Peragallo, Mario

Mario Peragallo – Fantasia per orchestra (1950)

(b. Rome, March 25, 1910; d. Rome, Nov. 23, 1996)

Preface
Mario Peragallo was born in Rome to Genoese parents, Cornelio, a business man, and his wife Matilde. Both parents were keen lovers of music, and Cornelio became the president of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana from 1944 till 1950. Mario studied composition with Vincenzo di Donato, and piano with Francesco Baiardi. Di Donato, a major figure in Roman musical life at this time, produced editions of music by up-and-coming composers under the title Collezione Dorica, and Peragallo quickly distinguished himself in this ‘Doric’ circle. He made his debut with the Adagio per orchestra d’archi e arpa, performed during the Accademia Filarmonica’s 1925-6 season. Other works were published in Dorica, and in its successor La Rassegna Musicale (founded by di Donato in 1929). Peragallo achieved fame initially in the operatic milieu. Working with the eminent librettist Giovacchino Forzano his Ginevra degli Almieri (1937) and Lo Stendardo di San Giorgio (1941) met with public – if not always critical – approbation. The war years coincided with changes in the personal and artistic life of our composer. He married Fiora Ginanni in 1943 and they had two children. After a creative silence of some five years, Peragallo entered a second phase of his career, producing works that explored a more chromatically saturated palette, and then moving on to an individual version of dodecaphony. The first fruit of this new serial direction was the ‘madrigale scenico’ La Collina which excited great interest at the contemporary music festival in Venice in 1947. In the same year he organized a tour to nine Italian cities of Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte and Pierrot Lunaire, this bringing back memories of the well-nigh legendary Pierrot tour organized by Casella’s Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche in 1924. Peragallo continued along the 12-note path in instrumental pieces: Musica per doppio quartetto d’archi (1948), Concerto per pianoforte e orchestra (1949), the present Fantasia per orchestra (1950), and most importantly the Concerto per violino e orchestra (1953-4). Towards the end of the 1950s he allied himself stylistically with the techniques of the younger generation of composers in Forme sovrapposte per orchestra (1959), and, inspired – as many composers were – by the virtuosity of the flautist Severino Gazzelloni, in Vibrazioni per flauto, piano e tiptofono (1960). This compositional itinerary is comparable to that of Petrassi, who used serialism in several of his Concerti per Orchestra in the 1950s and then immersed himself in the sound worlds of Berio, Castiglioni and Donatoni in the 1960s. The comparison breaks down after that: Peragallo was an extraordinarily zealous administrator and innovator in his many years as president of the Società Italiana di Musica Contemporanea (1956-60, 1963-86). However this organizational activity took its toll: unlike the consistently productive Petrassi, Peragallo experienced a 20-year compositional drought, only to be broken in 1980 with Emircal (for orchestra and tape). Emircal (‘Lacrime’ backwards) was written on a wave of emotion at the death of his friend of many years, Luigi Dallapiccola. Peragallo became a widower in 1979, but remarried ten years later to Anna Cudin. He died in 1996.

In compositions like La Collina, the Doppio Quartetto, and the Piano Concerto, Peragallo does not create the discourse from a single 12-note series but freely uses various rows, without hesitating to interlard their development with free diatonic episodes. The Fantasia per orchestra was different: in this piece for the first time he employed a single note-row as his core material.

However, he still uses this material very freely, integrating strict, if not very intense, serial procedures with more conventional textures, rhythmic patterning and structures. The row is given out in long notes at the start over a barcarolle-like lilt and a ‘tonic’ E flat pedal. This ‘keynote’ returns at the close as well. The compound time signatures are a constant throughout the piece; even when the tempo indication is ‘Tempo di valse lento’ the music stays in 6/8. Peragallo’s use of pedal notes and perpetuum mobile quavers suggests a neo-Classical or even neo-Romantic ethos. This is at a far remove from the negations of key and disjunct rhythms one finds in the works of Schoenberg and Webern: expressiveness of an altogether more traditional essence is the order of the day here. The work’s overall structure is determined by changes in speed and in articulation, in other words, it is a somewhat fluid plan – as implied by the title Fantasia. Towards the end (bar 404) a clear inversion of the row is stated as a hushed chorale before a final E flat-based chord is sounded.

Roman Vlad in his 1958 book Storia della dodecafonia, sums up this period of the composer’s output thus: ‘Peragallo is in fact one of the most typical and, also internationally, most renowned representatives of Italian dodecaphony. And this, not in spite of, but perhaps precisely because of the fact that he aims at a total independence from the rules and the aesthetic of historical dodecaphony.’

The score presented here was published by Universal Edition in 1953 (plate number UE 12153). A piano version (with a slightly earlier plate number – UE12137) was issued in the same year.

Alasdair Jamieson, 2018

For performance material please contact Universal Edition (www.universaledition.com), Vienna.