Ottorino Respighi: A Dream of Italy

"I am only a composer, always a composer. I could never have been anything else. I believe in the continuity of the Italian musical tradition and the undying spirit of Italian song. But I believe that European music as a whole is about to undergo a radical crisis from which it will emerge transformed and renewed. I believe in the search for a new common language of European music and that in this quest, Italy can lead the way as she did four hundred years ago.
Just as the plastic rythms of the Greeks, dissolved into the ecstatic song of Gregorian chant, and at the end of the 16th century, the new monotic music appeared suddenly in Florence. So I see with a certain security that music is about to return to its original and immortal element: song." Those words were written by Ottorino Respighi in 1925 and they capture precisly the spirit of his musical quest. But they also contain within them the artistic dilemma of his entire creative life: An artist who dreamed of Italy and its glorious past is sought in the turmoil of the 20th century to restore to Europe the strength and coherence of the Italian musical tradition which he saw as the European birthright.

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An Allegro Film by Christopher Nupen

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