Napoli nell’immaginario dei musicisti russi. Il caso di Michail Glinka

Abstract

Mikhail Glinka represents a fundamental figure in the Russian musical culture: in traditional historiography he is considered the equivalent in music of the poet Aleksandr Pushkin as founder of original literary genres and codifier of the linguistic means with which these were expressed. For a certain period, this “parallel myth” symbolized the birth of an exclusively Russian music, a music that rejected Western influence choosing to mirror the vague concept of ‘Russian soul’ that he himself contributed to formulate in the years of Russian Romanticism. Today this image is subject to revisionism, oriented to highlight Glinka’s synthesis of the major trends of the coeval musical language. Especially in reference to theatre, this more complex image includes elements coming from the western koiné as well as elements of Russian origin. Glinka became familiar with the Italian music tradition because this had settled in Russia during the 18th century and was still à la page during the years of Glinka’s training in St Petersburg. His will to improve his compositional skills, however, led him to a prolonged stay in Italy, which made him visit several cities of the peninsula, including Rome and Naples. In his mature years, he collected the impressions of this journey in a volume of Zapiski (Memoirs, 1854). This paper investigates the effect of early-19^th-century Italy on the composer as a ‘Russian traveler’, his own understanding of the country’s culture, and the mental frame through which he could “read” the places he visited during his youth, and write about them in later times. The goal is to highlight the difference entailed by the two-stage process of reconstruction of an imaginary, in relation to the Russian context that acted as a counterpart to this gaze.