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Obscure composers (1)
Giovanni Pacini —the strange case of an "empty chapter" in Italian music.
I hesitate to use the word
“obscure” for someone who wrote upwards of 70 operas (!) and who for a period of
at least 20 years (1825-45) was overshadowed in
Italian music only by his contemporary, Rossini. Not even Bellini and Donizetti got as much “air
time” as Pacini. This passage from the New York Times
of June 22, 1858, is instructive (it is a review
written on the revival of Pacini’s opera Saffo
(Sapho) at the Academy of Music in New
York City the day before): “The first quarter of the present century possessed a great wealth of composers, and so far as Italy is concerned, it may be regarded as the most fruitful of her modern times… [We remember]…Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini…The reputations against which these men struggled are precisely those which have since disappeared from musical remembrance…We seldom hear the names of such men as Pacini…[but he] was for many years the most popular and prolific composer of Italy…” Pacini attended the music conservatory in Bologna. His first real success was Adelaide e Comingio in 1817. He moved to Rome in 1820 and kept composing, squeezing in an affair with Princess Pauline Borghese, Napoleon's sister! He then moved to Naples, helped out Rossini with three arias for the latter's Matilde di Shabran (1821), and ran San Carlo for two years. Pacini's operas that premiered in Naples (at San Carlo unless otherwise indicated, below) were:
Saffo is Pacini's best-known opera; it premiered on November 29, 1840. The libretto was by Salvatore Cammerano (1801-52) (who also wrote the libretti for Donizetti's Lucia di Lamermoor and Verdi's Luisa Miller). Saffo has been revived occasionally over the years. It was last performed in Naples in April of 1967 featuring the great Turkish soprano, Leyla Gencer, in the title role of Sappho. The review in the Neapolitan daily, il Mattino, on April 2, 1967, was totally laudatory. The critic, Alfredo Parente, praised everything—production, singers, the quality of the work, itself, and the skill of maestro Rubino Profeta (1910-1985) (a Neapolitan violinist, composer and eventually artistic director of San Carlo from 1972-74) who had to reconstruct the opera from Pacini's manuscript in the archives of the San Pietro a Maiella conservatory since the published Ricordi scores had not survived damage from WWII. Like most who have written about Pacini (and there are not that many), the critic is puzzled by the fact that this work of "great dignity and originality" comes from one who is an "empty chapter" in Italian music. When he says empty, he means empty—that is, there isn't even negative opinion about Pacini. There is NO opinion. Yet, says the critic, Pacini fits in perfectly—as do Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti—between the music of Cherubini (1760-1842) and Verdi in the history of Italian music, and he certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with those three great names—or at least Pacini deserves to be fairly passed or failed in comparison to them; yet, that has not happened. This fertile and original composer has simply "disappeared from musical remembrance."  Perhaps
the answer lies in the time-line. Rossini quit writing
opera in 1829 (he lived another 40 years!); Bellini died
in 1835 at the tragically young age of 34. Donizetti
died in 1848. All three of them are "pre-Verdi," (although there is a
brief overlap between Donizetti's last and Verdi's first
works). None of them is seen historically as being in
competition with Verdi, who composed from 1840 to 1900.
Pacini, on the other hand composed from 1815 to 1867,
which puts him in direct comparison with Verdi, a
composer so stunningly creative and prolific that not
only is he number 1 in Italian opera for entire decades,
but as the Latin phrase has it: "ubi maior, minor cessat"—roughly,
no one is in
second place!It is perhaps justifiable “shorthand” to refer to Bellini and Donizetti as “co-founders” of the new sounds of Italian lyric Romanticism that paved the way for Verdi, but if Pacini had stopped composing sometime in the 1840s after a string of success (that started with Saffo), he might, paradoxically, be remembered as part of that group. After all, not even Verdi’s Nabucco (1842) was initially as well-received and as popular as Pacini’s Saffo. Instead, Pacini periodically retired for a few years at a time to take stock. He would wander off to teach composition at a conservatory or give private lessons; then he would stage a come-back. At one point (in the 1830s) he is reported to have said that he had been "surpassed by the divine Bellini," but he overcame that crisis and had a particularly fine decade in the 1840s. Surely, sometime in the early 1850s, he must have had a chance to listen to the music of this young whippersnapper, Giuseppe Verdi, and have heard in only two years (1851 and 1852), Rigoletto, il Trovatore and la Traviata—heard, as it were, the Verdi juggernaut picking up speed right behind him. Even then, Pacini didn't quit; his last real success was Il Saltimbanco in 1858. He wrote music until he died (in December of 1867). His last opera, Berta di Varnol, had premiered in Naples just a few months earlier. It simply has to be the case that if you write 70-plus operas, some of them—maybe a lot of them—are going to be hastily composed pot-boilers, but some of them—maybe a lot of them—will be good and some may be even great. But time placed Pacini up against one of history's truly great musical spirits. It's something like being a polymath in 1500 and not being Leonardo da Vinci. No one is in second place.
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Giovanni
Pacini (1796-1867) was born in Sicily, but I
think I can sneak him into Naples since (1) many of
his works were premiered at