The Ways to Russia of Alfredo Casella

The relationship of Alfredo Casella with the Russian musical culture took place on several levels, ranging from artistic interest in the production of ‘the Five’ to interpersonal relationships that the composer maintained at different times of his life. During his early years in Paris he became passionate about such composers as Musorgsky and Balakirev, which would have much impact on the renewal of the European musical language. In line with the recovery of folklore are the Chansons he arranged in 1912 for a competition organized by the Maison du Lied, an association founded in 1908 in Paris and Moscow that proposed to perpetuate and enrich the tradition of Lied and of popular song. Casella visited St Petersburg with Henri Casadesus’s Société des instruments anciens, invited to give concerts of ancient music in 1907-08 and 1909, by Aleksandr Ziloti and Sergey Kusevitsky respectively. Subsequently, in 1926 the composer went to the USSR in order to promote the contemporary music. This trip originated from the relationships he had established with some exponents of Russian musical modernism: Boris Asaf’yev, Viktor Belyayev, and more generally the Association for Contemporary Music’ – Moscow branch of the International Society for Contemporary Music. The production of the composer was publicized by the group in several issues of their magazine, Contemporary music, and the musician was invited to contribute some writings for the journal. Evidence of these initiatives can be found in some documents preserved at the Casella Archive at the Fondazione Cini in Venice. My contribution will consider these materials, putting them in connection with the existing literature on the Russian musical life in the early years of the 20th century (e. g. Frolova-Walker) and on the activity of Casella in Russia (Lebed’, Kirillina). More importantly, attention will be paid to the critical debate emerging on the mentioned periodical, in reference to the coeval situation within the USSR and in Western Europe. As well as the debate that developed in the 1920s among music theoreticians within the divided community of Soviet musicians, the international contacts upheld among different communities were to be interrupted by the subsequent course of events in the cultural life of the Soviet Union. Still, they represent an element of continuity in the long-standing tradition of Russian – Italian Musical Connections that are at the centre of the 2018 Conference of the Institute for Russian Music Studies.