Art &Technology | |
- Italian Futurism - The Manifesto of Futurist Music (Balilla Pratella, October 10, 1910) |
"I appeal to the young. Only they should listen, and only they can understand what I have to say. Some people are born old, slobbering spectres of the past, cryptograms swollen with poison. To them no words or ideas, but a single injunction: the end.
I appeal to the young, to those who are thirsty for the new, the actual, the lively. They follow me, faithful and fearless, along the roads of the future, gloriously preceded by my, by our, intrepid brothers, the Futurist poets and painters, beautiful with violence, daring with rebellion, and luminous with the animation of genius.
A year has passed since a jury composed of Pietro Mascagni, Giacomo Orefice, Guglielmo Mattioli, Rodolfo Ferrari and the critic Gian Battista Nappi announced that my musical Futurist work entitled La Sina díVarg–un, based on a free verse poem, also by me, had won a prize of 10,000 lire against all other contenders. This prize was to cover the cost of performance of the work thus recognized as superior and worthy, according to the bequest of the Bolognese, Cincinnato Baruzzi.
The performance, which took place in December l909, in the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, brought with it success in the form of enthusiasm, base and stupid criticisms, generous defense on the part of friends and strangers, respect and imitation from my enemies.
After such a triumphal entry into Italian musical society and after establishing contact with the public, publishers and critics, I was able to judge with supreme serenity the intellectual mediocrity, commercial baseness and misoneism that reduce Italian music to a unique and almost unvarying form of vulgar melodrama, an absolute result of which is our inferiority when compared to the Futurist evolution of music in other countries.
In Germany, after the glorious and revolutionary era dominated by the sublime genius of Wagner, Richard Strauss almost elevated the baroque style of instrumentation into an essential form of art, and although he cannot hide the aridity, commercialism and banality of his spirit with harmonic affectations and skillful, complicated and ostentatious acoustics, he nevertheless does struggle to combat and overcome the past with innovatory talent.
In France,
Claude Debussy, a profoundly subjective artist and more a literary man than
a musician, swims in a diaphanous and calm lake of tenuous, delicate, clear
blue and constantly transparent harmonies. He presents instrumental symbolism
and a monotonous polyphony of harmonic sensations conveyed through a scale of
whole tonesó
In England, Edward Elgar is cooperating with our efforts to destroy the past by pitting his will to amplify classical symphonic forms, seeking richer ways of thematic development and multiform variations on a single theme. Moreover, he directs his energy not merely to the exuberant variety of the instruments, but to the variety of their combinational effects, which is in keeping with our complex sensibility.
In Russia, Modeste Mussorgsky, renewed by the spirit of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, grafts the primitive national element on to the formulae inherited from others, and by seeking dramatic truth and harmonic liberty he abandons tradition and consigns it to oblivion. Alexander Glazunov is moving in the same direction, although still primitive and far from a pure and balanced concept of art.
In Finland
and Sweden, also, innovatory tendencies are being nourished by means of national
musical and poetical elements, and the works of Sibelius confirm this.
And in Italy?
The vegetating
schools, conservatories and academies act as snares for youth and art alike.
In these hot-beds of impotence, masters and professors, illustrious deficients,
perpetuate traditionalism and combat any effort to widen the musical field.
The result
is prudent repression and restriction of any free and daring tendency; constant
mortification of impetuous intelligence; unconditioned propping-up of imitative
and incestuous mediocrity; prostitution of the great glories of the music of
the past, used as insidious arms of offense against budding talent; limitation
of study to a useless form of acrobatics floundering in the perpetual last throes
of a behindhand culture that is already dead.
The young
musical talents stagnating in the conservatories have their eyes fixed on the
fascinating mirage of opera under the protection of the big publishing houses.
Most of them end up badó Pure symphony,
the last refuge, harbors the failed opera composers, who justify themselves
by preaching the death of the music drama as an absurd and anti-musical form.
On the other hand they confirm the traditional claim that the Italians are not
born equipped for the symphony, revealing themselves equally inept in this most
noble and vital form of composition. The cause of their double failure is unique,
and is not to be sought in the completely guiltless and incessantly slandered
forms of opera and symphony, but in the writersí own impotence.
They make
use, in their ascent to fame, of that absurd swindle that is called well-made
music, the falsification of all that is true and great, a worthless copy
sold to a public that lets itself be cheated by its own free will.
But the
rare fortunates who, through multiple renunciations, have managed to obtain
the protection of the large publishers, to whom they are tied by illusory and
humiliating noose-contracts, these represent the classes of serfs, cowards
and those who voluntarily sell themselves.
The great
publisher-merchants rule over everything; they impose commercial limitations
on operatic forms, proclaiming which models are not to be excelled, unsurpassable:
the base, rickety and vulgar operas of Giacomo Puccini and Umberto Giordano.
Publishers
pay poets to waste their time and intelligence in concocting and seasoningó Publishers
discard any opera that surpasses mediocrity, since they have a monopoly to disseminate
and exploit their wares and defend the field of action from any dreaded attempt
at rebellion.
Publishers
assume protection and power over public taste, and, with the complicity of the
critics, they evoke as example or warning amidst the tears and general chaos,
our alleged Italian monopoly of melody and of bel canto, and our never
sufficiently praised opera, that heavy and suffocating crop of our nation.
Only Pietro
Mascagni, the publishersí favorite, has had the spirit and power to rebel against
the traditions of art, against publishers and the deceived and spoilt public.
His personal example, first and unique in Italy, has unmasked the infamy of
publishing monopolies and the venality of the critics. He has hastened the hour
of our liberation from commercial czarism and dilettantism in music; Pietro
Mascagni has shown great talent in his real attempts at innovation in the harmonic
and lyrical aspects of opera, even though he has not yet succeeded in freeing
himself from traditional forms.
The shame
and filth that I have denounced in general terms faithfully represent Italyís
past in its relationship with art and with the customs of today: industry of
the dead, cult of cemeteries, parching of the vital sources.
Futurism,
the rebellion of the life of intuition and feeling, quivering and impetuous
spring, declares inexorable war on doctrines, individuals and works that repeat,
prolong or exalt the past at the expense of the future. It proclaims the conquest
of amoral liberty, of action, conscience and imagination. It proclaims that
Art is disinterest, heroism and contempt for easy success.
I unfurl
to the freedom of air and sun the red flag of Futurism, calling to its flaming
symbol such young composers as have hearts to love and fight, minds to conceive,
and brows free of cowardice. And I shout with joy at feeling myself unfettered
from all the chains of tradition, doubt, opportunism and vanity.
I, who repudiate
the title of Maestro as a stigma of mediocrity and ignorance, hereby
confirm my enthusiastic adhesion to Futurism, offering to the young, the bold
and the reckless these my irrevocable conclusions:
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And now the reactions of the traditionalists are poured on my head in all their fury. I laugh serenely and care not a jot; I have climbed beyond the past, and I loudly summon young musicians to the flag of Futurism which, launched by the poet Marinetti in Le Figaro in Paris, has in a short space of time conquered most of the intellectual centers of the world."