Organ Voices

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n the heart of Tuscany lies the Chianti area like a casket filled with treasures such as the beautiful scenery and the precious artistic and cultural inheritance best-known in this part of the country which foreign visitors themselves have called the unique jewel of Italy. Where green valleys alternate with smooth slopes Romanesque and Renaissance churches rise, their sober and impressive architecture matching perfectly well with the natural landscape dominated by vineyards, olive trees and cypresses. All that explains why the Chianti area has become one of the most popular resorts characterized by a keen and demanding tourism.

Some say that the word Chianti means birds’din while others claim it comes from the Etruscan word «clante» since in this area of Tuscany the Etruscans have left signs of their mysterious and fascinating civilization.

However, few people know that besides its natural beauty and monuments, the Chianti area keeps a rare and precious organ patrimony. For this reason, a few years ago Renzo Giorgetti decided to report in a fine book this patrimony which has become more and more appreciated by musicians and lovers of classical music (cf. R. Giorgetti, Antichi organi del Chianti, Centro studi «Clante», 1994). In this book the organ of the Pieve of San Leolino appears as a fine example. The Pieve of San Leolino, situated outside the ancient fortified village of Panzano, is indeed one of the oldest churches in Chianti and one of the most abundant in works of art (Mariotto di Nardo, Meliore di Jacopo, Raffaellino del Garbo, etc.), but until the second half of the XlXth cent, it strangely had no organ. Only

 

in 1889, thanks to the work of Demetrio and Onofrio Bruschi of Loro Ciuffenna (Arezzo), the present organ was built, which still being in good condition, has enabled the perfomance of concerts attended by a continual growing number of attentive Italian and foreign audiences. The instrument, of average dimensions, is placed inside a wall-space in the presbytery to the left of the high altar. Its features, like all organs built in the XlXth cent, in Italy, reveal the taste of orchestral sonority. In this way, the organ of the Pieve of San Leolino in Panzano possesses a beautiful timbre alternating the softness of sounds with a more open and brillant sonority which allows the perfomance of the organ music from the XVIth to the XlXth century.

In the occasion of the celebration of the 2000 Jubilee Year, the Community of San Leolino – a brotherhood that leads fraternal life which takes care of the church and whose mission is the evangelization of culture through meetings, seminars, concerts and publications – has decided to give this CD to the Diocese of Fiesole and to all pilgrims and visitors in the Jubilee Year as a taste of the beautiful and evocative sound of the instrument built by Demetrio and Onofrio Bruschi back in the year 1889. As it is well-known, music, particularly the one played with the organ, has always been part of the liturgy in the Catholic Church, following the taste and artistic trends of each historical period. Thus, in the XVIth cent., with the Liturgical Reform made by the Council of Trent, the organ was played in the service only in particular moments whereas choir music was more predominant. That ex-

 

plains the typical organ literature of the time which required an instrument of a fairly small size, having one keyboard and a single body. Composers such as Frescobaldi, Gabrieli, Merula and Zi-poli were played above all in «Elevazioni», «Toccate», «Ricerca-ri», etc, that is, in those particular moments of the Mass when prayer, meditation and the impulse of the soul to the mysterious real presence of Christ in the Eucharist became much deeper and quieter. However, as the centuries went by and the traditional use of choirs in Church declined, the organ began to have a more important role in the Mass service. Later in the 1800′s the triumph of opera developed a taste for a more complex and emphatic organ literature, which is not to be despised. It reflected the musical sensibility of the common people who attended the services as well the particular atmosphere of the time characterized by social and cultural disorder whose restlessness, anxiety and spiritual dubiousness are sometimes difficult for us to understand.

To our cold and detached modern taste, the organ compositions by Donizetti, Bellini, Petrali, Padre Davide da Bergamo and Morandi may give a sense of magniloquent and superficial musical rhetoric, but if one looks into them and listens to their most intimate and secret musical structure, they reveal, instead, a noble and endured concept of music, even religious, in which prayer and human psychology combine inextricably in a close and dramatic dialogue before reaching, even if only in certain cases, a synthesis of religious abandon. Therefore, it is neither fair nor culturally right to let such music sink into complete oblivion.

 

Every musical work fulfills itself in its own time, but as it has been said in a suitable metaphor, it may be renewed by those «stones» which slide easily from tradition towards tomorrow, from a past to a future belonging no longer to a chronological order only, but to a sequence of spiritual events. In this way, the masterpieces by a Frescobaldi or a Zipoli will raise us from our space and time to an ideal space and time ordered by an ideal casualness which is the casualness of freedom and imagination.

In fact, the musical creation of the first Christian centuries consists of «singing», certainly poorer and plainer compared to the Greek melodies enriched by the sound of lyres, flutes and syringes. That new world built by Christianity finds in its own «po-verty» of instruments, the taste for a deeper melodious understanding and melody itself becomes the main interest of Christian musicians. Thus, melody, as in the humbleness of Gregorian chant, symbolyzes a more spiritual conception of music, acquires its own independence and its own individuality and reaches the top of a hierarchy of values.

The road therefore led to a musical language which is actually European or Western, in which the melody was enlarged and developed with the adoption of polyphonic forms that will later give birth to the laws and rules of modern harmony – in substance, that harmony which has essentially led music to our present days.

This way, organ music has remarkably conserved that singing which, from the very first Christian centuries reaches our days through Olivier Messiaen and remains as a vital tradition of Catho-

 

lie music. Born like other instruments with a long sound to accompany the human voice or even substitute it, the organ, has belonged to the most illustrious Italian, French, Flemish and German musicians and has always conserved that «nostalgic longing for the human voice» which had also favoured the birth of a new style between the end of the 1800′s and the first decades of the following century. Such distant echo of human voice still remained in the compositions for the organ by Donizetti, Bellini, Petra-li and Marco Enrico Bossi. It is true that the influence of the opera on one hand and virtuosity on the other hand, had in a way impaired that spiritual music devoted to liturgy and prayer so that the authoritative voices of some Popes such as Benedictus XIV (1789), Leon XII (1824) up to Pope Pius X (1903) raised against that opera singing and put an end to centuries of excessive orchestrated liturgical music. Nevertheless, this music remains as a document and a warning: the organ has a typically religious nature and for this reason it should avoid extremely free or alluring forms. On the other hand, by competing with the possibilities of the orchestra, this music has left us some scores which still deserve attention, full of a certain spirituality which, when played out side the liturgy, may endow a deep sense of beauty. In fact, in our ancient culture, beauty has always been an idea of invention and the building of possible worlds. It speaks straight into our routine, challenges it with a sense and accepts the risk of deciding what is good and what is bad. This is what its morals consist of. Beauty holds all the proposing power of a civilization whether we appro-

 

ve of it or not because it questions an ideal of humanity to be achieved. Beauty should never be nihilistic or reactive, otherwise it would become ephemeral, seductive, mere fashion. After all, even Christianity should be aware of artistical beauty and favour it by all means wherever a sign or a trace of it is found. If there is no art, life fades away and so does spirituality.

Based on all those considerations, we have entrusted the organ of the church of San Leolino to Marco D’Avola, an organist and a composer, whose artistical activity has touched the most prestigious organs from the United States to England. A member of the «Royal College of Organists» in London and of the International Fellowship of Rotarian Musicians (U.S.A.), Marco D’Avola has founded and still directs the International Organ Festival «Citta di Ragusa», aimed at protecting the patrimony of antique organs in the Province of Ragusa which has come to its Vllth year. However, there is a deeper reason for our choice which the recording of this CD proves: as a composer, Marco D’Avola has a remarkable sensibility for religious music which has inspired many of his compositions. It seems to us that through religious music, Marco D’Avola has found the meaning of this musical language which some daring voices of contemporary music have often labelled as tonal. Marco D’Avola, instead, revalues the tonal style without ever falling into a banal nostalgic feeling of the past. Aware of the long musical journey to our days, the young Sicilian composer is endowed with a special «melodious inspiration* which he is able to explore to the best, thus creating his own very personal style in

 

which tradition and novelty naturally combine in a harmony typical of the real poet. Marco D’Avola’s compositions recorded in this CD {Suite gregoriana, op. 35, Adagio in do min., op. 7, Aria per I’Of-fertorio, op. 39), strongly witness the particular creation and greatness of such musical language. Actually, Marco D’Avola, both as a composer and as a musician, creates music which conveys the poetry of a supreme beauty, an image of God the creator, keeping a continuous dialogue with the human voice and thus with singing -the everlasting yearning of religious music.

Carmelo Mezzasalma

Professor at the Istituto Musicale «L. Boccherini» of Lucca and Superior of the Community of San Leolino