Bazzini: Le pene di amore
Nicholas Simpson and Will Crutchfield
This is not a typical Italian romanza, nor representative of Italian music at the end of the 1870s when it was composed, nor exemplary of the Romantic style of Antonio Bazzini, whose violin works Edson Scheid has been recording for Teatro Nuovo’s series I professori d’orchestra, and there are particular reasons for all these incongruities.
Andrea Maffei, undated photograph
The text is a free translation/elaboration of one of the Odes of Anacreon, the Greek lyricist born in the fifth century BCE. The translator was Andrea Maffei (1798-1885), probably the most important conveyor of foreign verse to Italian readers in the 19th century. Maffei was involved with practically every important artist and intellectual active during his long career, including composers from Rossini to young Pietro Mascagni, and above all with Verdi, for whom he supplied song texts, touchups to the libretto of Macbeth, and a complete libretto (his only one) for I masnadieri. He translated Byron and Thomas Moore; Schiller and Heine; Goethe’s Faust and Milton’s Paradise Lost; plays of Shakespeare and odes of Horace.
Maffei’s edition of Anacreon appeared to great acclaim in 1875. The poet and the publisher Ricordi wanted to follow it up with a selection set to music by leading composers. The first invitation naturally went to Verdi, who declined by praising the translations and implying that music could only detract from them. (Maffei was stung, but admitted admiring his old friend’s nerve in sticking to his artistic convictions.) But twenty other composers accepted, among them Bazzini, who supplied a through-composed Lied in something like Schubertian style, with perhaps a touch of the “antique” flavor of Cimarosa and Paisiello in the accompaniment. As far as we are aware, this is its first-ever recording.
For more about Bazzini, see Bavardage.
Con ferza di giacinto
Battendomi m’ha spinto
Dietro i suoi passi Amor.
Io lo seguia per valli,
Per fosse ed aspri calli,
Grondante di sudor.
Quando ferir da un angue
Mi sento, e tutto il sangue
Fluir dal volto al cor.
Moria, ma colle penne
Mi sventolò, mi tenne
Cupido in vita ancor.
E poi che risensai,
Mi disse: “Amar non sai,
Mio povero cantor.”
With lashes of his hyacinth whip,
Cupid drove me
along his path.
I followed him o’er hill and dale,
through trenches and obstacles,
dripping with sweat.
When suddenly I felt a viper’s
sting, and all the blood
rushed from my face.
I was dying, but with his wings
Cupid fanned me
and kept me alive.
And then when I came to my senses,
He told me: “You know not
how to love, poor singer!”