Who he was, in a few words

Valentino Bucchi was born in Florence on November 29, 1916, to musician parents (his father played the French horn, his mother the violin). He was to take a serious interest in music rather late; after graduating with a degree in philosophy at the University of Florence he went on to graduate in composition at the local Liceo Musicale Cherubini (his teachers: C. Barbieri, Vito Frazzi, Luigi Dallapiccola). He belonged to a group of young people – Franco Lattes Fortini, Giorgio Spini, Giancarlo Bartolini Salimbeni, Giampiero Carocci – who in 1932/1933 lived in the same neighborhood of Florence and went to the same high school, all of them deeply involved in literature, art and music.

Valentino Bucchi started his activities as a composer, critic and essayist at a very early age. In 1938 he began writing for the Florentine newspaper, “La Nazione”, where at the age of 22 he became the music critic. In 1939 his first theatrical work was performed, the one-act Giuoco del Barone, based on an old Florentine popular game and reviewed with the keenest interest by Bruno Barilli, one of the most perceptive critics of the time. In 1956, a new version of the work won the “Prix Italia”.

At the end of 1941 his critical activities were interrupted by the war, but articles by him continued to appear occasionally in “La Nazione” up until the 1944 “Maggio Musicale”. In October, 1945, he resumed his career as an active critic, this time on “La Nazione del Popolo”, the official organ of the Committee of National Liberation, after which he moved on to the “Mattino dell’Italia Centrale” but at the end of October, 1947, he resigned, considering that experience a closed chapter in his life. The “composer” had ousted the “critic”.

Writing words as well as music was however to remain one of Bucchi’s most typical characteristics. His more important essays include Orfeo di Claudio Monteverdi (1949) and Seraphita (“La nuova musica e l’alternativa”, 1961). As a composer, Valentino Bucchi’s activities range over all aspects of musical communication. Considered a “lone wolf” by many people because he fitted into no category, more attentive critics were later to call him a “free” musician. It was Roman Vlad who wrote, in his review of a public radio concert in Rome in 1972, where three of Bucchi’s solo works dating from 1969-1971 were performed (Concerto for solo clarinet, Lettres de la religieuse portugaise for solo voice and Ison for solo cello): “Each of these works expresses, in one way or the other, that demand for freedom which has informed all of Bucchi’s activities from the very beginning. Freedom in the double meaning of the word: as the moral premise and goal of human experience, which find expression in its creativity, and freedom from any sort of aesthetic conformism, whether rearguard or avant-guarde. Freedom which, among other things, takes the form of an absolute lack of preclusions, with respect both to traditional means of expression and to more recent stylistic procedures in composition and instrumental technique”.

Bucchi remained fiercely jealous of his imaginative world, with its literary over-tones, was against obstacles of any kind between art and the public, aware of the necessity to establish a constantly open “exchange” with the listener, as a number of his works go to prove: the highly successful Concerto Lirico for violin and strings (1957), for example, was performed over a thousand times in seven years. He felt an urgent need for “information” which he considered a “duty” that made it possible for him to take part in the cultural life of his time. So his music is also a “searching”. Each piece – as he used to say – must also be the solution to a problem. This searching and an instinctive and intelligent curiosity accompanied him throughout his career and he never swayed from his chosen path. He resorted, without hesitation, to even the most advanced techniques to satisfy his desire for expression at all costs and for good craftsmanship.

In his last works, from 1969 on, the already wide range of compositional techniques was extended even further. The foundations of this new musical concept were: a special rhythmic texture based exclusively on the kronos protos (tempo primo) which established the rate of speed and its free associations; the systematic use of microintervals, which can be readily perceived and evaluated thanks to the simultaneous presence of a held note (ison); highly difficult vocal and instrumental passages of all kinds, always carefully written out and, above all, “the search for absolute expression, free of all other related issues,” as Bucchi himself remarked in a program note for the performance of Lettres de la religieuse portugaise at the 1971 Venice Festival.

Part and parcel of this process of working out an organic system of uniform microintervals was a special kind of quarter-tone guitar, which Bucchi, with the help of the guitarist Carlo Carfagna, was the first to invent and have built; at the time of his death (Rome, May 8, 1976) he was writing a manual for the instrument of which only a few pages remain. Bucchi’s music was always controlled, thought-out, essential. His devotion to neatness of sound led him in general to avoid large orchestras. His concept of circular musical structures was such that he often gave his work a rondo feeling or the concise contours of the concerto grosso. The highly transparent timbres, the primarily dark colors, certain predominating characteristics, especially in the structure of intervals and their placement in the musical context, are to be found in his earlier as well as in his later compositional style, both in the difficult simplicity of some of his music “by far the most of it for two voices, not rarely for only one” (Fedele D’Amico), and in the remarkably complex structure of his last works.

Valentino Bucchi is also interesting because of his anarchic and anticonformist status as an original “layman of music”. In a television interview (April, 1976), only a few days before his death, he summed up his ideological and aesthetic position as follows: “I’m non-violent, non-competitive, in life and in art. After all, I’ve lived for years in Perugia, where the highly effective technique of non-violence had struck its deepest roots. So in music, too, we fight the violence of big business and political power which impose prefabricated values and market successes, substituting, among other things, easy information for difficult culture”. And in Bucchi’s biography episodes of civil struggle are not lacking, including the curious “Battaglia” for brass, timpani and drum, inspired by the lutist Donino Garsi, written especially to be played at the beginning and end of a “protest concert,” organized in Piazza della Repubblica in Perugia, May 23, 1973, by teachers and students of the Morlacchi Conservatory of Music (of which Bucchi was for years the director) for the definitive “nationalization” of the school and for Umbria’s failure to promote music.

Reflections of Bucchi’s early formation, as we have seen, among scholars and musicians, are also to be found in his musical output. Cori della pietà morta (1949-50) mixed chorus and orchestra, on lines from “Foglio di via” by Franco Fortini (his former classmate) and first performed by Hermann Scherchen at the 1950 “Maggio Musicale,” represents an important stage in the composer’s development, but also one of the first examples – and one of the most significant – of music celebrating the Resistance, of which several tragic episodes are recounted in a tense, harrowing atmosphere, attained by the utmost simplicity of means. A deep, heartfelt expression of that moral commitment which Bucchi considered the composer’s primary duty. A commitment which emerges touchingly in Colloquio corale (1972) for narrator, soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra, dedicated to the memory of Aldo Capitini, the apostle of non-violence who organized the first peace marches. A narrator is given lines from “La compresenza dei morti e dei viventi”, the Umbrian philosopher’s spiritual testament; the ardent, raving voice of the soprano, with its daunting melodic line, stresses the more touching moments of Capitini’s poetry (a brilliant collage of verses from his book, “Colloquio corale”). The chorus chants ancient Greek invocations to the night and repose, enveloping the voices of the soprano and the narrator in an aura of mystery and magic; finally, the orchestra, reduced to a minimum, plays with closely linked solo fragments which, with their shifting colors, create an even more rarefied atmosphere. Separated by over 20 years, Cori della pietà morta and Colloquio corale are, even so, cut out of the same cloth and represent the most immediate expression of a dialectically dramatic concept of life.

Compared to this deeply afflicted view of reality, Bucchi’s theatrical works, absolutely unique, are fundamentally ironic, more and more on the grotesque side. With the exception of Il Contrabbasso (1954), his only opera in the true sense of the word, they lie outside traditional forms. An evolution that begins with the early Il Giuoco del Barone (one act, words by Alessandro Parronchi, 1937/1939, first performance: Florence, December 20, 1939, labeled an “experimental” work when it was written) and ends with the sharply bitter Il Coccodrillo (4 acts, 1969/1970, libretto by Bucchi and Mauro Pezzati), which takes stock of man’s position in contemporary society and gave rise to endless criticisms and controversy when it was performed in Florence, Rome and Bologna. A most unusual work which proposes a fusion of different elements, with no ranking scale of predetermined values. A wide range of technical resources are used, one after other, without interruption: prose, musical speech, singing, choruses, instrumental passages and recorded music. On stage: action that is spoken, sung and danced with mimed and filmed episodes. To be sure, Il Coccodrillo – obviously more suited for performance in some other setting than conventional opera houses, still today the shrines of “bel canto” – “acknowledges the receipt” – as Luciano Alberti wrote – “of many, many messages, or in any case of data concerning the present situation of the musical theater. Messages and data that go beyond the endless bounds of the rhetoric of musical genres, both old and new, to focus on the specific level of language”.

A concert version of the work (Turin, Rai Auditorium, November 10, 1973), which the composer – who directed the production – brought into line with his principles of communication, met with “great success” (Massimo Mila). More traditional, the one-act “grotesque,” Il Contrabbasso (first performed at the “Maggio Musicale,” June 20, 1954), on a libretto by Mario Mattolini and Mauro Pezzati, and the ballet, Mirandolina (first performance, Teatro dell’Opera, Rome, March 12, 1957, created and choreographed by Aurél Milloss). In a program note for the revival of Mirandolina at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice (starring Carla Fracci) on June 26, 1974, Bucchi wrote: “The two works form a sort of diptych… Il Contrabbasso is an opera ballet, in which all the movements of the different characters are mimed musically and every scene suggested by the gestures of the singer Mirandolina is a ballet opera in which the words and actions of the characters dissolve without a trace into a mimed narration”

The delightful musical fairy tale, Una Notte in Paradiso (1959/60), with words by Luigi Bazzoni, infused with archaic popular themes, real or invented, is of its kind unique. A theatrical work in which music, speech, mime blend together, not in independent and consecutive episodes, but in a rigorous context where it is hard to separate the different elements. An unusual work, which breaks entirely with the crystallized cliches of traditional opera, employing a special technique of “sequence” where it is possible to discern the key points of the story, linking them together with no consideration of time, place and duration. A work of this kind – originally conceived for the radio, for that matter – had necessarily to be organized into separate “numbers”: actors’ voices and comments by the chorus anticipate the action, carry it back in time, slow it down, whirl it around, so that the dimension of time is always cancelled out.

Bucchi’s last theatrical work was to have been Il Tumulto dei Ciompi, commissioned by the Teatro Comunale of Florence for the 1972 Maggio Musicale. An open-air production to take place in a public square, with words by Massimo Dursi based on an account of a popular revolt in 14th century Florence, and music by Valentino Bucchi, it too based on music of the period. At the last moment – rehearsals had almost begun – the performance was called off, officially due to “organizational and financial difficulties”. Thanks to the knowledgeable and painstaking revision by the composer, Fernando Sulpizi, based on material in the Bucchi Foundation files, Il Tumulto dei Ciompi was published in 1996 and distributed, that same Jubilee year, to all of the Italian opera houses for a possible world premiere. At present it is still unperformed.

If one takes a look then at Bucchi as the transcriber of early works, which he treats, however, with great freedom, it will be seen that the works he chose all date from the dawn of the modern theater, in its different epochs. Li Gieus de Robin et de Marion by Adam de la Halle from 13th century France (1951/1952); Laudes Evangelii, organized along the lines of a 14th century Italian mystery play, choreographed by Léonide Massine and performed at the Sagra Musicale Umbra on September 20, 1952, and later filmed in its entirety by “Associated Rediffusion” and shown on worldwide television; Orfeo di Monteverdi (first performed: Milan, Rai Auditorium, April 29, 1967, then produced by Italian television and directed by Raymund Rouleau, January 13, 1968). Mention should also be made, however short-lived these experiences were and with anything but negative results, of Bucchi’s incidental music (among the more important the score for Goethe’s Faust for the Third Program, Italian Radio, 1953) and film music, including Il cielo è rosso (1950), Febbre di vivere for which he won the 1953 Nastro d’Argento Award, Banditi a Orgosolo (1961).

In 1998, the Italian composer, Clemente Terni, looking for a way to pay tribute to the memory of his former classmate (both he and Bucchi were pupils of Vito Frazzi at the Conservatory of Florence), as well as friend and colleague of many years, decided to put together a series of pieces Bucchi had written for the Hammond organ and transcribe them for the classical organ. The resulting Suite in seven movements, published by the Valentino Bucchi Foundation in 1999, brilliantly combines various works by Bucchi, very distinct in character, ranging from excerpts from Laudes Evangelii and film documentary scores (Larderello e la grande ombra), to the music for the TV film, Il giocoliere della Vergine, and selections from his theatrical works (Una Notte in Paradiso and Il Tumulto dei Ciompi).

His works for orchestra and chamber ensembles are no less distinct than his stage works: from the Quattro liriche for voice and piano (1935/40), set to poems by Verlaine, Palazzeschi and Noventa, and the early Sonatina for piano (1938), which led the composer to be referred to as an “hermetic” of music (Massimo Mila), up to the Vocalizzo nel modo dei fiori for voice and ten instruments, first performed at the Settimana Musicale Senese on August 19, 1975. Others may be mentioned (for the list of Bucchi’s published works or other detailed analyses, see the Valentino Bucchi Prize publications, which since 1981 have been put out by the Valentino Bucchi Foundation [formally Association]): Cinque Madrigali La dolce pena, for voice and 9 instruments on verses of Politian, first performed at the Venice Festival, June 21, 1946; Il pianto delle creature, cantata for voice and orchestra, first performed in the Sala Bianca, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, April 10, 1947, with Fedora Barbieri as soloist; La Ballata del Silenzio, the first completely orchestral work, freely inspired by a poetic fragment by Edgar Allan Poe, first performed at the Venice Festival, September 24, 1951; Concerto in rondò for piano and orchestra in one movement, first performed at the Venice Festival, September 21, 1957, with Vera Franceschi as soloist, later performed at the Teatro Comunale of Florence, April 10, 1958 (conductor, Wolfgang Sawallisch; soloist Gino Gorini).

String instruments certainly represented a point of reference for Bucchi and the resulting works are among his most successful: the String Quartet, commissioned in 1956 by the Quartetto Italiano was first performed in New York on January 17, 1957, then repeated with great success during the famous quartet’s tours of the United States and Europe. One of the composer’s most far-reaching and important works, it shows a mature grasp of the expressive resources of string instruments and shuns formalisms of any kind and all temptations to “pure music”. The very titles of the four movements: Lamento, Girotondo, Notturno, Epilogo, are allusive in a way that animates the music with mysterious human presences: in their interchange the four instruments take on distinct personalities of their own, against a background of a dramatic contemplation of the sounds of nature and men’s voices. In 1963, Bucchi, in his Fantasia for string orchestra, adapted the last three movements of the String Quartet.

The Concerto lirico for violin and strings, written in 1957 in a very short space of time, is model of spareness, founded on the constant evolving of the solo voice, as the violin launches into a sequence of broad melodic leaps of the greatest effect. It is in one movement – like the subsequent Concerto grottesco for double bass and strings (1967) – but is divided into different sections, something like an ideal seven-part rondo, the central part being a highly elaborate cadenza. “I Musici”, already a very famous group at the time (soloist, Roberto Michelucci), were certainly greatly responsible for the success of this work, and included it in many of their concert tours in Italy and abroad. In the above-mentioned Concerto grottesco (1967) for double bass and strings (plus a single xylophone note), all the possible registers of the solo instrument are exploited, from the lowest to the highest most ethereal harmonics.

In Ison for solo cello (1971), written in close collaboration with Amedeo Baldovino, who performed it for the first time, there is a systematic use of microintervals, “set off” against a held note (the ison), microintervals which also appear in Un incipit for strings (1972), there too perfectly easy to hear, thanks to the presence of a held note. In 1973 Bucchi wrote the Piccolo concerto for piccolo/flute and strings. It is in one movement, consisting of a series of panels, organized into brief episodes, each one greatly different in “tone”, and reflects another one of the composer’s tendencies, namely that of using instruments which would seem to be least suited for use as soloists. Supplementing his fondness for the double bass, also manifest in the 1967 Concerto grottesco, is his special and highly sensitive treatment of the piccolo.

Playing upon the word “piccolo” (with its other meaning of “little”) in the progam note of the first performance (November 2, 1973, Teatro Comunale of Florence, Maggio Musicale, Orchestra conducted by Piero Bellugi with the extraordinary soloist, Roberto Fabbriciani), he wrote: “a free, shrill little voice that suffers the violence of the full orchestral tuttis but ends up having the last word”. In August, 1974, Bucchi finished the Concerto di Concerti for strings (with obbligato violin, viola, cello and double bass). The work is about as long as a normal “concerto grosso” and consists of series of mini-concertos entrusted either to a solo instrument or to a combination of solo instruments, with intervening refrains for the full string orchestra which reappears in a closing “Epilogue”. Bucchi’s absolutely last work dates from 1976: Soliloquios, a “monodrama” for viola solo (completed and revised by Fernando Sulpizi), planned as the second of three works for television. It consists of a conversation between an actor and his tape recorder, where scenes and lines from a radio play by Mauro Pezzati, La ricerca d’Ippolito, are pasted together, a dramatic confrontation between two different voices belonging to the same person.

That Bucchi had a special fondness for the viola is evident if you take a look at his list of works, seeing as how he often uses it instead of the violin (see, for example, Laudes Evangelii, Li Gieus de Robin et de Marion, Orfeo di Monteverdi or Il Coccodrillo). Moreover, the clearly specific need he feels in his last works to exploit the technical and expressive resources of single instruments, is probably what led him to write this last enigmatic work, where the viola part covers all the way up to four staves. Among his other works, mention may be made of Racconto Siciliano (1955), a curious ballet for two pianos based on an idea of Luchino Visconti; a miniature five-finger piano concerto, Le petit prince, inspired by Saint-Exupéry, meant to be played by children: five tiny pieces played one after the other without interruption, as well as another piece for piano, Fogli d’Album (1957-1973).

Bucchi was artistic director and adviser for various Italian concert organizations and opera houses (Accademia Filarmonica Romana 1958-1960; Teatro Comunale of Bologna 1963-1967, Accademia Chigiana in Siena), active as a teacher in the conservatories of Florence and Venice (beginning in 1945), headed the Perugia Conservatory from 1957 to 1974, when he became the head of the Florence Conservatory from that time up until his death. To finish off this brief portrait of Valentino Bucchi, it seems fit to quote what he himself wrote in 1970: “I don’t think a self-standing and exclusive composing technique exists any more, neither traditional nor avant-garde; techniques of any kind that serve to grasp reality, to comprehend and judge it, can be used. Our task is to salvage values which make a completely new approach possible; in this approach the composer can be completely free and this being free, this starting from scratch, represents one of the positive aspects of the present musical moment”.