Collodi before Collodi: as a music critic, he was quite the rascal himself

It is 29 December 1847, and in L’Italia musicale, a prestigious Milanese artistic and literary periodical, an article entitled “L’arpa” is published, in which that musical instrument is praised – “so noble, so poetic, so harmonious, whose origins are lost in the mists of time, whose memories are linked to the mysteries of Holy History, to the Olympic contests, to the ethereal inspirations of Ossian, and to the tender songs of the minstrels” – which had by then fallen into disuse and now seemed to have reached “the end of its glorious career”. A defence of the harp at a time when Verdi’s opera was transforming nineteenth-century music and when “the means of creating effect in music are all directed towards the sole aim of bringing emotions to a state of paroxysm”.

The columnist, who signs his pieces with the initial ‘L.’, making his debut as a music critic, is Carlo Lorenzini, the man who, nine years later, would adopt the pseudonym Collodi. The author of The Adventures of Pinocchio was, in fact, a scathing music critic for some of the leading newspapers of the time from 1847 onwards for a decade. An extraordinary volume published by Libreria Musicale Italiana and edited by Marco Capra, Collodi e la musica, reprints the musical writings of the Florentine journalist and writer.

As a music critic, Collodi was scornful, polemical, often vitriolic, and always incisive and sharp. A staunch defender – ever since his very first piece on the harp – of Italian tradition, when in 1853 he heard Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, he criticised the music for being “too slavishly tailored to French taste”, addressing the composer: “Where are you? Where are your beautiful songs, your passionate melodies, your brilliant colours? Where is that multifaceted power of yours that descends into the soul and touches the very fibres of the heart?”.

Collodi’s writings on music make for a thoroughly entertaining read. He was fiercely critical of Verdi and of what he termed ‘Verdi-mania’: in 1855, in Florence, he attended a performance of La Traviata and savaged it as ‘a jumble of waltzes, larghi and cabalettas, all strung together by monotonous and insignificant recitatives’. When he reviewed I Vespri Siciliani, staged in 1856 at the Teatro Pagliano, he did not skimp on what might be called ‘incidental’ details: ‘Between the third and fourth acts. Many are glancing at their watches and starting to say it’s late!… Between the fourth and fifth acts. General signs of weariness… and an eagerness for the fifth act to begin… so they can go and fetch their overcoats and umbrellas!”.

In addition to reviews and music columns for L’Italia musicale and Lo Scaramuccia, the book also includes satirical articles, oddities, musical profiles and caricatures, as well as dialogues and parodies: In these pages the Collodi of Pinocchio—humorous and light-hearted—clearly emerges: the writer who described journalists as ‘the link between the parrot and the leech’. In his irreverent, self-deprecating humour, Lorenzini – who knew music well and played the piano – was keen to point out that ‘to speak authoritatively about music, two absolutely essential things are required: to know nothing about music and to imagine oneself to be a great intellectual. Music and politics are two subjects in the public domain: anyone can discuss them at length – even the deaf and the illiterate’. Collodi, as a music journalist, as Capra aptly writes in his introductory essay, was a multifaceted figure ‘always lucidly suspended between news reporting, criticism and literary invention’.