Fra Gherardo

At La Scala, in Milan, Arturo Toscanini conducted a new opera by Ildebrando Pizzetti. Its story, taken from a mediaeval monk's chronicle, was that of "a young Parman of low birth, layman, idiot, and fool," one Gherardhino Segarello, whose reckless career of devotion and debauchery caused him to be put in jail, led out only to amuse guests when the Bishop of Parma gave a banquet. Pizzetti had chosen to make a martyr of this squalid clown, to endow his dishonorable poverty with Franciscan splendor.

In Fra Gherardo, the poor Parman is a religious rebel who gives all his money to the poor and dares combat with the Church of Rome. He is not, however, entirely a saint. His lusts lead him to betray a sympathetic virgin who later returns to help him conduct his holy reforms. Gherardo, veering like a mediaeval Elmer Gantry between his passion for this girl and his passion for reform, is led at last to betray his followers in an effort to secure her release from jail. In this effort he fails. He watches her being strangled and is then carried off to be put on the fire.

Such is the tragic tale which Pizzetti has adorned with perhaps the most splendid music of his career. The opera was undoubtedly too long and it seemed to contain a superfluity of dialogue, of inactive interludes that were only vaguely melodic. Lyrical passages were few. Fra Gherardo was original mainly for its orchestration and for the thunderous, muttering chorus which reached its climax in a mob scene at the end of the third act. These choruses were unlike anything that Milanese operagoers had ever seen before. There was something terrible and true in that imitation of the angry shouted songs of many men together, songs sweeping with strong steadiness through a range of cruelty and fear.

Ildebrando Pizzetti was born in Parma and he has honored it before this in, for example, his Ildebrando da Parma. He studied at the Conservatory of Parma for six years, specializing in the model qualities of Greek and Gregorian music. Since 1918, he has directed the Florence Conservatory. In Florence he lives now in almost ratlike retirement. His wife, a descendant of Stradivarius, is dead. He likes quiet and hates traveling; he was made sorrowful before the War when his enemies, on account of his "revolutionary" music, made him the object of belligerent slander. His most famed work previous to Fra Gherardo was Debora e Jaele, an opera about a Hebrew prophetess in which, as in the more recent work, Pizzetti made frequent use of a crowded stage and made his score the incentive for action rather than its purpose.