Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari... a composer who bridged Italian and German cultures
For centuries, Italian and German musical cultures were regarded as so different as to be almost in opposition. Yet over a long period several composers brought the two together. Think, for instance, of the German-born Handel and his vast number of Italian operas, or of JS Bach and the clear Italian influence on his many concertos. Similarly, the young Mozart’s periods spent in Italy (from 1769-73) – which included the premieres of three of his operas at Milan’s leading theatre, the Teatro Regio Ducale, forerunner of La Scala – were also hugely significant in developing his mature style.
Partly due to birth as well as inclination, two later composers each had an aesthetic as well as physical foot firmly on either side of the Alps. One was the highly original composer and virtuoso pianist Ferruccio Busoni – born in Empoli, near Florence, in 1866; died in Berlin in 1924 – whose mother was the pianist Anna Weiss-Busoni, and whose family moved to Graz in Austria when he was ten. The other was Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948), best remembered for his operas, although he also composed chamber and orchestral music as well as some major choral works.
Wolf-Ferrari... early influences and musical studies
Hermann Friedrich Wolf – as he was christened, changing his name to the now familiar form at the age of 19 – was born in Venice and eventually died there; but in between, he spent long periods of his life in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. His father was the painter and trained pianist August Wolf (1843-1915), who first saw the light of day in Weinheim in south-west Germany; his mother – Emilia Ferrari, also a pianist – was Venetian.
August’s influence as well as his own inclination were sufficiently strong for Hermann to initially study painting, first in Rome (1891-2) and later in Munich. It was, however, during a spell at an art school in the latter city that music finally won out when he transferred to the local conservatoire (1892-5) to study counterpoint under the eminent Josef Rheinberger, who taught organ and composition there; based on such solidly respectable German musical training, Wolf-Ferrari’s first compositions date from this period.
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari... first operas
Following his Munich studies, which he failed to complete, he moved back to Italy where, in Milan, he came into contact with the composer and librettist Arrigo Boito but failed to persuade the publisher Giulio Ricordi to take him onto his books. Appointed director of what is now the Venice Conservatory in 1903, his main creative goal became that of many Italian composers of the period: to write successful operas. His first, the fiaba musicale (or musical fable) Cenerentola (Cinderella), based on Perrault’s fairy-tale, had had an unsuccessful production at the Teatro La Fenice in his native city in February 1900, prompting him to try his luck back in Germany – there, revised and translated into the local language, the work achieved a much better reception in Bremen in January 1902.
Wolf-Ferrari... the best-known operas
Somewhat surprisingly for an Italian composer, from this point onwards, Wolf-Ferrari’s dozen-or-so subsequent operatic works mostly had their premieres in German, in German translation, and mostly in Munich – where, having resigned from his Venice conservatory post, he resided from 1909 – with exceptions opening either in Dresden or Berlin. Works premiered in Germany include some of his best known scores – all of them comedies, the form he clearly preferred: Le donne curiose (The Inquisitive Women; 1903), I quatro rusteghi (The Four Curmudgeons; 1906), Il segreto di Susanna (Susanna’s Secret; 1909) and L’amore medico (Doctor Cupid; 1913).
Set in Wolf-Ferrari’s own time – though partially utilising neo-classical idioms – the subject of Il segreto di Susanna is a married woman whose secret vice turns out to be smoking. There was a distinct change of style, meanwhile, for his single – and, at the time, highly successful – venture into the popular verismo (‘realist’) manner of such figures as his older contemporary Pietro Mascagni: the blasphemy-and-crime-laden I gioielli della Madonna (The Jewels of the Madonna; 1911), set once again in modern times amidst the emotionally extreme, even violent world of the local Neapolitan Mafia (the ‘Camorra’).
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari... World War I and a move to Zurich
But then came the First World War. For an artist who had profound connections to two enemy combatants, German and Italian, the conflict must have been both politically and psychologically troubling on every level for Wolf-Ferrari, who was temperamentally insecure even at the best of times. His response was to move to neutral Zurich, where for some years he effectively relinquished composition.
It was not until 1925, in fact, that Gli amanti sposi (The Loving Spouses) once again brought him a theatrical premiere, this time in his native city of Venice. Following one more Munich first night – the ‘legend’ Das Himmelskleid (The Garment of Heaven; 1927) – all his later stage-works were written either for Milan or Rome, until the last opera of all – Gli dei a Tebe (The Gods in Thebes) – made its debut, once again in German, in Hanover in 1943.
Wolf-Ferrari... the later years
Devoting himself increasingly to orchestral and chamber music, Wolf-Ferrari spent much of the interwar period living in the Munich suburb of Planegg, though with staggeringly poor timing was appointed as a professor at the Salzburg Mozarteum in 1939. Remaining in Germany and Austria during World War II, in 1946 he moved in with friends in Zurich. Then, as his health worsened, he moved back to Venice, dying there in January 1948. Like his father, he is buried on the Venetian island cemetery of San Michele.
An ongoing fascination with Venice and opera buffa
Indeed, wherever he was based, Venice and its literary past remained central to Wolf-Ferrari’s productivity. His subject matter returns again and again to the 18th century and to the musical world of classical opera buffa: Le donne curiose, I quatro rusteghi, Gli amanti sposi, La vedova scaltra (The Cunning Widow) and Il campiello (The Little Piazza) all derive from the playwright and librettist Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), whose regular theme was Venice and its inhabitants of all ages, types and classes. Other sources include the author Charles Perrault (for Cenerentola and Das Himmelskleid), Molière (L’amore medico), Shakespeare (Sly, derived from The Taming of the Shrew) and Shakespeare’s Spanish contemporary Lope de Vega for La dama boba (The Lady Simpleton).
All of these works are characterised by light, clear textures and buoyancy, often making use of elements of pastiche in terms of period dance rhythms. Their overall musical inspiration is closer to such 18th-century forebears as Cimarosa and Paisiello than to the more vigorous early 19th-century éclat of Rossini, but complementing this is a generous slice of late-Romantic warmth and melody. The impact of Verdi’s super-enriched final comedy Falstaff (1893) is also clearly evident. In the perfect gem of a one-act comedy Il segreto di Susanna, for instance, the overture is a brilliant exercise in the liveliest neo-classicism, while the melodic highpoint of the score – Susanna’s paean to cigarette smoking – is a delightful piece of Iate-Romantic Italianate lyricism, not dissimilar in its delicate harmony and colouring to moments in Richard Strauss’s near-contemporary opera Der Rosenkavalier.
Wolf-Ferrari... a gifted orchestrator and chamber composer
Wolf-Ferrari’s gifts as an orchestrator, too, are consistently impressive: highlights of I gioielli della Madonna include a couple of strikingly characterful orchestral intermezzos, long popular as concert items; there’s another such crowdpleaser in I quatro rusteghi. Standalone orchestral pieces such as the Sinfonia da camera (1901) or the Suite Veneziana (1935), meanwhile, demonstrate an equivalent level of craftmanship. Essentially light music, their language derives from 18th- and 19th-century models – and equally they possess a healthy quotient of melancholy charm. Similarly successful is his late Violin Concerto (1943), written for the American violinist Guila Bustabo.
Also worth exploring are chamber pieces such as the three violin sonatas (1895, 1901, 1943) which, while not forward-looking, are nonetheless unfailingly effective – a sense of a composer largely out of his time scarcely invalidates the craft and skill exhibited throughout these works (or, indeed, in his output as a whole). And Wolf-Ferrari’s most ambitious choral piece, an hour-long setting of Dante entitled La vita nuova (1901), received 500 performances up to 1937. While genuinely impressive, it is largely neglected today.
Time to reassess this overlooked composer
In a centenary essay published in 1976, the distinguished musicologist Hans Keller referred to Wolf-Ferrari as ‘an unrecognised major minor master, the man of intermittent genius who is not a genius’, but equally ‘a composer who has something to say and says it with utter clarity […] his harmonic subtlety makes his melodic invention unexpected when it happens, and inevitable, firmly founded, when it has happened’. As Keller goes on to state: ‘I know of no other composer capable of investing his taste with so much meaning, or of his meanings with so much taste.’
Similarly, for Keller’s fellow-Viennese, the later British refugee, composer and academic Egon Wellesz, Wolf-Ferrari was ‘the first representative of neoclassicism in Italy, who showed the next generation how to shake itself free of the influence of Verdi and Wagner.’ In his 150th-anniversary year, now is the perfect time to celebrate this often overlooked composer.
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s style
Opera buffa
At the centre of Wolf-Ferrari’s output are his comic operas, many of which hark back to the 18th century in terms of subject matter, and in location to Venice. Musically, too, the foundation of the language is a playful but deliberate evocation of the music of former composers and of his Italian predecessors in particular.
Neo-classicism
The neo-classical style is often dated to such works as Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ Symphony or Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, substantially derived from works by Pergolesi. However, Wolf-Ferrari and Mascagni were self-consciously reinhabiting such antique territory before this, the latter in the commedia dell’arte-inspired Le Maschere and Wolf-Ferrari regularly from Cenerentola onwards.
Late-romanticism
The other strong element of Wolf-Ferrari’s inheritance comes from German Romanticism – from Mendelssohn and Brahms, but up to Richard Strauss (below) in the harmonies and orchestral colours of Susanna’s aria ‘Oh gioia la nube leggera!’ in Il segreto di Susanna.
Venetian dialect
Given the Venetian setting of many of Wolf-Ferrari’s works, it is no surprise that some of their librettos make use of Venetian dialect. The most obvious example is I quatro rusteghi, even whose title uses the Venetian word for four (‘quatro’) rather than the standard Italian ‘quattro’. Other examples are Il campiello, in the case of its Venetian characters (there are also some Neapolitans who sing in their own dialect), and Le donne curiose.
