Esordi gregoriani di Ildebrando Pizzetti

Ildebrando Pizzetti’s sincere and deep-rooted devotion to Gregorian music is quite different from the generic attraction for early music widespread among Italian composers at the beginning of the twentieth century. The meeting with Giovanni Tebaldini was crucial in Pizzetti’s artistic life: Tebaldini was one of the most deserving assertor of Caecilian movement and in 1897 took over the direction of Parma’s Conservatory. Despite strong oppositions, Tebaldini included teaching of Gregorian chant and Palestrinian polyphony in musical education. By rediscovering these remote realms Pizzetti found inspiration for a prosodic musical language that, already evident in his apprenticeship works, was to become a constant feature in his style. The young composer’s attraction towards the remote world he labelled “music of Greeks” does not result in a philological exploration, but rather into the revelation of its ethos made of richness, an endless source of the dramatic tension which is central in his artistic perspective. Faith in a music conceived as “pure sentiment made sound”, an idea that goes beyond mere matters of language in order to enshroud humanity, thus crossing categories and schemes. A drama that lives not only in wide theatrical spaces but also in the intimate space of a lyric, in the personal setting of a sonata’s movement, in the austere and terse plot of a choral piece.