Tracing the Neoclassical Casella: Compositional Projects, Models, Ideologies

In 1913, well before neoclassicism became a historiographical label, Alfredo Casella jotted down in his sketchbook a plan for a ‘Divertimento’, then amended to ‘Concerto (or Serenata) in Italian Style’, for string quartet, winds, guitar and mandolin. On the same page appear orchestral settings of two patriotic poems by D’Annunzio: The Night of Caprera and Ode to Rome. Overshadowed by the atonal experiments of the war years, this long-cherished program only materialized a decade later, as the ‘Return to Order’ convinced Casella that the time was ripe for musical and national revival. This article retraces the lines of continuity between the early ‘modernist turmoil’ and the ‘classicist adjustment’, that coincided with the advent of Fascism. Drawing on unpublished sources from the Casella archive, the discussion explores how the composer negotiated the dialectic between revolution and reaction, European cosmopolitanism and cultural autarchy. To demonstrate the alignment between Casella’s aesthetic-ideological premises and the substance of his musical writing, two string quartet works are considered, both emblematic of his transition toward a ‘clarified style’: the Five Pieces, op. 34 (1920) and the Concerto, op. 40 (1923–24).