Notturno in G-flat major, Op. 70 No. 1 (version for orchestra)

Program notes

About the Work

Giuseppe Martucci was an unusual figure in nineteenth-century Italy: a composer who wrote no operas. A virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher, he devoted his career to instrumental music at a time when Italian musical life revolved around the opera house. As a conductor he championed Wagner, leading the first Italian performance of Tristan und Isolde in Bologna in 1888. As director of the music school in Bologna he taught composition to the young Ottorino Respighi and became an important influence on him. That link explains the Notturno’s place in this all-Respighi evening: here is the teacher, framed by the pupil’s three Roman portraits.

The Notturno began life as a piano piece in 1891. Martucci scored it for orchestra in 1901, and in that year it was performed at the Teatro Regio in Turin; he often used it as an encore at his own concerts. It became one of his most frequently played works and was a favourite of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted Martucci’s music throughout his career; his performances of Martucci’s orchestral works with the NBC Symphony Orchestra have since been issued on record.

A nocturne is a piece that evokes the night, usually quiet and reflective, in the tradition of the piano nocturnes of John Field and Chopin. Martucci’s is a short, tender piece built around a single warm melody, and one critic has heard in it the same inward mood as Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll or Mahler’s Adagietto.

What to Listen For

After the brilliance of the Roman festivals, the Notturno changes the scale completely. Listen for the long, singing melody, introduced softly and then passed around the orchestra, and for the way Martucci’s delicate orchestration lets the strings and woodwind glow rather than blaze. Its ancestors are less Italian opera than the German Romantic tradition that Martucci admired, from Schumann and Brahms to Wagner.