Respighi: Pines of Rome

Many classical composers attain immortality with their genius but nevertheless die poor. Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave. Vivaldi also died in poverty. Erik Satie, Gustav Holst, Jean Sibelius, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy–the list of brilliant composers who struggled financially is, sadly, a long one.

Ottorino Respighi is not among them. The Italian composer, violinist, teacher, and musicologist completed Fountains of Rome in 1916. The four-part symphonic tone poem became hugely successful, making Respighi famous and wealthy while still in his 30s.

Its sequel, Pines of Rome, was an even bigger hit following its premiere in December 1924. His bulging bank account allowed Respighi to quit as director of Rome’s Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in 1926 to concentrate on his composing. (He loved teaching, though, and continued as a professor of composition at the conservatory until 1935.)

Respighi’s success isn’t hard to understand once you’ve heard his music. It’s highly colorful, beautifully crafted, full of scintillating orchestration, memorable melodies, and sincere emotion. He was inspired by the world around him and often wrote programmatically, bringing places, people, and history to life in his music.

Resphigi’s fascination with Rome’s fountains and pine trees reflects a love affair with his new home. Upon moving to Rome from his native Bologna in 1913, Respighi said that the city’s “marvellous fountains” and “umbrella-like pines that appear in every part of the horizon [have] spoken to my imagination above all.”

Pines of Rome consists of four related movements: I pini di Villa Borghese (The Pines of the Villa Borghese), Pini presso una catacomba (Pines Near a Catacomb), I pini del Gianicolo (The Pines of the Janiculum) and I pini della via Appia (The Pines of the Appian Way). The work is cyclical on several levels.

A map of Rome reveals that the Villa Borghese gardens, the Janiculum hill and the Appian Way trace a counter-clockwise tour around the ancient city’s perimeter. The four movements also move through day and night, ending with dawn.

There’s also a longer time element at work. In the first movement, children are playing by the pine trees in the Villa Borghese gardens in modern times (Respighi’s early 20th-century Rome). The setting of each movement goes back in time, first to the early Christian period of the catacombs and then to the glory days of the ancient Roman Republic.

And Respighi also describes a journey from childhood to adulthood. Pines of Rome begins with frolicking kids and ends with marching soldiers.

The third movement hints at the importance of the work’s deeply cyclical nature: Janiculum hill is named after Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, endings and transitions.

The first section of Pines of Rome is a short prelude with hints of popular Italian children’s nursery rhymes. The children’s dances and games are brought to life by sprightly back-and-forth passages between brass and woodwinds.

The second movement, Pines Near a Catacomb, is suitably somber and sometimes dark. Muted strings underscore a chant which “re-echoes solemnly, sonorously, like a hymn” rising from the catacomb, according to Respighi.

The third movement, The Pines of the Janiculum, begins with a solo clarinet playing a plaintive melody that introduces the actual song of a nightingale played over tremolo strings. (Respighi even specified the recording to be used for the nightingale’s call.)

The final movement, The Pines of the Appian Way, conjures up an ancient scene: the steady march of an ancient Roman imperial army.

But the composer was interested in the musical possibilities of the scene, nothing else. Although Mussolini admired Respighi’s orchestral music, the composer didn’t reciprocate. (He maintained close ties with anti-Fascist figures, such as conductor Arturo Toscanini, and intervened to save Toscanini from a Fascist mob in 1931.) Respighi would probably have scoffed at any suggestion that this movement was propagandistic. He was a lover of life and nature, not politics.

You can experience Respighi’s Pines of Rome as part of Pacific Symphony’s next classical concert, Feb. 6-8. The evening is complete with Bernstein’s Slava! and two world premieres by Adolphus Hailstork with pianist Jeffrey Biegel and our Composer-in-Residence Viet Cuong. Carl St.Clair conducts. Your seat awaits!