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NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator
The Leni and Peter May Chair
Vetrate di chiesa (Church Windows)
Ottorino Respighi
O
ttorino Respighi was schooled in his native Bologna, but he started his career in
earnest with an appointment as a viola player
at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg, where
he had the opportunity to study with Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov. After Respighi returned to
Italy he occasionally flirted with modernism,
but he always retreated to an essentially conservative stance. In 1932 he joined nine other
conservative composers to sign a declaration
condemning the deleterious effect of music by
such figures as Schoenberg and Stravinsky and
encouraging a return to established Italian
tradition. By then he was rich and famous —
success had arrived through his hugely popular tone poem Fountains of Rome, composed in
1915–16, and he had ridden its wave with the
ensuing Pines of Rome (1923–24) and Roman
Festivals (1928).
In 1919 Respighi married the mezzo-soprano
Elsa Olivieri-Sangiacomo, who, for several
years, had been his composition pupil at the
Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In her
memoirs, she recalled:
We had been married for some weeks when
one day I asked Ottorino if he had ever studied Gregorian Chant. He replied that it was
something he had long wanted to do but
never found the opportunity. For my part, I
had studied the subject with particular enthusiasm and been given a first-class
diploma a few months previously. I offered to
teach him. … Not a day passed but he asked
me to intone a passage from the Roman Gradual while he listened spellbound. The Maestro was considerably influenced by this
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music, for there are echoes of Gregorian
Chant in almost everything he wrote after
1920. The Three Piano Preludes on Gregorian
Melodies [sic] were completed a few months
later at Capri in the summer of 1919 and
brightly reflect Respighi’s state of mind at
that time — delighted wonder at a revelation
and the mystic exaltation of profound religious feeling which matched the harmony
of our life together. The Maestro told me
how wonderful it would be to recast those
IN SHORT
Born: July 9, 1879, in Bologna, Italy
Died: April 18, 1936, in Rome
Work composed: the first three movements,
1919–21, as Tre preludi sopra melodie gregoriane (Three Preludes on Gregorian Melodies)
for solo piano; adapted into orchestral form
1925–October 1926, at which time the fourth
movement was composed
World premiere: February 27, 1927, at
Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts,
by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge
Koussevitzky, conductor
New York Philharmonic premiere:
March 20, 1932, with the composer conducting
Most recent New York Philharmonic
performance: December 3, 1933, Bruno
Walter, conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 25 minutes
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magnificent melodies in a new language of
sounds, free them from the rigidly formal
Catholic liturgy of the Roman Gradual and revive the indestructible germ of real human
values contained therein.
Respighi adapted the three pieces for orchestral forces in 1925–26, maintaining their
original order, and added a fourth piece to conclude the suite. His friend Claudio Guastalla, an
editor and professor of literature, recounted:
What were these four symphonic impressions to be called? Respighi thought of four
church doorways.… I objected that it was too
colorless. Why not Vetrate di chiesa —
(Church Windows), I suggested? The name
remained and was perhaps responsible for
some of the more idly superficial critics comparing the work to the symphonic poems,
which are quite different.
It’s a fair distinction. Whereas a symphonic
poem is inspired by some pre-existent extramusical impetus — usually a literary program,
sometimes a painting or other source — Vetrate di
chiesa traveled the opposite route, with the extramusical reference being dreamed up only after
the composition was completed. (In the original
Three Preludes, the movements were presented
without any programmatic titles.) Having settled on the overall “subject,” Guastalla and
Respighi set about deciding the topics of the individual movements. Guastalla heard in the
The Work at a Glance
The score for Respighi’s Vetrate di chiesa (Church Windows) is subtitled “Four Impressions for Orchestra,”
and a short descriptive text, selected by the composer and his colleague Claudio Guastalla, is attached to
illuminate each of the movements:
I. The Flight into Egypt
“… the little caravan proceeded through the desert, in the starry night, carrying the Treasure of the world.”
Adapted from Matthew 2:14
II. St. Michael the Archangel
“And a great battle was made in the Heavens: Michael and his Angels fought with the dragon, and fought
the dragon and his angels. But these did not prevail, and there was no more place for them in Heaven.”
Homily of St. Gregory on Matthew 7–8 [sic; the passage is Revelation 12:7–8]
III. The Matins of Santa Chiara [St. Clare]
“But Jesus Christ, her bridegroom, not wishing to leave her thus disconsolate, had her miraculously carried by the angels to the Church of Santo
Francesco, and to be at the whole function of Matins.”
Little Flowers of St. Francis, XXXV
IV. S. Gregorio Magno
“Ecce Pontifex Maximus! … Bless the Lord … sing the hymn to God.
Alleluia!”
Graduale Romanum; Comm. Sanct. 33
The Archangel St. Michael, depicted in a stained-glass window in the Church
of the Holy Sacrament, Elba, Italy
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opening movement “the passing of a chariot beneath a brilliant, starry sky,” which in turn suggested to him the Flight into Egypt, as recounted
in the Gospel of Matthew. The riotous second
movement evoked “a clash of weapons — a battle in the skies,” and this brought to mind the vision of the Archangel Michael in the Book of
Revelation. The third called for a reference to
support its “mystical, pure, and convent-like”
character, and that led them to a passage about
St. Clare in The Little Flowers of St. Francis. Applicable literary quotations were noted in the
published score for these three adapted move-
ments as well as for the very grand finale, the
splendor of which reminded Guastalla of St. Gregory the Great, the sixth-century pope whose reforms to the liturgy led to his name being
attached to the repertoire of Gregorian chant.
Instrumentation: three flutes (one doubling
piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, three tamtams, bass drum, bell, harp, celeste, piano,
organ, and strings.
Respighi Looks Back
Respighi’s refashioning of Gregorian chant as themes for Vetrate di chiesa (Church Windows) bears testimony
to his fascination with the music of the distant past, both from Italy and elsewhere. Neo-Renaissance sounds
are at the heart of his Concerto gregoriano (for violin and orchestra), his Concerto in Mixolydian Mode (for
piano and orchestra), Quartet in Doric Mode (for string quartet), and Botticelli Triptych. His orchestral elaborations of early repertoire are among his most often heard works today, including the three installments of Ancient Airs and Dances, essentially symphonic transcriptions of 16thand 17th-century lute pieces, and Gli uccelli (The Birds), based on
Baroque keyboard movements from the Italian and French Baroque.
Respighi produced numerous stand-alone orchestral transcriptions of pieces by such Baroque and Classical composers as Vitali,
Benedetto Marcello, Boccherini, Pergolesi, and Cimarosa, and the
symphonic transcriptions he made around 1930 of several of Bach’s
organ works (including the towering C-minor Passacaglia) occasionally surface to the delight of audiences who relish flamboyant orchestral color, and to the outrage of listeners of a more purist
disposition. The revival of interest in the music of Monteverdi owes
much to Respighi, whose large-orchestra realizations of that composer’s Lamento d’Arianna (1908, championed by Artur Nikisch and
the Berlin Philharmonic) and Orfeo (produced at La Scala in 1935)
provided an emphatic nudge to essential repertoire which at that time
was just beginning to emerge from general oblivion.
Ottorino Respighi with his wife, Elsa, who introduced him to Gregorian
chant, which influenced many of his compositions
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