La lingua della musica

Pythagoras thought maths was the language of music. It was an ambitious claim, though not altogether absurd: modern musicologists delight in discerning mathematical patterns in the works of Bach and Mozart. Nowadays, though, the language of music is surely Italian.

How on earth has this come about? Music has, from the first grunts of mankind, been made by everybody everywhere, and Italy might seem an improbable country to lead the world in musical influence. It has been a single independent country for scarcely 150 years, with little political power to impose any language on anyone far beyond its borders.

So is Italy’s musical dominance a fiction? Just look at ‘bebop’, ‘fado’, ‘lieder’, you may say, or ‘mazurka’, ‘polonaise’ or ‘tango’. Remember, too, that French has provided ‘plié’, ‘entrechat’, ‘arabesque’ and nearly all the standard terms of ballet.

It’s also true that foreigners have sometimes marked their works not in Italian but in their own tongue. French composers such as Debussy and Ravel did so. So did several German-speakers. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, No 6, is marked in German. Mahler too would use a feierlich (solemnly) here or a fröhlich (lively) there. And when Schumann wanted to counsel ‘funny’ or ‘impatient’, he wrote lustig or ungeduldig.

If British composers have been more reluctant to use their native language, be thankful: imagine scores adorned with ‘buck up’, ‘whoa’, ‘less emotion’ or ‘full steam ahead’. Anyway, there has been no need. English thrives on theft. ‘Lullaby’ came to Middle English from Swedish. ‘Minuet’ is French in origin. ‘Polka’ is Czech. ‘Guitar’ is Greek. ‘Rasgueado’ – playing guitar strings with the back of the fingernail – is Spanish.

But none of these, nor any others, can shake the proposition that Italian is the language of the andante, the arpeggio, the sonata and the virtuoso, of the piano, the prima donna and the pizzicato – in short, the language of music.

It may have begun about 1,000 years ago, when Guido D’arezzo, an Italian monk, invented a new way of writing Gregorian chant, using a four-line stave and letters as clefs. This became the basis of the musical notation in worldwide use today. After such a good start, Italians were musically on their way.

Indeed, they gained a reputation for all things musical, just as they were becoming famous for other artistic accomplishments. Though Italy was merely a geographical expression, its component parts were evolving into centres of commerce and culture, leading in the 15th and 16th centuries to the Renaissance.

In music, as in painting, architecture and the sciences, the Italian peninsula became pre-eminent and thus influential.

It was soon the place to hear and learn music. Composers such as Palestrina and Striggio were the pop stars of the 16th century. Italy was also a leader in publishing sheet music. And its instrument-makers – the Amati family, Stradivari, Bergonzi and Guarneri – were unrivalled. All over Europe their products – cellos, pianos, violas, violins – took Italian-derived names.

Meanwhile Italians began to develop new genres of music. Early in the 16th century, Monteverdi, a composer of both sacred and secular pieces, helped to establish opera, an art form at which Italians were to excel over the next 400 years. Italian influence was such that foreign composers would often use Italian librettos: several of Mozart’s operas were written in Italian, among them Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.

The oddity in this story is that Latin plays no great part. Of course, Latin is the basis of Italian and was long used in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church. Latin was also the language of educated people all over Europe for hundreds of years. But it has not thrived as a sung language in the way Italian has. Mozart’s first opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus, written in Latin (when he was 11), is seldom performed these days and choral Latin is confined chiefly to religious music, much of it early, a few Christmas carols and one or two school songs.

One explanation for the weakness of Latin may also be an explanation for the success of Italian. Latin is not a pretty language. Italian is beautiful.