While the impact of Visconti’s haunting use of the ‘Adagietto’ in Death in Venice (1971) has been thoroughly discussed, this paper tackles Mahler’s presence in Italian film culture from a different angle, one in which the craft of film musicians was key in mediating Mahler’s influence on the (mass-)cultural canon. The inclusion of pre-existing concert music in film acquired an auteurist undertone in Italy throughout the 1960s. In a time when compiling soundtracks from issued records was still uncommon for non-pop genres, productions often hired film composers as adapters/arrangers of the ‘Western art music’ repertoire. In this role, however, their contribution extended to paraphrase, allusion, pastiche and reinvention. Mahler’s case exemplifies this framework. At least six other productions besides Death in Venice account for Mahlerian references in Italian cinema between 1967 and 1981, often involving creative agency by the respective film composers. Director Franco Giraldi repeatedly chose Mahler’s work for his films, tying this to his origins on the Italian-Slovenian border (formerly Austro-Hungarian territory): for his western A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die (1967), composer Carlo Rustichelli conceived a sort of pastiche, blurring the line between quotation and reinvention; Giraldi entrusted Luis Bacalov with similar tasks in La rosa rossa (1973) and in the TV-documentary Trieste 1948 (1981). Director Liliana Cavani worked with composer Daniele Paris on Beyond Good and Evil (1977), whose plot dramatizes Nietzsche’s love triangle with Lou von Salomé and Paul Rée. Paris had been a trailblazer of the Mahler renaissance in Italy with his conducting and teaching work. For this film, he devised a thick web of musical references in which Mahler takes centre stage, starting with the diegetic adaptation of the first song from the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, which serves as a base for his otherwise original score. Looking at these examples as symptomatic of the catching on of a Mahlerian vocabulary in the golden age of Italian cinema enables us to reframe Visconti’s case less as a singularity, yet rather as a glaring emergence (and a kind of crystallisation) of a shifting taste.

(Un)crediting Mahler: Adaptation, allusion, reinvention in Italian film music beyond Visconti / M. Corbella. ((Intervento presentato al convegno (Re-)mediating Mahler - International Conference tenutosi a Dobbiaco nel 2023.

(Un)crediting Mahler: Adaptation, allusion, reinvention in Italian film music beyond Visconti

M. Corbella
2023

Abstract

While the impact of Visconti’s haunting use of the ‘Adagietto’ in Death in Venice (1971) has been thoroughly discussed, this paper tackles Mahler’s presence in Italian film culture from a different angle, one in which the craft of film musicians was key in mediating Mahler’s influence on the (mass-)cultural canon. The inclusion of pre-existing concert music in film acquired an auteurist undertone in Italy throughout the 1960s. In a time when compiling soundtracks from issued records was still uncommon for non-pop genres, productions often hired film composers as adapters/arrangers of the ‘Western art music’ repertoire. In this role, however, their contribution extended to paraphrase, allusion, pastiche and reinvention. Mahler’s case exemplifies this framework. At least six other productions besides Death in Venice account for Mahlerian references in Italian cinema between 1967 and 1981, often involving creative agency by the respective film composers. Director Franco Giraldi repeatedly chose Mahler’s work for his films, tying this to his origins on the Italian-Slovenian border (formerly Austro-Hungarian territory): for his western A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die (1967), composer Carlo Rustichelli conceived a sort of pastiche, blurring the line between quotation and reinvention; Giraldi entrusted Luis Bacalov with similar tasks in La rosa rossa (1973) and in the TV-documentary Trieste 1948 (1981). Director Liliana Cavani worked with composer Daniele Paris on Beyond Good and Evil (1977), whose plot dramatizes Nietzsche’s love triangle with Lou von Salomé and Paul Rée. Paris had been a trailblazer of the Mahler renaissance in Italy with his conducting and teaching work. For this film, he devised a thick web of musical references in which Mahler takes centre stage, starting with the diegetic adaptation of the first song from the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, which serves as a base for his otherwise original score. Looking at these examples as symptomatic of the catching on of a Mahlerian vocabulary in the golden age of Italian cinema enables us to reframe Visconti’s case less as a singularity, yet rather as a glaring emergence (and a kind of crystallisation) of a shifting taste.
16-set-2023
Settore PEMM-01/C - Musicologia e storia della musica
Settore PEMM-01/B - Cinema, fotografia, radio, televisione e media digitali
Mahler Centre
https://mahler-centre.net/veranstaltungen-eventi/re-mediating-mahler
(Un)crediting Mahler: Adaptation, allusion, reinvention in Italian film music beyond Visconti / M. Corbella. ((Intervento presentato al convegno (Re-)mediating Mahler - International Conference tenutosi a Dobbiaco nel 2023.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2434/1121456
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