Respighi: Il tramanto
Ottorino Respighi lifted the text from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s morbid 1816 poem “The Sunset” for his work of the same title for string quartet (or string orchestra) and mezzo-soprano. Written during the art world’s pivotal post-Wagner years, a century after its source material, Il tramanto reads like a retelling of the fetishistic nocturnal fixation that gripped the star-crossed lovers Tristan and Isolde, a sort of Respighian Liebestod. Shelley’s poem chronicles a tragic romance between a lady and her youth, one that met its mortal end after the youth’s final musing, “‘Is it not strange…I never saw the sun? / We will walk here / To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’” The echoes of Tristan are loud and clear in this image of the day as a destroyer of love, and like Wagner’s ill-fated lovers, Shelley’s pair only achieves their erotic reunion in the eternal night of death.
Respighi’s timely resurrection of Shelley’s poem in a post-Romantic context also had resonances with the contemporary Italian Symbolist movement, and his syllabic vocal line sensitive to the idioms of spoken Italian recalls the innovative direct libretto setting of Debussy’s recent Pelléas et Mélisande. Respighi’s creation is intensely expressive, but bound up in the delicate intimacy of chamber music and perfumed with fleeting chromaticism — in this respect a far cry from the larger-than-life scale and more aggressive brand of harmony of Wagner. A crepuscular tenderness enswathes Il tramanto and seems a faithful realization of its affective essence: chamber music instead of opera, poetry instead of dramatic libretto.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Ottorino Respighi lifted the text from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s morbid 1816 poem “The Sunset” for his work of the same title for string quartet (or string orchestra) and mezzo-soprano. Written during the art world’s pivotal post-Wagner years, a century after its source material, Il tramanto reads like a retelling of the fetishistic nocturnal fixation that gripped the star-crossed lovers Tristan and Isolde, a sort of Respighian Liebestod. Shelley’s poem chronicles a tragic romance between a lady and her youth, one that met its mortal end after the youth’s final musing, “‘Is it not strange…I never saw the sun? / We will walk here / To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’” The echoes of Tristan are loud and clear in this image of the day as a destroyer of love, and like Wagner’s ill-fated lovers, Shelley’s pair only achieves their erotic reunion in the eternal night of death.
Respighi’s timely resurrection of Shelley’s poem in a post-Romantic context also had resonances with the contemporary Italian Symbolist movement, and his syllabic vocal line sensitive to the idioms of spoken Italian recalls the innovative direct libretto setting of Debussy’s recent Pelléas et Mélisande. Respighi’s creation is intensely expressive, but bound up in the delicate intimacy of chamber music and perfumed with fleeting chromaticism — in this respect a far cry from the larger-than-life scale and more aggressive brand of harmony of Wagner. A crepuscular tenderness enswathes Il tramanto and seems a faithful realization of its affective essence: chamber music instead of opera, poetry instead of dramatic libretto.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival