Attività concertistica e musica strumentale da camera a Roma (1856-1870)

Abstract

Music making in Rome during the fifteen years that preceded 1870 (the year of the Breach of Porta Pia that won the city for Italy) was a much more complex, “Italian” and “European” affair than has hitherto been noted. Music was played at a variety of public occasions in concerts that gradually assumed a more modern structure. This meant not only a departure from the charity concerts (with the promotion of private initiatives by genuine musical organizers) and the standard mixed-genre recipe of the “vocal and instrumental academies”, but also a departure from the predominant involvement of amateurs, who began to make way for the more refined skills of the professional musicians.
While in compositional terms the production of instrumental music in the secular sphere was hardly abundant in Rome, an awareness of instrumental culture was maturing in the environments of the two institutions (the Pontificia Congregazione ed Accademia di Santa Cecilia and the Accademia Filarmonica Romana) that organized public “esercizi” of classical music and had explicit programmatic aims.
Outside the academy environment, what particularly stands out in the 1860s is the activity of a group of instrumentalists revolving round the matinées of instrumental classical music: in particular Tullio Ramacciotti, Giovanni Sgambati, Ettore Pinelli and their collaborators. Stimulated, amongst other things, by the vital presence of Franz Liszt, who was living in Rome in these years, these musicians made bold organizational choices and adopted a very confident, open-minded approach. In cultural terms, the most important factor in the musical scene of those years was surely the establishment of fruitful links with other centres of musical activity in Italy and the contact with musicians and audiences of a broader European nature. This was in line with both the cosmopolitanism that had always a feature of the city and the gradual process of Italianization that was transforming the capital of the Papal State into the capital of the Kingdom of Italy in those very years.