Pagine di Musicologia          
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a cura di Marco Buccolo

Guido Cantelli

Memories HR 4428-29 (ed.1992)

It seems that to leave an artistic heritage today is a rare possibility reserved for those who add the fortune of a long career to their genius. When we think of Guido Cantelli, however, we suspect that there may well be exceptions. Cantelli left a distinctive mark on the musical world of his time and, despite his short span of thirty-six years life, marked out the beginning of a path which even today shows a remarkable degree of relevance: something modern in its intensity, capable of producing - developed over a wider time span - who knows what results. Intensity does indeed seem to have been the predominant feature of Guido Cantelli's life: photographs of his activity and meetings portray him as a man who rarely smiled, with a demanding, analytic gaze and severe attitudes that seem to stem from an awareness of the little time at his disposal. Written reports too, from the aphoristic comments of his wife Iris to the more commemorative writings of Luigi Sante Colonna, often insist on the image of Cantelli rcing against time, from the time when he conducted his father's band at the age of seven, to his presence shortly afterwards as a treble in the choir of the musical cappella of San Gaudenzio where he had no hesitation in standing in for the maestro Felice Fasola -, to his studies of composition which he completed at the age of twenty-three under the guidance of Ghedini and his first official engagement as a conductor: La Traviata at the Teatro Coccia in Novara. But apart from individual episodes and being the enfant prodige who even caught Arturo Toscanini's eye, what did Cantelli mean to the world of music in the post-war period? What did he represent for audiences, and what did he represent in terms of orchestral conducting and musical interpretation? Although he had previously had successes of no modest entity, it is clear that the public at large became aware of Guido Cantelli as a conductor when Toscanini focussed on him a degree of interest that he had never before shown for any young colleague. Toscanini was orchestral conducting itself, he was a guarantee of its discipline, its interpretative precision, its faithfulness to the musical text. Toscanini was above all the myth of the podium and the baton. In his commemoration of Cantelli, Rodolfo Celletti began by underlining this same phenomenon: "The myth of the conductor is a modern myth, born of cultural and artistic requirements that belong to our own times, coined by a taste that is of our times, fed on the manners of our times. The cult of colossal blocks is also ofour time with its intricate, complex mechanisms; gigantic concert halls belong to our time, with their immense stages, dense orchestral throngs strategically set out in semicircles or lined up functionally aligned in mystical gulfs bristling with instruments. Yet the myth of the conductor stands apart from our age, which often seeks for clamorous, cloying popularity, in the severe, distant manner in which it presents itself compared to other myths. It offers a detached, retiring fame, a halo which can scarcely be perceived outside the confines of the opera house or concert hall." In this sense we can easily understand how it was that audiences, seeing the particular rapport existing between Toscanini and Cantelli, overstepped the comparison between master and pupil and preferred to think of the former handing over to the latter or, indeed, of a sort of artistic progeny. Toscanini's approval was surely more than mere professional praise, and the public - perhaps rightly so - did not hesitate to see in this a ecognition by the grand old master of something of himself in Cantelli. Yet if we take into account all the musical circles and personalities of the period we can hardly see Cantelli's art as being derived exclusively from Toscanini, and in the same way, considering the results, we can scarcely perceive such close dependence in Cantelli's conception of interpretation. Though Toscanini had at the time been wholeheartedly adopted by the American star system and had come to represent the high point of musical popularity, in the eyes of younger musicians he was the first modern conductor: it was, therefore, inevitable that everyone should at least in part - in professional and artistic terms - feel the consequences of this progress. There were other reference points with which Cantelli was certainly familiar, having furthered his education through the use of gramophone recordings, however precarious they may have been. A famous 1952 photograph shows him with Victor de Sabata and Herbert von Karajan. Another, of he same year, shows us Cantelli with Dimitri Mitropoulos. This was a period in which such a personality as Wilhelm Furtängler was at work, and a conductor like Hermann Scherchen was striving to broaden the horizons of the repertoire of contemporary music. In this climate, characterised by stimuli which in their various directions were to condition the future panorama of music, Toscanini was, as Massimo Mila puts it, "the perfection of musical craftsmanship" : a long career transformed into a precious, rich, open proposal. A necessary condition in the approach to music interpretation yet one which left several problems unresolved particularly the question of bringing repertoire up to date. What musicians of Cantelli's generation found was not then the inheritance of a baton so much as the onus of closely examining the rapidly evolving reality of music. For his part, Cantelli had already made precise choices. His decision to gradually insert "new" music into concert programmes, applying the same intense study hat had been dedicated to the "classics", and to dedicate himself specifically to the symphonic concert, whilst audiences associated Italian nationality with a vocation for opera, enabled Cantelli to build up a unique and intensely personal orchestral sound. The overpowering energy of Toscanini's conducting found an efficient means of control in Cantelli's hands. Attention to instrumental tone, study of the phrase as a sound which is born and takes form, smooth progression of the whole, with every component part finding its own identity, were all the product of his clear, analytic vision of the score together with an indispensable - and at the time probably exceptional desire to learn. Perhaps it is for all these reasons (and for many more that the mystery of musical interpretation does not reveal to us) that the recordings of Cantelli's concerts, now revived and passed on to us thanks to today's digital technology, have a particular savour. We might listen out of curiosity or nostalgia for the past, or with the score before us in the hope of discovering some secret: yet Cantelli's life and art, in their rapid concentration, seem not to wish to grant us much room for making this type of investigation. In the same way those questions that come to mind when we think of a career that was tragically cut short, questions to which the sky above Orly airport definitively denied all answers on that 23rd November 1956, seem to lose their importance compared to the music that Guido Cantelli studied and conducted in his thirty-six young years of art: quite apart form any regret, this - for us - remains a precious certainty.