Casella, Alfredo

Casella, Alfredo – Concerto op. 40bis (arranged for string orchestra by Erwin Stein)

(b. Turin, 25 July 1883 – d. Rome, 5 March 1947)

Arranged for string orchestra by Erwin Stein (1885 -1958)

Preface
It is not often that one major composer marks another’s homework, so to speak, but this music by Alfredo Casella gives us a striking example. In 1935, Arnold Schoenberg recalled that, having heard and read Casella’s Concerto no fewer than ten times, he felt compelled to point out that, in the first movement, the Italian had made an error. It was wrong, Schoenberg told his colleague, to bring back the tonic key after the development but before the reprise of the main theme. Apparently, Casella took his colleague’s advice. Schoenberg congratulated himself on ‘seeing eliminated in the printed score this great C of the violoncello’.1 But there is something strange about this story. To alter one note, even a ‘great C’, is not to change a key. Does the problem that Schoenberg identified remain in Casella’s score? And there is a more immediate question: How did the inventor of twelve-note technique find himself listening to this piece so many times?

Originally composed for string quartet between 28 November 1923 and 16 March 1924, Casella’s Concerto per due violini, viola e violoncello, Op. 40, was given its premiere by the Belgian ‘Pro Arte’ Quartet in Rome on 28 March 1924, in a concert organized by the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche, which Casella had helped found the previous year. Also on the programme was Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), for reciter and five instruments, conducted by the composer. Casella and Schoenberg took this double-bill on tour to a further seven Italian cities, which is how Schoenberg, waiting each evening to perform (Pierrot Lunaire came in the second half) heard Casella’s piece so many times. It was a tough programme, particularly given the lack of Italian exposure to the new music at this period. Audiences were generally rowdy. The coupling of the two compositions was also polemical. As Casella seems already to have recognised in 1924, and as he would go on to emphasise in countless journalistic articles, his music and that of Schoenberg stood as opposites, and not only in terms of style. For Casella, the hyper-chromatic expressionism of Pierrot Lunaire stood for the chaos of a decadent liberal bourgeois epoch, which had been overcome by the ‘return to normality’ represented by the diatonic neoclassicism of his Concerto, to be grasped as a musical analogue to the fascist revolution of Benito Mussolini. …

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