Amilcare Ponchielli

Amilcare Ponchielli: Between Verdi and Verismo

Almost everyone alive has heard the music, and almost nobody can name the man who wrote it. The "Dance of the Hours" reached the twentieth century as a Disney cartoon of hippopotamuses in tutus in *Fantasia* (1940), and then again as the tune of Allan Sherman's summer-camp complaint "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh." It is the third-act finale of a grand Venetian melodrama by a Lombard bandmaster's son who also taught Puccini and Mascagni how to write operas.

Paderno Fasolaro

Amilcare Ponchielli was born on 31 August 1834 at Paderno Fasolaro, a village near Cremona in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia that now carries his name. He was a prodigy of the conventional kind: a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory at nine, a first symphony written at ten. What followed was not the career such a start predicts. He won a professorship at the Conservatory in open competition and was manoeuvred out of it, and spent his thirties in the provinces instead of at La Scala.

The Provinces

Those years were not wasted, though they were obscure. As a municipal bandmaster in Piacenza and then Cremona he wrote and arranged more than two hundred works for wind band, including a set of variations on the "Carnevale di Venezia" and, in 1872, the *Concerto per Flicornobasso* — the first concerto ever written for the euphonium, and still one of the few. It is an unglamorous apprenticeship, and it left him with something most Italian opera composers of his generation did not have: a working knowledge of what individual wind instruments can actually do, in the hands of amateurs, in the open air.

Manzoni, and the Second Chance

His first opera, staged in 1856, was a setting of Manzoni's *I promessi sposi*, the national novel. It did nothing much. Sixteen years later he rewrote it, and the 1872 version changed his life: recognition, a contract with the house of Ricordi, and at last the doors of La Scala. The soprano who sang Lina in the revision, Teresina Brambilla, married him in 1874; their son Annibale became a music critic. A ballet, *Le due gemelle*, followed in 1873, and the Lithuanian epic *I Lituani* in 1874.

La Gioconda

*La Gioconda* opened in 1876 and is the reason his name survives. The libretto, adapted from Victor Hugo's *Angélo, tyran de Padoue*, was by Arrigo Boito — who had wanted to compose the opera himself, was passed over by Giulio Ricordi in favour of a more experienced hand, and signed his text in protest with the anagram "Tobia Gorrio." Out of that sulk came one of the great Italian librettos and a partnership that produced a genuine hit. Ponchielli kept revising; the version everyone performs dates from 1880.

The Liceu in Barcelona puts the work's oddity precisely: between Donizetti's *Don Pasquale* in 1843 and Mascagni's *Cavalleria rusticana* in 1890, *La Gioconda* is practically the only Italian repertory opera that does not bear Verdi's signature. It stands, in the same account, halfway between French *grand opéra*, Verdi-style Romantic drama and the *verismo* that had not yet arrived — French monumentality, Italian lyricism, and passages that plainly anticipate what Mascagni and Puccini would do. The tenor's "Cielo e mar" and the contralto's "Voce di donna o d'angelo" are still audition pieces.

The Dance of the Hours

The ballet that closes the third act is the most widely known music any nineteenth-century Italian composer wrote, and its fame is entirely detached from its author. This is not quite an accident. The number is a display of exactly the skill the band years had taught him — clean, characterful writing for individual instrumental voices, immediately memorable, built to survive rough playing. It travels well because it was made to.

The Teacher

In 1881 the Conservatory that had squeezed him out took him back, this time as professor of composition, and he was appointed *maestro di cappella* at Bergamo Cathedral in the same year. Among his pupils were Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni, Emilio Pizzi and Giovanni Tebaldini — which is to say that the two men who would define the next thirty years of Italian opera both learned their trade from him. He went on composing: the biblical spectacle *Il figliuol prodigo* opened at La Scala on 26 December 1880 and the second Hugo adaptation *Marion Delorme* on 17 March 1885. Neither held the stage. He left *I Mori di Valenza* unfinished; Arturo Cadore completed it and it was staged in 1914. Ponchielli died of pneumonia in Milan on 16 January 1886, aged fifty-one, and lies in the Monumental Cemetery.

Why Amilcare Is Called a Genius

The strongest claim on his behalf is the one the Liceu makes: for nearly half a century, in the most opera-mad country on earth, he wrote the only work besides Verdi's to hold the repertory. That took a particular and unfashionable talent — synthesis. Ponchielli could hear what was useful in French *grand opéra*, in Verdi's dramatic architecture and in the raw new manner coming up behind him, and combine them without the joins showing. He enlarged the orchestra and thickened the orchestration of Italian opera, and wrote melodies that survive being whistled badly. He was also a formidable teacher: Puccini and Mascagni came out of his classroom.

The counter-case is blunt and mostly fair. One opera survives out of a substantial working life; *I Lituani*, *Il figliuol prodigo* and *Marion Delorme* are curiosities, and *I Lituani* had to be dug out of an archive by Italian radio in 1979 to be heard at all. *La Gioconda* needed four years of revision to reach its final shape, and its reputation rests as much on Boito's libretto as on the score. The music of his that everybody knows is famous as a cartoon and a novelty record, its composer anonymous. A synthesist is not an originator: Ponchielli built the bridge between Verdi and *verismo*, and two of his own students walked across it and took the credit. That is a real achievement, and not the same as originality.

Legacy

The village of his birth renamed itself after him, which is more than most composers get. *La Gioconda* remains in the international repertory, a vehicle for big voices and bigger stagings; the "Dance of the Hours" remains in the ears of people who have never seen an opera. But his most durable work was done in a classroom in Milan between 1881 and 1886. Puccini's orchestration and Mascagni's directness both have Ponchielli somewhere in their ancestry, and the man who was once manoeuvred out of a professorship ended up shaping the era that followed his own.

Achievements

• Notable work: La Gioconda
• Instruments: organ
• Genres: opera and classical music