Tempo 57 (225) 9–22 © 2003 Cambridge University Press 9

DOI: 10.1017/S0040298203000214 Printed in the United Kingdom

   

 ()
Calum MacDonald

The first part of this article was published in Tempo No.194 (October 1995),
pp. 2–11, and dealt with Goffredo Petrassi’s first two Concertos for Orchestra
as well as other works, notably the major choral compositions Coro di Morti
and Noche Oscura. At the time Petrassi was 91 years of age and it was
intended to complete the article within a few issues’ time. Other commitments
supervened, however; but the composer’s death has given added urgency to the
need to publish a second instalment concentrating on his concertos of the
1950s. A third and final instalment, covering Concertos 7 and 8 and some of
the remarkable compositions of Petrassi’s final period, is planned for 2004.

Seventeen years had elapsed between Petrassi’s First Concerto for

Orchestra (1933–4) and his Second (1951). But less than two separate
the Second from the Third (1952–3) and thereafter, until the Sixth
(1956–7), they emerged at the rate of one a year. No other composer
had written so many works in this genre. Indeed Petrassi may well have
been the first composer to think of the Concerto for Orchestra as a
genre – in fact, at this period, as his principal medium of discourse –
rather than a once-off excuse for orchestral display. Concertos Nos.3–6
therefore form an unusually clear case-study of the evolution of a
composer’s thinking in a single medium. Composed one after another,
with scarcely any intervening music, these four works embody, step by
step, his path from the later vestiges of neoclassicism to a free-chromatic
play of fantasy at once entirely liberated and severely self-disciplined.
That path led through – rather than ending at – a personal applica-
tion of 12-note serial techniques. Certainly, such writing as there has
been on these concertos (and the literature remains surprisingly
sparse) has tended to concentrate on their serial or quasi-serial opera-
tions. One suspects this may be a capitulation, on the part of commen-
tators only too grateful that the discernible operations of a series and
its cognate forms provide them with something solid to talk about,
rather than the fluid, allusive, increasingly capricious nature of
Petrassi’s actual discourse. Clearly Petrassi came to value serial opera-
tions as a means of securing motivic/harmonic consistency and inter-
relation. But not to resurrect or invigorate classical or post-classical
forms. With him the series became less a generator of meaning, the
nub and kernel of the argument, than the thread along which the
music would be spun, the means to release the untrammelled play of
tones and affect, which is the music’s real meaning, from the need for
symmetry or recapitulation.
The Third Concerto bears the title Récréation Concertante; it was
composed in Rome from October 1952 to April 1953 in response to a
commission from Südwestfunk Baden-Baden – whose orchestra,
under the baton of Hans Rosbaud, gave the world première at a
concert of the International Festival held that latter year at Aix-en-
Provence, on 23 July. The scoring is for an almost classical orchestra

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 10 

(double woodwind, 2 horns, a trumpet, a trombone, timpani and

strings – but a fair amount of percussion). Here the Second Concerto’s
formal strategy of uniting the characteristics of four movements into
one (a strategy as old as the Liszt B minor Sonata or Schoenberg’s
opp.5, 7 and 9) is carried a significant stage further, as those character-
istics themselves begin to dissolve into mere successive stages in an
open-ended discourse.
The element of ‘recreation’ should probably be understood on
several levels. Witty and agile, the Récréation Concertante has been seen
by some writers as in the tradition of Rossini (or Scarlatti). Paganini
may be relevant too – and perhaps especially Paganini as mediated
through Casella, for example by his Paganiniana. Assuredly an element
of joyous caprice runs through this elegant score, which delights in
raising expectations (on the structural and linguistic levels as well as
the merely melodic) only to subvert them. Something specific – a
moment from Petrassi’s religio-mystical choral work Noche Oscura, on
a poem of St. John of the Cross – is ‘re-created’ towards the end of the
Concerto in a new context and instrumental guise. (Such phenomena
preoccupy this group of Concerti: Nos.5 and 6 also make use of quota-
tions from the composer’s previous choral works.) But most impor-
tant, perhaps, is the fact that Petrassi has here almost taken his leave of
traditional forms and patterning: instead he approaches a new
aesthetic of spontaneous inventiveness, one thing leading to another
rather than back to a point of origin or articulating a structural arche-
type. There is virtually no recapitulatory impulse in this music; at the
most there are recurrences (of course structurally significant) of
certain types of gesture, motion and texture. There is, so to speak, a
constant sense of the music re-making itself anew from moment to
moment.
Something of the neo-classical vocabulary lingers still, in character-
istic repeated-note patterns, motoric rhythmic writing thrown out by
asymmetric accents, lively polyphonic textures with hints (and more
than hints) of canon or fugato. But it goes now hand in hand with an
overt – yet relaxed – use of 12-note technique, something which had
been foreshadowed in the cellular workings of Noche Oscura. Here
perhaps is yet one more connotation for récréation: the composer is re-
making his personal language, and so re-creating himself. As already
hinted, however, the meaning of this ‘serialism’ is rather different from
Schoenberg’s or Webern’s (and certainly from the exactly contempo-
rary ‘total serialization’ of Boulez and Stockhausen) – though it does
furnish Petrassi with a common stock of motifs or themes for an entire
work. Rather than drawing attention to his basic series Petrassi indeed
embeds it in the unfolding of his ‘neo-classical’ motion. After an intro-
ductory Allegro sostenuto ed energico with something of a fanfare char-
acter – immediately arresting in its dissonance and angularity while
stressing the intervals of minor and major third – an Allegro spiritoso,
with a ‘first-movement’ feel to it, begins by stating a 12-note row in the
following fashion (Ex.1):

vlns. I

leggero

bsn. 1
Example 1

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con sord.

tpt.

bsn. 1

Example 1 continued

Already there is a paradox: the more ‘expressionistic’ introductory

music is not, in fact, serially derived, whereas the more neo-classical-
sounding Allegro spiritoso is. Ex.1’s toccata-like presentation of the row
seems a deliberate and even pointed violation of Schoenberg’s early
injunction against note-repetition; there is, likewise, plenty of use of
the ‘forbidden’ octave. Apart from the oboe’s casual enunciation of the
first seven tones of the inversion as a kind of answer to the bassoon,
Petrassi is in no hurry to introduce the other row-forms; they make
their appearance as and when he happens to find a use – specifically a
melodic use – for them. Perhaps this seemingly relaxed use of row-
forms, taking them up one minute and putting them down the next,
simply privileges certain intervals (such as the major and minor third
already exposed in the introduction) and provides a ‘subcutaneous’
unity which allows the composer to dispense, even further than he had
in the Second Concerto, with explicit subjects and their repetitions.
Such themes as there are tend to use only a part of the row – the first
seven or nine tones, say. Generally the discourse is broken down to a
myriad motifs which are allowed to advance to the fore and then
recede through a ‘concertante’ fragmentation of the orchestra, espe-
cially as regards the soloistic role of the woodwind instruments.
The pulsing semiquaver motion hardly ever lets up in this opening
span of the Concerto, though the mood passes from debonair
elegance1 to mystery and back, borne by a stream of virtuosic solo
writing (notable demands of polish and agility are made on the
bassoons). An Un poco piu tranquillo brings a near-heterophony of
woodwind parts against irregularly repeated tones from the brass,
before the angular gestures of the work’s opening bars recur in a new
guise, provoking a furioso climax.
A mysterious transition slows the tempo to Molto moderato, where
we encounter a kind of grotesque nocturne that pits stealthy staccato
woodwind chordal phrases against florid, intricate string soli, both of
these providing the frame for a melancholic arietta from the cor
anglais (Ex.2). The delicate linear unravelling continues to arrange
these materials in different relationships.
Quasi andantino ( = 60)
[Lento moderato = 52 / 56 ] 3
c. ingl.
3 3 3

3
3
poco cresc. 3
(see Ex. 1)

Example 2 3 3 3 3

1
Mario Bartolotto has referred to ‘Il dandyism’ of this Concerto. ‘Il cammino di Goffredo
Petrassi’ in Quaderna della Rassegna Musicale 1. L’opera di Goffredo Petrassi ed. Guido M. Gatti
(Turin: Einaudi, 1964), p.54.

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 12 

The whole mood quivers on the edge of parody, as in a quasi-expres-

sionist comic opera. Yet muted trumpet, trombone and violas also
introduce a severe chromatic four-note motif: the basic motif, in fact,
of the existential choral work Noche Oscura, which hints at an autobio-
graphical significance to this music.2
Increasingly uneasy motivic spasms, with a return of the semi-
quaver motion, form a bridge to the extended Vigoroso e ritmico section
that constitutes the Concerto’s central span. Here gruff, incisive
unisons and irregularly changing metres, turning to agile canonic
writing and other close imitations, throw up a stream of fresh instru-
mental invention. The motion and gestures become more ‘neo-
Baroque’ – and, as if on cue, an actual concertino of 2 violins, viola and
cello emerges and holds the stage for a while. The rhythmic unisons
then become competing groups of wind ostinati, and the culmination
of the section occurs in a striking polarization of opposites: furioso
tutti unisons are juxtaposed against other-worldly calmo windows of
stasis, hinting very quietly at the underlying presence of the original
semiquaver pulse.
Two solo violins lead into an opalescent Adagio Moderato where the
muted brass keen chorale-like phrases in long note-values. Against
them rises a long, intensely expressive line in cellos and violins, span-
ning most of the available tessitura. Seamlessly woven into the
discourse, cor anglais and trombone give out simultaneously the orig-
inal form and inversion of the previously-noted 4-note motivic cell
central to the Cantata Noche Oscura.3 But this is not all: the cell is then
developed in association with two other elements – a slowly-pulsing
rhythmic figure, and rising-falling melodic lines – that so closely
resemble parallel formulations in the same work that the whole
concatenation can be viewed as an instrumental reworking, just
avoiding exact quotation, of that passage in the latter part of Noche
Oscura where Petrassi sets the lines of St. John of the Cross: ‘En mi
pecho florido,/que entero para Él solo se guardaba,/allí quedó dormido … .
Here a certain stately sadness enwraps the music, as if a distant echo of
the Sarabande from Busoni’s Faust.
Presaged by a brief motoric ticking of woodwind, a chugging
Allegretto sereno motion starts up and we find ourselves in the midst of
a cubist-neoclassical coda. (The few bars’ tipping of the hat to
Stravinsky – and Jeu de Cartes in particular – is unmistakable.) But
imperceptibly this comfortingly ironic comedy freezes back into the
contemplative spirit-world of the Noche Oscura references, the music
apparently extinguishing itself in misty string tremolandi and sighs
from muted brass. Only the last curt cadential gesture restores the
‘neoclassical’ feel – and somewhat angrily, it must be said.
I’ve mentioned the name of Busoni: his spirit, and not just in its
Faustian and Mephistophelean guise, seems to hover close about the
Third Concerto, as it already had in the Second. Récréation Concertante
is surely an object-lesson in the achievement of that ‘youthful classi-
cality’ (Junge Klassizität) which was the goal of the Tuscan master’s
final years – a ‘Latin’ art that would synthesize the best aspects of the
past, including the immediate past, to renew the fundamental classical
principles of proportion, balance, objectivity and force, to create ‘a
definitive art of the future’.

2
For Noche Oscura see Part I of this article, where the motif is shown in Ex.2a.
3
On this occasion Petrassi draws attention to the figure’s provenance in a footnote to his
score.

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Only some film scores, and incidental music for the Prometheus of
Aeschylus for a staging at the Greek Threatre in Syracuse, intervened
before Petrassi composed his Fourth Concerto (1954), premièred in
Rome on 28 April 1956 (that is, some time after the première of the
following, Fifth Concerto) by the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma della
Radiotelevisione Italiana, conducted by Fernando Previtali. Alone
among the concertos this is for string orchestra. In character it appears
at first to be Petrassi’s most Bartókian score, and indeed in its externals
(the lavish use of advanced playing techniques, for one) it seems like a
first cousin to the Hungarian master’s Divertimento and Music for
Strings, Percussion and Celesta, not to mention some of the string quar-
tets. Appearances, however, can be deceptive, as the Third Concerto
had already showed. The most deeply Bartókian aspect of Concerto
No.4 is its unusual concern with symmetry in melody and harmony –
the work abounds in passages in contrary motion – as well as with
melodic arch shapes. The serene arc of melody which is the very first
gesture, its descending arm filling in the chromatic notes omitted on
its rise, is paradigmatic: Ex.3a. (Later development in strict mirror
formation – Ex.3b – achieves the same result.) But in the fluidity and
freedom of the discourse, as well as its spiritual sheen, it is not inap-
propriate to detect again the example of Busoni.
Placidamente ( = 56 / 58)
vlns. I

vlns. II, vle.

Example 3a

vlns. I

senza vibrare

vlc. (half)

Example 3b senza vibrare

This Concerto too is a single-movement structure, subsuming the

semblances of several movements within an unbroken continuum.
Though in performance it lasts significantly longer than the Récréation
Concertante, the Fourth conveys the impression of being more compact
and unified. Partly this may be due to the homogeneity of instru-
mental timbre, but also to the tightness of its motivic workings and
the fact that in this work Petrassi allows vestiges of recapitulation or
‘ternary’ returns in some sections, though the restated material is
always somewhat transformed. In strong contrast to the Third
Concerto, the element of blithe caprice is notable by its absence:
though astonishingly inventive in motivic working and sonority, this
work is if anything rather dark and severe, shot through at times with

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 14 

a painful radiance. Here there are no quotations from Noche Oscura, yet
the Concerto shares much of the withdrawn, disturbed spirit of that
work (inquieto is a significant expression-mark) as well as the internal
rigour of its imitative contrapuntal techniques.
This Concerto too has, as it were, a covert serial basis. A 12-note
row, or rather the constituent intervallic motifs of one, underlies much
of the work’s invention, though as in the previous Concerto Petrassi
only states his row – this time in the guise of a subordinate theme –
after a non-serial opening. This theme occurs in the first relaxation of
the meditative berceuse-like rhythm that dominates the opening span:
Ex.4a. It will be noted that the theme’s two phrases divide the row into
two hexachords, almost (but not quite) identical in their intervallic
structure. As the work proceeds Petrassi tends to fashion his subjects
and harmonies from one or other hexachord, the tones quite freely
permuted – and motivically especially from its first 3-note cell (minor
third and fifth, spanning a seventh: a figure which in this falling form
or its aspiring inversion sounds all through the work in different
contexts). Though he does this with continual elegant ingenuity, he
ensures that tonal feeling remains palpable through this highly chro-
matic work, and seems to delight every now and then in cocking a
snook at serial orthodoxy – as when, at the climax of this initial
Placidamente section (which in spirit is hardly ‘placid’), the row-theme
is reprised fff molto sostenuto against dazzling triadic sonorities. The
shock value of the C-sharp major triad at this point, after several
minutes of chromatic circularities, is as powerful as the most pungent
dissonance (Ex.4b).

[( = 56 / 58) ]
poco meno
8
8
vlns. I

2 2 2
Example 4a

Example 4b

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Example 4b continued

Dissolving into misty tastiera tremolandi, with a brief recall of

Ex.3a, the Placidamente’s spectral berceuse leads into a hectic and
hugely inventive Allegro inquieto, strongly rhythmic, marked by
harried, closely-imitative polyphony, a wide palette of string sonority
and the sense of competing masses of sound wheeling and jostling
against one another in the onward stream. Its principal thematic motif
(Ex.5) derives from the row’s initial 3-note cell. The predominant
quaver motion comes under polyrhythmic attack; violent episodes
occur, sometimes based on nothing more than the iteration of the
minor-third interval. A dapper, more neoclassically-phrased music,
somewhat slower – the marking is Sereno – interposes as a kind of trio-
section; its main theme is Ex. 6a (which reorders the note-row’s first
hexachord; also appearing in inversion, Ex.6b), characterized by stac-
cato repeated notes that turn into nagging appoggiature. This splintered
baroquerie gives way to a further onset of the Allegro inquieto, now
even more closely worked motivically but rapidly deliquescing into a
Molto sostenuto section.
Allegro inquieto ( = 144)
vlns. I con sord.

Example 5

Sereno ( = 60 circa, ma elastico)

(sempre sord.)
vlns. I vlc.

Example 6a Example 6b

Here interest is concentrated at the lower end of the spectrum.

Begun almost grotesquely with mysterious rising-falling motivic
motion on divided double basses and celli, eventually joined by violas,
its textures weave a dark and sinuous chromatic-polyphonic web.
When the violins join in, this fretfully searching episode is left behind

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 16 

in its undergrowth and we emerge into pure starlight: a single page of

ethereal Lentissimo polyphony in six real parts (each part more or less
its own complete 12-tone row), played senza vibrato and spanning
almost the entire available tessitura. This is a locus classicus of
Petrassian spiritual withdrawal, which yet seems, paradoxically, the
emotional heart of the Concerto. Equally typically, it is short-lived,
becoming a tragic outcry that dies away into ominous tremolandi –
whose swelling to almost unbearable volume seems to threaten
catastrophe.
Example 7 Allegro giusto ( = 84 / 88)

vle.

Example 7 dim.

In fact it brings forth a fractured, angular fugue, Allegro giusto. The

subject (Ex.7) shares some of the characteristics of the earlier Sereno;
seemingly it wants to hark back to old neo-classical manners. But none
of that era’s comfortable certainties will suffice any more. The fugue
collapses soon enough in buzzing tremolandi and angry chordal
outbursts, and though it makes attempts to re-establish itself a swiftly-
changing succession of episodes, with something of the same motive
power, takes over. Elements of the Allegro inquieto infiltrate the
proceedings, especially the generative 3-note cell, as Petrassi’s inven-
tion becomes increasingly cornucopic and spontaneous in the way
idea follows idea. An unmistakable pizzicato reference to the Dies Irae
plainchant brings back a wild, almost gypsy-style reinvention of the
fugue subject, strenuously developed in a last flurry of fugal entries
and an angry Sostenuto climax from which the violas, with the fugue
subject’s last gutterings, subside into the Concerto’s final section.
Marked Calmo, this starts as a developed and irradiated reprise, at
half speed, of the berceuse-like music from the very opening, mainly
on a solo string sextet. When the other desks join in, the first
half/hexachord of the 12-note theme is heard for the last time, almost
nostalgically, as a gesture of farewell. But the coda is a brief stretto on
the fugue theme, bringing the work to a punctual and biting close.
Among commentators, the Fourth Concerto has always been one of
Petrassi’s most admired works, and it is very difficult to understand
why it is not part of the standard 20th-century repertoire. In its evoca-
tiveness, instrumental brilliance and inventive power it stands with the
iconic modern masterpieces of string-orchestra writing.
Immediately on completing the Fourth Concerto Petrassi, who was
by now President of the ISCM, began work on his Fifth. Dedicated to
the memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitsky, this was commis-
sioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation and the Boston Symphony
Orchestra for the orchestra’s 75th anniversary; they gave the première
on 2 December 1955, conducted by Charles Munch. In this fifth essay
in his chosen genre, an awareness of the virtuoso qualities of the

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orchestra that he was writing for doubtless influenced Petrassi in

returning, for the first time since Concerto No.1, to the full orchestra
and (comparatively) expansive utterance. Here there are two move-
ments, though the effect is rather of two parts, each comprising a pair
of movements played without a break: the implication is thus of a
four-movement structure, plus a slow epilogue recalling the work’s
opening. Of all the concertos so far, the Fifth (which with the First has
probably been the most frequently played of them) manifests perhaps
the greatest range of expression, from the crepuscular mysteries
already explored in Coro di Morti and Noche Oscura to outbursts of
Expressionistic violence.
The overall harmonic impression is of a freely tonal score – there
would be grounds for saying the work is (like Concerto No.4) ‘in C’ –
but one whose high degree of chromaticism is continually, if not
entirely systematically, serially organized. The very opening revisits
the ghostly, twilit world of Petrassi’s major choral works, as we are
confronted immediately with three thematic entities (Ex.8).
Molto moderato ( = 66)
(a) (b)
3
tbn. 1.2
vle. con sord.

dolce
ponticello

alla tavola

harp (in relievo)

(+ tam-t.)
Example 8

The violas’ tremolo, ponticello figure (a) presents what is potentially the
first hexachord of a 12-note row. The hexachord’s last tone, G#(=Ab),
then starts tolling, resonated over two octaves, in what will become an
important rhythmic motif. Starting from that same tone, muted trom-
bones give out a dolce figure in conjunct contrary motion (b) which
adds a further three chromatic tones of the twelve. Solemn, even
portentous in character, this pregnant phrase is, for those who know
the composer’s work well, an immediately identifiable quotation: the
repeated, melancholy cry of the Dead, ‘lieta no’ (‘Not happy …’),4 in
his sombre ‘dramatic madrigal’ after Leopardi, Coro di Morti.5
What these elements – and they are the basic materials of much of
the Concerto – present us with is a free ‘serial’ working in which the
significance of the full 12-note row has receded into the background.
Petrassi keeps all twelve pitches almost constantly in play, but in this
first movement no ‘second hexachord’ ever announces itself in a firm
enough order to rival the importance of Ex.8a, which goes on – with
plentiful re-orderings and repetitions of its constituent tones – to be
the source and generator of most of the themes and figures we hear.
The first four tones are the most important, and establish their own
identity as a significant tetrachordal cell. Meanwhile, to 8a’s ‘chro-
matic’ angularity, 8b – which almost immediately extends itself to
4
The text continues: ‘… but safe from the former grief ’.
5
The same figure, with slight rhythmic change, is also used for the question ‘Che fummo?’
(‘What were we?’) and this form too will be found in the Concerto. For Coro di Morti see Part
I of this article, where the evolution of this figure is shown in Exx.1a,b and d.

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 18 

become a 3-step rather than 2-step figure; it is soon also heard in a

contracting retrograde form – opposes a ‘diatonic’ smoothness and
conjunction of a very different tonal character. Part of the fascination
of the work is the way these harmonic fields interpenetrate, both by
the filling-in of variants of 8a with extra tones to secure conjunct
motion, and the way that so much of the music proceeds in wedge or
delta shapes, idea after idea opening out from a central tone by
contrary motion, sometimes to close up again but more often to be
left open, pointing forward, beyond themselves, to the next event.
Clearly the procedures of Concerto No.4 were an important precedent
for this, but in No.5 the whole process has become more fluid. There
are recognizable recurring elements in the discourse, and Ex.8, as
mentioned, already identifies three of them – but as in the previous
Concertos there is virtually no literal repetition anywhere.
The opening Molto Moderato stage of the work, as these elements drift
and eddy with increasing textural complexity, creates a phosphorescent
world of roiling half-lights. There is a steady increase in tension, leading
to an anguished climax marked by the militaristic attack of timpani and
side-drum. The music appears about to fall back once more into the
eddying mists, but instead accelerates, in a gathering heterophony of
woodwind ostinati, into a busy, highly rhythmic Presto movement. This
is a kind of scherzo-toccata, propelled by the rapid irregular pulsing of
alternating pairs of string and wind chords: the initial, germinal form of
these is a verticalization of the tetrachordal cell. Here Petrassi’s orches-
tral writing reaches a new pitch of virtuosity. The staccato chordal pulse
carries new melodic ideas, sometimes pointillistic, sometimes debonair
tunes which recklessly soar and plunge between registral extremes. The
‘lieta no’ motif Ex.8b becomes a baleful, proclamatory brass fanfare,
precipitating a swirling, heterophonic tutti climax. The music slows as if
exhausted, but an accelerating timpani solo restores the pace to a whis-
pering, scurrying, Presto close.
With the principal slow music occuring at the beginning and end of
the work, there is no central slow movement or section. The Andante
tranquillo that opens the Concerto’s second movement is a kind of
serenade-like intermezzo, Cubist-bucolic in its clucking, high-stepping
woodwind tunes, presented in reedy polyphony. Here the previously
elusive second hexachord is the source of the material, though
whether or not it has a fixed order remains moot, as the supercilious
cor anglais tune (Ex.9a) shows. There is also a falling conjunct diatonic
phrase (Ex.9b) like a reversal of the ‘lieta no’ motif.

ob. (fl. 8va higher)

c. ingl.

espress. espress.

Example 9a Example 9b
The sinuous, vaguely oriental atmosphere, enhanced by discreet
cymbals, gong and harp, would not be out of place at the court of
Busoni’s Turandot. Eventually a passionate stretto on the first six notes
of Ex.9a, all the lines doubled in thirds, brings in a Mosso, con vivacità
span which serves the Concerto for finale-section. Whereas the
previous section had been full of changing metres, here a steady 4/4
pulse is established, enhancing the ‘finale feeling’. Also there is a new
toccata-style pulse of nagging semiquaver groups, apt for turning into
tucketting brass flourishes and fanfares. Wild, atonal, pointillistic
writing flickers around this stable (and more obviously ‘tonal’) pulse,

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and trombones re-introduce the ‘lieta no’ motif – answered now by its
reversal, Ex.9b, in high woodwind. A first climax and a brief with-
drawal into flickering, buzzing tremolandi and pp percussion tattoos,
with a lugubrious canonic invention on 9b, leads to the dramatic
perepiteia of the entire work, a climactic tutti in which 9b is expanded
into a long and dolorous melody against brilliant antiphonal writing in
brass and woodwind.
Precisely at the moment of greatest intensity, as the lines unite on
the sudden brightness of an E major triad, the music congeals into a
chill and glassy Molto sostenuto. Muted brass and a last grotesque echo
of 9a in the cor anglais link into a crepuscular epilogue, Lento e grave,
all shivering low string tremolandi and sinister muted brass. From this
arises with a long-breathed, expressive polyphonic invention on the
strings – in its warm, regretful lyricism perhaps the most eloquent
music in the entire work. The tolling rhythm from Ex.8 returns, as
does the ‘lieta no’ motif, mingling with 9b and 8a’s tetrachord in a spec-
tral constellation of the work’s salient elements. There are two impas-
sioned outcries, but the work ebbs away into the night with a
rearrangement of Ex.8: the ‘lieta no’ motif in tremolando basses, the
tolling motif on the harp, and the hexachord 8a in retrograde on
violins, col legno and sul ponticello. This shivering music, whose final
implication is a sort of fateful C minor, is finally dispersed into its
constituent atoms by the stroke of the large tam-tam.
From the Fifth Concerto Petrassi proceeded almost at once – after a
summer spent teaching composition at Tanglewood – to a Sixth,
composed in the winter of 1956–7 to a commission to mark the 10th
anniversary of the BBC’s Third Programme. He gave it the title
Invenzione Concertata. The first performance took place in London,
towards the end of the Royal Albert Hall Prom Season, on 9 September
1957: Basil Cameron conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Invenzione Concertata is the shortest, but one of the toughest, of
Petrassi’s concertos. Once again he dispenses with the full orchestra,
scoring for brass, timpani, percussion and strings. The removal of the
woodwind allows the other three constituent bodies to emerge in
greater relief, and the effect is often of starkly-delineated masses of
sound moving against one another. Despite being composed in such
close proximity to the three concertos already discussed, the Sixth
represents less a next smooth progressive step as a sudden considerable
radicalization of Petrassi’s language. In this austere, brazen and
eldritch score he finally dispenses, almost totally, with any last hints of
neo-classical phraseology or diatonic tonality. Equally the music’s
‘serial’ basis is freer than ever.
The title Invenzione seems to suggest a mere working with materials,
like an etude; and on one level Concerto No.6 appears a formidably
‘abstract’ work. While Nos.3–5 have their secretive aspects they are,
whatever else, virtuoso display pieces. The Sixth, though it has its
extrovert side and tests its performers to the full, is no crowd-pleaser
but engaged, from the outset, on serious motivic business of the most
searching kind: it is here that its ‘virtuosity’ resides. As a result it is
more unified in tone than any of its predecessors: and the tone is one
of tension, pain, impending tragedy. Petrassi himself confessed that he
had been deeply affected by the contemporary events in Hungary: the
uprising against the Communist régime and its suppression by Soviet
power. On that plane, the Sixth Concerto is not ‘abstract’ at all, but the
most passionately and immediately engaged of the series so far.6 It is
6
We will find a similar level of engagement in the Seventh Concerto, dedicated to the mem-
ory of the Italian Resistance.

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 20 

easy to imagine, in this harsh nocturnal music, the movement of

soldiery, clashes by night, authoritarian proclamations. In its inmost
character, Invenzione Concertata could be considered one of Petrassi’s
most Roman works, its very scoring suggesting the gleam of armour
and weapons in torchlight, buccinists exchanging signals over distances.
The work’s opening moments may seem to inhabit a similar eerie
half-world to the close of Concerto No.5; but here the gloom is cover
for a hive of furtive, purposeful activity. The single movement does
not, as in previous concerti, encompass several clearly-delineated sub-
sections, though it might be possible to posit a controlling idea of
introduction – allegro – slow movement – finale.7 Rather an initial
tempo, characteristically labelled Mosso (inquieto) and with a
metronome mark of crotchet = 132/138, recurs throughout but is
interpenetrated by episodes, also recurrent, that move at different
speeds, notably an Adagio or Tranquillo associated with crotchet or
minim = 50. Cellos and basses give out what appears to be an 11-note
series (Ex.10): at least, after intervening percussion noise and a rocking
seventh on the cellos, the first 4 tones of its retrograde inversion
(transposed) begin the next phrase. But the rocking-seventh figure,
here repeating tones 10 and 11 of the series, is just as important an
element in its own right, a kind of typically Petrassian slowed trill, like
a spinning flywheel on a perpetual-motion machine. Similar trills and
oscillations, soft percussion attacks, gleams of brass and string
harmonics ensue, but all is introductory. In fact the series does extend
to twelve tones; but this full form is only stated some 30 bars on,
where a return to the Mosso tempo gets proceedings fully underway,
and where – given that the row unfolds in a close canon for strings –
the listener is unlikely to be aware of it.

Mosso (inquieto) ( = 132 / 138)

vc. con sord.

Example 10

As Roberto Gerhard once said, 12-note music ‘is exclusively the

concern of the composer. It does not concern the listener at all …’
though that ‘is not to say that he is not affected by it …’.8 Petrassi
works throughout with different segments, transpositions and cognate
forms of his series as he pleases, securing motivic-harmonic unity
while taking little heed of any injunctions to completeness or purity in
his use of this fundamental resource. The canonic, closely imitative
textures are however a salient feature of this work, one of his most
resourceful displays of polyphonic mastery. The concentration on the
brass (4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones) is of course reminiscent of
Coro di Morti; but the much more chromatic language shows how far
Petrassi has moved on. The serried, dissonant bursts of fanfare seem
almost to anticipate the kind of brass writing that Tippett would bring
to King Priam some five years later. The percussion battery, larger than

7
A distant echo, perhaps, despite the enormous stylistic disparity, of the Baroque Sonata da
chiesa, while the brass-writing sometimes brings to mind a modern recreation of Giovanni
Gabrieli.
8
Roberto Gerhard, ‘Tonality in Twelve-note Music’ (The Score, May 1952), p.30; now reprint-
ed in Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings edited by Meirion Bowen (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2000), pp.116–128.

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in any of the previous concertos,9 is organic to the work, not decora-

tive, taking an equal part in the statement and development of the
material.
After the canonic statement of the full series, vertginous, pointil-
listic string writing is juxtaposed against ever more extended brass
fanfares at a slightly slower Energico tempo. Greaved and vambraced as
it is, this brass music sounds at first like a more tonal – even triadic –
harmonic counterpoise to the serial writing but develops, in melodic
and rhythmic canon, to complex passages of near-Varèsian starkness.
Percussion ostinati introduce a scherzo-like episode dominated by
nagging dotted rhythms, until a return of the fanfare writing leads into
a central Adagio sostenuto beginning with an extended, lugubrious
canon from muted solo brass, based on original, inverted and inverted
retrograde forms of the 12-note series (Ex.11).
Adagio sostenuto ( = 50)
tbn. 2
con sord.

calmo
con sord.
tbn. 3

calmo

tpt. 1

calmo

hn. 1

calmo

etc.
(con sord.)

(quasi )
(con sord.)

Example 11 (quasi )

These brass exchanges become melancholy signal-calls against a slow

unfoldment of the series in the strings, which builds to a deeply expres-
sive polyphonic development that dissolves like smoke in swirling
upward string runs. Soft percussion tickings link to a very slow,

9
Timpani, String Drum, Side Drum, Bass Drum, small and large Tam-tams, large Chinese
Gong, Cymbals, Suspended Cymbal, Triangle and Maracas. Five players (including the tim-
panist) are required.

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 22 

chorale-like string music played ppp senza vibrato and marked Estatico:
another Petrassian ‘window of meditation’ opened in a dark and trou-
bled context. The dolorous brass canons return, underpinned now by
the oscillating seventh on timpani. This music is interrupted by a kind
of wild cadenza for the string body, Libero (con fantasia), which then
launches into a hurried (and harried) Allegro in the strings, canonic in
texture and set against ever more urgent brass interjections.
An unexpected moment of lyricism on the four horns presages an
intense ‘finale’ section in a determined stalking motion, strings and
brass working for the most part in co-operation and intricate
polyphony. But another harsh, domineering fanfare and the irruption
of the percussion in militaristic rhythms has the music scurrying for
the shadows once more. The dotted-rhythm ostinato is worked into
what becomes a headlong chase; eventually the textures fragment in
pointillistic fashion, the music atomizing into isolated single-note jabs
and gleams, before a final abrupt cadential tutti, involving all 12
pitches, brings matters to a decisive, crushing end.
This remarkable work10 concludes the period when Petrassi’s
compositional activity centred on the Concerto for Orchestra genre
almost to the exclusion of all else. It is also the gateway to his later
development. Over the next few years he was to write a number of
bold and important chamber and vocal works that absorbed the devel-
opments and concerns of the avant-garde a generation younger than
himself. The last two Concerti would be created in a yet more radical
syntax.
[to be concluded]

Music examples © Copyright by SugarMusic S.p.A. – Milan

10
Regrettably there is no really adequate recording. All eight of Petrassi’s Concertos for
Orchestra were recorded in the 1970s, conducted by Petrassi’s pupil Zoltán Peskó, with var-
ious orchestras, and circulated intermittently on the CBS-Sugar, Italia and Fonit-Cetra
labels; the whole collection is currently a 3-CD set issued by Warner Fonit (8573 83274-2).
Despite Peskó’s skill and advocacy, the performance of Concerto No.6 with the Orchestra
Sinfonica di Milano della RAI is probably the least good technically; the orchestra could evi-
dently have used more rehearsal time. It is worth mentioning that Concerto No.5 had
already been recorded in 1967 by the Louisville Orchestra under Robert Whitney (Louisville
Records LS-676, the LP so far as I know never reissued on CD).

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298203000214 Published online by Cambridge University Press