a sincere music-lover and an amateur violinist, was impressed. Guaranteeing the organisers much-needed state funds for the event’s implementation, he also suggested (or was it an order?) that future events take place in Rome. Lualdi, the meeting’s chronicler,1 wrote that the historical encounter between the leader of the country and ‘the most neglected category of Italian artists’ went very well, thus adding a special flavour to the ‘fettuccine al burro’ the musicians savoured at the celebrated restaurant Alfredo, in the nearby Via della Scrofa.

The photograph commemorates some of the best musical minds in Italy, led by Franco Alfano and Ottorino Respighi (situated at Mussolini’s right). Many Italian musicians maintained personal relationships with Mussolini, keeping him abreast of every move of their careers, flooding his desk with scores and books, pestering him with petulant petitions of every sort, and requesting his presence at performances of their music or, if he could not be present in person, even his ear for radio broadcasts. By hoping for his paternalistic omnipresence, these highly creative individuals did indeed contribute to the perpetration of the Mussolini myth, perhaps in tune with the popular saying that ‘Mussolini was everywhere and heard everything’.

Hundreds of the letters which Italian musicians wrote to Mussolini, from the time of his appointment as Prime Minister to the very last moments of the Fascist regime, are deposited in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Segreteria particolare del Duce, Carteggio ordinario. These letters, or at least those written by composers, were published by Fiamma Nicolodi in her splendid study Musica e Musicisti nel ventennio fascista. Through this correspondence it is possible to formulate a clear idea about the relationship between music and politics during a period which was as fateful as it was complex. In the course of a study in progress, Mussolini’s musicians, I have been focussing on three particularly interesting composers and the numerous exchanges they had with their Commander-in-Chief: Franco Alfano, Ildebrando Pizzetti, and Adriano Lualdi. I have been focusssing on them because they were convinced Mussolinians. They unquestionably admired the man, without necessarily endorsing some of his political decisions nor siding with those of the many gerarchi surrounding him. Perhaps such a stance allowed all three of them to remain very much active and in postions of authority in the years after 1945.