Patrick Bade
Cultural Life in Fascist Italy

Patrick Bade | Cultural Life in Fascist Italy | 06.09.21

- [Judi] All right Patrick, welcome back and thank you to everybody who’s joined us this evening. Patrick, over to you.

Visual and music are displayed throughout the presentation.

• Thank you, Judi. I’m going to be talking tonight about the cultural life in Italy under Mussolini. That’s from 1922 up until the end of the Second World War. 1922, what you see on the left is the March on Rome, that was the 28th of October, 1922. It was a kind of insurrection led by Mussolini intended to intimidate and suppress the democratically elected centre left government of Italy. You could say it was a kind of precedent for what happened in Washington in January this year. The difference is being that of course, Mussolini led from the front and not from the back. And he was unfortunately successful.

So he remained in power until 1943 when the allies invaded Italy and he was a puppet dictator or a fascist republic, but really under the control of the Nazis for the last two years of the war. And then he was lynched with his mistress, Clara Petacci, on the 28th of April, 1945. It was horrible thing to happen. And I’m not in favour of lynching anybody really, with the possible exception of Hitler. And I mean, the only good thing I can think about this was that it’s two days before Hitler’s suicide. So Hitler will have died knowing what was likely to have happened him if he hadn’t taken his own life. Okay, I want to take you back to the 1930s and imagine switching on the radio set you see on the left hand side, tuning into an Italian station. And this is very likely what you might have heard.

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That was Mane Bianca, she was one of the most popular radio singers in Italy. And she did lots of Italian songs, but of course she also did American, French songs and it very, very delightful. So I’m going to begin with a kind of health warning about this lecture ‘cause I am going to show you lots of lovely things, lots of very beautiful things, beautiful buildings, beautiful interiors, I’m going to play some lovely music, show you wonderful paintings. But I don’t want you to imagine for one second that this lecture is any kind of an apology for or for fascism or that I’m promoting it in any kind of way.

What is fascism? Fascism is a philosophy which puts the good of the state and the collective identity of the people over the rights of individuals. The word comes from the Latin fasces, fasces. You’ll see, you can see a fasces is on the screen. Fasces is a bundle of sticks tied together, but sometimes with an axe, sometimes without, but it, the sticks are tied together showing that collectively there is greater strength than in individually. And so it’s a symbol that goes back to 2000 years to the Romans, and you can find it everywhere.

This is a victory, a First World War victory arch, actually built in the 1920s at Bolzano in Italy. You can see that the columns are entirely made up of fasces. You could, this is a fasces wool lamp on the left hand side, a fascist wall lamp. If you’re really, really devoted, enthusiastic fascist, you can have a fascist double bed. As you can see on the right hand side. This is a picture, it’s actually behind me on the wall, can probably see it, where is it? And you cannot see it, yes you can. This is a fascist frame that I found in the Paris flea market. And I’ve used it to frame a portrait I made of my very delightful Indian dentist who could not be less fascist if he tried. And when you start looking for them, you find fasces everywhere.

Here are fasces at the Washington, the capital, huge fasces. And they’re there of course, as again, as a symbol of authority. Doesn’t necessarily have to be authority that’s misused or abused. This is a building in on Great Titchfield Street in London where I used to work and I was sitting in a cafe looking out the window and I thought, bloody hell, there are fasces on that building, but they don’t necessarily have to have a fascist meaning.

Here is Mussolini with the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who in many ways was a kind of pioneer or precedent for fascist ideas. He was considered a great war hero in the first World War. And he was a great promoter of extreme Italian nationalism. He was actually probably one of the very few people that Mussolini was really wary of and a nervous of. 'Cause he just had such a huge, he was such a hero. He was such, had such huge prestige.

I’m always asking Italian friends or any Italian I meet, what do Italians today think of Gabriele D'Annunzio? Does anybody read his poetry? It seems to me to be unreadable. But then of course I can only really read it in English translation. My Italian is not really not good enough for it. And he just strikes me as a rather ludicrous figure. I’ve never really had a very clear answer from anybody. I think in a way he’s a sort of Italian equivalent of Rudyard Kipling that he still does actually have a certain hold on the popular imagination despite some very dubious associations.

One thing you can say in favour of him was that he was always against Hitler and he did everything he could to warn Mussolini against Hitler and to try and prevent him forming an alliance with Hitler. So D'Annunzio was an absolute megalomaniac, as you can probably see from his little country villa on Lake Garda, which was of course, financed by Mussolini, who was very keen to buy off D'Annunzio. And in the grounds is there’s natural, there’s even a small battleship in the garden, which was that he used, that he commanded during the First World War.

So many people welcomed fascism, even Toscanini, who later became its greatest Italian enemy, initially was attracted by it. I think people welcomed it as many people mistakenly welcomed Hitler through fear or dislike of communism and fear of public disorder. So people just wanted an orderly society. So I think many of the intellectuals and artists of Italy, were initially at least quite attractive to it.

And I’m going to play you a piece that Puccini wrote in 1922 to celebrate the march on Rome. Well, for obvious reasons, this is not a piece of Puccini that gets very, gets performed very often, but it’s the most attractive piece. If anything’s going to persuade you to become a fascist, it might be this. And I’m going to play you a record of it made in the 1920s by the great Italian baritone Apollo Granforte.

♪ Music plays ♪

It’s a very catchy stuff, a bit land of ho and glory. And we can’t know really how, whether Puccini would’ve gone along with fascism all the way, 'cause he died in 1924, two years after Mussolini took power and his final masterpiece Turandot was performed posthumously at Lascala in 1926. It’s a piece I love very much. But I’ve been listening to it over the last few days and thinking, is it a piece that is flavoured with the new atmosphere of fascism? I mean the, one of the things that sets Puccini apart from all the other Italian composers of his generation, Mascagni, Tudana, Chulea, et cetera, et cetera, was his remarkable ability to absorb new influences and move with the times which none of the other companion, Italian composers have.

There is a spirit in which, in Turandot quite different from his earlier operas, there’s a kind of monumentalism, a kind of epic quality and in particular the way something that you’ve never seen in any of his operas up to this point. The way the mob, the crowd becomes a protagonist in the drama. Very, very exciting stuff. But some of it is really quite brutal.

♪ Music plays ♪

Now with Puccini gone in 1924, the grand old man of Italian music and indeed Italian culture altogether was Pietro Mascagni. See him on the left as a very beautiful young man. At the time he had his greatest triumph in 1890 with his opera Cavalleria rusticana. Something he was never able to quite repeat. It’s wrong to say as some in British critics do that he’s just a one opera composer. There’s a lot of interest in Mascagni, but nothing ever again as quite as successful as Cavalleria rusticana.

Here you see him as an old man in the 1930s. Now, he certainly was for a long time a very enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini. He had second thoughts in 1936 when his son was killed in the Ethiopian Campaign. And he clearly didn’t like it in 1938 when Italy adopted fascist, racist antisemitic laws in imitation of Germany. Here he is again, his very last interview with, 'cause he was a senator, a very important man and he could always be received by Mussolini. But his very last interview with Mussolini was actually to protest against anti-Semitic measures. In particular, he wanted to lobby on the behalf of his friend the Jewish composer Franchetti.

But 1940 of course, it was 50 years since the premiere of Cavalleria rusticana and before Italy joined in the war in May, 1940, right at the beginning of the year, HMV, London based firm, decided to make a celebratory recording of Cavalleria rusticana with Mascagni himself conducting. And at the same time, they recorded a little speech in which he thanks his kind listeners, male and female, and introduces himself. So here is the voice of the aged Pietro Mascagni.

[Clip plays]

And for this recording, of course, it’s historically a very interesting recording as G Lee, can’t go wrong there, of course. But his favourite singer was a soprano called Lina Bruna Raza. And as I think you can sort of see in these two photographs, she was severely bipolar. And by the time that they came to make this recording in 1940, she was actually permanently incarcerated in an asylum. And because Mascagni was so insistent, he begged for her, they let her out of the asylum.

I think it was one of the last times she left it to go to the recording studios and make this recording. It’s her singing as had a fair amount of criticism. It’s some of it’s pretty rough stuff. But I want to play you one moment, which always really grabs me by the throat. It’s the end of her big aria. And she, right at the end of the aria, she has this little outburst and she says twice, I’m damned. And the first time it’s kind of desperate, desperate. Oh my god, I’m damned. And then the second time it’s with incredible sadness. And whenever I listen to this it, as I said, it really affects me 'cause you think, “My God, does she ever mean what she’s singing here?”

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I dunno any other singer who puts quite so much sadness into that second, your son, Donata. Oh, here he is Mascagni at the premier of his last opera in 1935, Nerone. And the inset here is of his great friend, Alberto Franchetti, who’s a really neglect, unfortunately neglected singer, composer rather. And he was an important Italian composer in the early 1900s, unlucky. His masterpiece was called Germania, of course that went out of fashion during the First World War. And then of course his work was banned because he was Jewish. And after the second World War, he was just considered passe.

But he’s, and his work has been very, very rarely performed since, but I’m hoping that one day we will get a proper Franchetti revival. Now, after Puccini, as I said, Turandot was the last Italian opera that ended the standard repertoire, but new operas were being written and presented all the way through the 1930s. And probably the most successful, and again, there’s a certain irony here, it’s a by composer called Lodovico Rocca the title is Il Dibuk. And of course it’s based on the famous Yiddish legend of the dybbuk, I’m sure most of you know, is an evil spirit of a dead person that comes back and takes over a living person.

This was a tremendous success in 1934 and right up to 1938 it was probably the most performed new opera in Italy. Again a work I’ve never seen. In fact, I’ve never heard the whole thing, only know bits of it. But this is for a duet, which is, well I suppose it’s haunting is the right word 'cause it is a haunting, but it’s I do find it a strange and fascinating. It’s got a sort of a dream like mesmeric quality.

♪ Music plays ♪

Well, Germany and Italy are of course the two greatest operatic nations. And when the, I told you before that when the Access Alliance was formed in 1937, it was sealed by a visit from the entire Lascala company to Milan in the summer or in June, as you can see, 1937, famous performance of Aida in Berlin attended by Hitler and Goebbels with Gigli and Gigli. And it was a kind of a two-way operatic traffic.

So Italian opera houses, which were notoriously provincial in the way, I mean, you know, they just regarded opera as being an Italian art form. Not a lot of foreign operas got performed in Italy, but in this period, oh my goodness, you can see riot or something out in the streets, sorry about that. So German operas were increasingly performed in Italy and rather belatedly in, in I think it’s '41 or '42, Atlas gala, Richard Strauss Die frau ohne Schatten was given its premiere in Italian as La donna Senz'ombra. And that parts of that performance have come down to us.

I’m going to play you next set, thank you. If Mike and Gail are listening to this from San Francisco, thank you because you gave me this recording and I absolutely love it, because I love Strauss. He’s my favourite composer, as you know, by now. But it’s wonderful to hear it sung in an Italian and in an Italian way. This is Eva Pache, you see on the left hand side. And oh, such a gorgeous voice. It’s so warm, you know, so open throated, Northern European singers just don’t make a sound like this.

♪ Music plays ♪

She sings it as though she’s singing Puccini. And that’s no bad thing as far as I’m concerned. Now, as I said, fascism, again, to repeat the warning, fascism is never a healthy or a good philosophy and you don’t want to live under any fascist regime. But I also want to make the point that Italian fascism was not like German fascism or even Russian fascism, 'cause I think you can say that the variety of communism that under Stalin was actually just another version of fascism.

Italian fascism was never oppressive. It didn’t take things to the extremes that German fascism did and there was always a much, much greater measure of freedom, including artistic freedom. And so, you know, culturally, Italy was much, much more open than Germany was during this period. And I’m going to play you now an excerpt of an Italian performance, actually this is a post-war performance, but it’s the same artist, Tito Gobbi, great, great Italian singing actor. And it’s amazing to think that in 1942 in Rome, they put on a performance of Berg’s 'Wozzeck’ which was completely, as the Germans would say, unerwünsch, that was this terrible word they used all the time, unerwünscht.

They used it against anybody that they didn’t like and they used it against of course anything that was Jewish and anything that was modernistic and Wozzeck was the great modernist opera completely banned in Germany during the Nazi period. But I’d like to play a little bit of it again, see how it sounds. This is the climactic scene in the opera where Wozzeck has just stabbed his mistress to death and thrown her body into a pond. And now he’s looking around desperately for the knife. And in search of the knife, he wades into the pond and he drowns in the pond.

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Another composer, modernist composer who in Germany was unerwünscht, although he protested against that, was Igor Stravinsky. I told you before about his notorious latter his German publishers saying, why don’t like the Nazis like me and my music? Don’t they know that I dislike Jews and Communists as much as they do. But so again, Stravinsky completely, certainly by the time you get to the Second World War, completely banned in Germany.

But these are designs by the brilliant designer, Gio Ponti, I’m going to talk about him later for a performance of Col Chin in 1942. And one of the great exports of Italy in the inter war period were the tenors so many wonderful Italian tenors in his bead, Gigli, the most famous of all, Lauri-Volpi, Pertile, and Tito Schipa. And so Gigli, Lauri-Volpi, Tito Schipa, they all made movies. And usually at this period, the movies would be made in bilingual versions in Italian and in German. And I couldn’t resist playing you this record. I just love it so much.

This is from a film with its Tito Schipa and the song is Torna Piccina. But he sings it in German as . And I want to make a couple of points about this, firstly, about enunciation pronunciation. The best Italian tellers, and Pavarotti, as an example, Tito Schipa, they have the most wonderful enunciation. So even though Schipa is singing in German, his enunciation is so good that you would understand every single word far better than if any, any German singing singer was singing it. His pronunciation is a different matter ‘cause he doesn’t really make any attempt to make it sound like German. He makes it sound like Italian with, you know, beautiful crisp consonants and pure vowel sounds. So it’s just such a delight for me and I hope it is for you, too.

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I think the German speakers amongst you will appreciate how delightful that is. Now, the most important person for Italian culture through much this period, at least until the late thirties, is a Jewish woman called Margherita Sarfatti. She came from a very wealthy, highly cultured Jewish family. She started with very left wing socialist sympathies, moved towards the extreme right and she became Mussolini’s mistress, one of many, in fact, two of her daughters were sleeping with Mussolini at the same time.

And she had a tremendous influence on him. I think, you know, he wasn’t clearly, I don’t think know how bright Mussolini was. He wasn’t really much of a political philosopher. She really provided the intellectual muscle behind the development of Italian fascism. But she was also a woman of very cultivated taste. This is a portrait of her by the very interesting sculptor, Adolfo Wildt.

Here is a photograph of her, I suppose around the time that she first became Mussolini’s mistress, another photo and a portrait of her. And so a place that I’m actually, I’ve never visited, I’m longing to visit, this is a hotel in Rome, Grand Palace Hotel, opened in 1927. And it has murals by an artist called Guido Cadorin, which includes portraits of Sarfatti you can see on the right hand side here. And her daughters, it’s a wonderful art deco palaces. So she was a major influence on the arts in Italy. And she promoted a particular style of painting, which was called Novecento.

Novecento just means 20th century, but it’s a kind of simplified, monumental classicism. I mean, you can see an influence if you want from Picasso’s near classical pictures at the end of the first world war, have three of the leading members of the Novecento movement here, Massimo Campigli on the left, Achille Funi in the middle. And Sironi the one artist I want to talk about is Sironi. He’s actually something of a passion of mine.

Well, and so, you know, some of this stuff I’m afraid, I’m almost embarrassed to tell you how much I like it 'cause Sironi really was an absolute convinced over the top fascist and he even followed Mussolini up to, you know, right to the end, you know, when Mussolini was in his republic in Saleo, Sironi followed him. The ironic thing is that what Londoners amongst you and I suppose any people who love art and have visited London, I hope you’ve all been to the Estorick Collection, which is in Islington. It’s actually just down the road from where I live when I’m in London.

And Eric Estorick, he was a New York Jew who found himself with the American forces in Italy at the end of the war. And he happened to bump into Sironi and he befriended Sironi Sironi introduced him to modern Italian art futurists, Boccioni and all those people. And it was a revelation for Estorick. And he became a passionate admirer of modern Italian art when it was very little known outside of Italy. And he dealt in it and he collected it and he built up, it is actually the finest collection of 20th, early 20th century Italian art outside of Italy. And amazingly to be found in a rather nice Georgian townhouse in Islington, but that’s later on.

Estorick said, of course, when he first met Sironi, had no idea that he was such an extreme fascist. This is the image, he did official murals like this one. And this is for the House of Wounded Soldiers in Rome. Another place I’d never been to, but very keen to go on my next visit to Rome. And so this is more, more typical of his work. And you can see there, there it is a kind of abstracted, simplified, slightly brutal form of classicism, very painterly, you know, a very gorgeous paint surface.

Well, you know, I’ll be interested but to know if people have a reaction to these pictures, positive or negative. If you like them as I do, or if you find that there are fascist connotations, or if you find them sinister. Actually the pictures I like best by Sironi are his urban scenes, very melancholy, very poetic, slightly dreamlike, slightly surreal scenes of urban life. I would love one of these actually, they’re still not that expensive, I think obviously his political associations after the war rather harmed his reputation.

Now the insert here is the cover of an exhibition that was in London in 1995 at the Hayward Garrick called Art and Power Europe Under the Dictators. And it looked at the art, architecture and design of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Francoist Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy. Behind it, you can see this image I’ve shown you several times before of the Paris welfare of 1937, where you have the Nazi pavilion facing the Soviet pavilion. Now, much of the art and design that was in this show was reassuringly, crass and terrible, particularly German. Apart from the music of Richard Strauss.

And he was of course on his own planet really by the late 1930s, not part of it. And arguably, and we could have an argument about this. Common bron art, I suppose it’s the only work of art that really comes out of Nazi Germany and is imbued to some extent, I think with Nazi philosophy that is still popular today. As I said, it’s quite reassuring how absolutely terrible actually that all the painting and art and sculpture is that comes out of Germany in the 1930s and these two ludicrous buildings that you can see here, spares pavilion for the Nazis and the Communist pavilion, equally awful buildings.

But I remember going around that show and feeling, I’m feeling a guilty pleasure in the Italian section. A lot of the design is, I suppose it’s so innate with the Italians going back a couple of thousand years. Not all of it, of course, here are two sculptures of Mussolini. I think if somebody gave me this futurist portrait of Mussolini and continuous profile on the left. I think that’s a rather wonderful piece of design. I don’t think I’d throw that out. On the other hand, I don’t think you’d really want the sculpture of Mussolini on the right hand side on your mantle piece.

This is a very famous fascist building at EUR just outside of Rome. It’s the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, 1937 to 40 by sculpt by architects Giovanni Guerrini and Ernesto La Padula. And I have to say, I think it’s in its way, it’s fabulous. The German stuff and that Soviet stuff is always, is never well proportioned. It always, with this, I think it’s beautifully proportioned and of course it has a certain air of brutality about it, but it is not a building that crushes you and makes you feel small, like so much of the– it’s all part of this area of Rome that was being developed with the prospect of the 1940 Olympics.

The ones the Olympics succeeded, the Berlin ones of 36 were going to be held in Rome and there was going to be a very, very spectacular setting for them. But of course they were cancelled. And there are all these rather wonderful hunky male statues of athletes that I think are really quite beautiful, quite splendid in a way, very different from Nazi sculpture. This is Arno Breker, this is the equivalent. These are just horrid, horrid, nasty and ridiculous. Actually, there’s something totally laughable about them. But the Italian version is, well, I’d have one of those in my back garden if somebody offered me one.

And now I get to, of course the great designer, one of the greatest architect designers of the 20th century, this is G Ponti, now he’s international fame is post-war. He’s really at his height in the 1950s and 60’s. But actually his career goes right back to the start of the fascist period. And there are many things in his art and design that actually do fit in to some extent with the fascist aesthetic like this plate, which he designed in 1923 and with the title Le attivita gentili. l progenitori

So these, it’s this idea of course it also celebrated in these statues. It’s a fascist idea of, you know, the healthy body and sport and family values and all sorts of things which aren’t necessarily always bad or fascist. But the fact that, but the fascists were projecting, that’s a photo of very handsome G. Ponti on the right hand side. This is his first great house, a villa, which is actually not in Italy, it’s just outside of Paris. It’s called 'L'Ange Volant’, flying Angel. So this dates from the late 1920s.

Here’s another, here’s the original owner in front of it, and here we are inside it. So he’s one of those architects like the, like Macintosh or even like Robert Adam if you want, who threw designs, everything. So if you wanted a house from G. Ponti, you could not just have the house, you could have all the furniture. This is a chair from the 1930s designed by G. Ponti. You could have your flatware for the table designed by him. And ceramics. William Morris, I suppose is also really goes back to William Morris, particularly this idea that everything can be designed by the architect inside the, the house. And if you want, you can get him to design a nice swimming pool for you. How about that? Fabulous. That would be nice to have in South Africa or Los Angeles.

So he’s not doctrinaire, I mean he’s open to, very open to new ideas. This is a, a block that he designed in the early ‘30s in Milan that still has a rather art deco look to it. But by the mid '30s just interestingly, just at a time when all the Baha artists were being driven out of Germany, 'cause the Nazis really hated Baha modernism. So they all went off and someone came to Britain, but eventually they all went to America. So this is a complex designed in the mid to late thirties by G. Ponti, which you can see is in really a kind of Baja modernism. I said never as doctrinaire, never. How about this, there’s a fabulous building, this is the School of Mathematics in Rome designed in 1935. And it has a kind of slight electricity, eccentricity in the shape of the windows, for instance, that is different from German Bahas.

He was very much an all rounder and he produced design magazines and books. This is the Publishing House of Domus, which he ran from 1928 to 1942. And he published this pamphlet, La Casa All Italiana, the Italian House. And here again is a very Italian version of about house aesthetic on the right hand side. And as said, he’s open to all sorts of things here. Another magazine that he edited, La Stile and here covers that he designed that show him very influenced by surrealism. 'Cause surrealism was an absolute anathema to the Nazis. They really, really hated it. Though this would not have been possible to have magazine comers like this in Germany in the 1930s.

Another example of how Italy was far more open than Nazi Germany, well how about this, gorgeous. This is the University of Padua, Palazzo del Bo. It’s actually a mediaeval building, that he designed a suite of modern rooms in it and the murals that he did in collaboration with another great designer who starts in this period for Nassetti And here’s another view of that staircase. And as I said, he would design everything to go in his buildings, all the furnishing as well.

And I’m finishing with a great movie which makes, it makes a sort of, it’s a kind of finale sort of final comment on the terrible ending of the, of Mussolini’s Italy. Now, it didn’t have to end this way, actually. In a funny way, it was the British and the French who drove Mussolini into Hitler’s arms in 1936 when they introduced sanctions against Italy for the invasion of Ethiopia. This is one reason why I’m always incredibly dubious about sanctions, whether they’re against Iran, Israel or whatever. I think they very often have the exactly the opposite effect of the one intended.

So it, you know, Hitler was not actually a natural ally of Italy. They had conflicting interests in to roll and there was a rivalry between them, but as I said, it was actually the British and the French who in a way drove Mussolini. And even then, there was no reason why Italy should have been brought into the second World War. It wasn’t in at the beginning, but Mussolini was an opportunist and with a collapse of France in May, 1940, it was just too tempting. He had to jump in. And from that moment, of course the guy was casted.

But if he’d been a bit smarter, like Franco was, for instance, I mean Hitler was expecting Franco to join in the war on the side, but Franco was too wiley to do that. So he survived, and of course he died in his bed, unlike Mussolini. Anyway, this is Rome Open City. I don’t know if David and Dennis have discussed this in the talks about films, but it is one, it’s not specifically of course about the Holocaust, it’s about the German occupation of Italy. And it has an extraordinary gritty authenticity.

It was actually the Roberto Rosellini started to film it while the war was still on. So it was filmed on the shoestring in a kind of semi-documentary, which very, very powerful, almost unbearably powerful. Actually I was watching scenes of it on YouTube the other day while I was putting together this lecture. And it really, very, it’s affected me horribly. I mean the terrible scene where the, a priest who is tortured and shot by the Nazis and the most affecting scene of all really when Anna Magnani is running after her lover’s being dragged away by the Nazis and she’s trying to run after him and they shoot her down in the street. So that is a dark and terrible image.

I didn’t really intend this talk to be so downbeat. I wanted to be a bit upbeat. Let’s go back to that image, I think, and I shall see what, what questions and comments we have.

Q&A and Comments

There’s a new film out on D'Annunzio, Poeta Cattivo, it may only be in Italian, the Bad Poet. The Wicked Poet, I suppose Cattivo is, that sounds very, very interesting, he’s a figure who is certainly very fascinating, excellent biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio called The Pike by Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Italian Romanticism and Fascism. Well now there’s a big debate on that and Judy and I for years and years and years we thought about doing a series of lectures, romanticism versus enlightenment. And you can see fascism or even Nazism as a perversion of romanticism. I just throw that out to you to think about that. You know, romanticism, Nazis and fascism, Nazism, it’s all about the embrace of the irrational, really, it’s the opposite of enlightenment.

Somebody saying what a fantastic voice from Granforte, nearly a hundred years ago. You know, it is a actually much though I love Gobbi and for me Gobbi is, is unique as a singing actor, as a voice. Just as a voice, I think Granforte had an even had a better voice than Gobbi. But you know, great Italian baritone voices, like great Italian tenor voices. They just grew on trees right up to the 1950s. Where have they all gone?

Somebody saying, I don’t know why. Absolutely is usually done with desperation. Well, I don’t know and I probably have 30 versions of Cavalleria Rusticana on my shelves. I don’t know another version to map that. Of course it’s done with desperation, but it, that’s what it’s about. But I don’t know another version. So you may think I’m wrong, but I think you’re wrong.

As a classically trained singer and teacher, I never heard of Franchetti before today. Well, look him out, there are a few recordings. There are complete recordings of his work and of course there are historic recordings. I’ll tell you what you should look for on YouTube. Look up Caruso’s recordings from Franchetti’s Opera, Germania.

Said somebody thank you, I’m not sure it was a bit off the cuff, my definition of fascism, I’m not sure. Well, you need to get some other definitions of it. I don’t think the one I offered you really is–

Somebody, that’s very strange. She’s sang it as if she’s enjoying swallowing a fly. We don’t, really don’t agree about singers. I’m sorry about that. Right.

And somebody missed the first 10 minutes from 1938, fascism became a nightmare for Jews. Yes, I didn’t really go into this. This is actually, I could have done it, and it’s actually a very interesting topic that the Italians were not inherently antisemitic as or far less so. I mean there’s antisemitism everywhere, but far less so is less ingrained I would say in the Italian thinking than it is in France, Germany or Russia, Poland, many, many other countries. And initially Mussolini certainly had nothing. I said his mistress was Jewish. The biggest influence on him. The Jewish community in Italy, by and large welcomed Mussolini and they didn’t see a threat in him. It was only when Mussolini really came under the influence of Hitler in 1938. And even then the antisemitic laws were not popular in Italy and they were frequently flouted. And so it’s an interesting topic, that one.

Q: When did the song Avanti Popolo become popular? A: I don’t know it, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you.

Tito Schipa, first opera I ever heard was a night in New York in 1948 Tosca. Is that possible? That’s interesting, I need to check that out. Schipa did sing Cavardossi but as far as I know only sang it right at the beginning of his career. And I don’t think he went back to the Met after the second World War, but I’ll check, I wonder if you’re– No, I think you’re thinking of Tagliavini. I think you’re thinking of Ferruccio Tagliavini who did sing Cavardossi at the Met with his wife actually as Tosca. Very certain similarities. I understand why you’d make that confusion.

Perfect German, yes it is perfect German. Although it’s funny, you know, instantly, of course he’s Italian, it’s a very Italian accent. “Love the Italian recordings.” Somebody’s saying.

Respighi, somebody asked me if I was talking about it, I did think about it, including him. You have to, you know, sort out what you’re going to talk about or not in these lectures, he’s certainly very relevant. Respighi was also to some extent a fellow traveller of the fascist and I often wonder if Toscanini knew that, 'cause Toscanini generally refused to conduct the works of anybody who had anything to do with fascism or Nazism. And again, he’s Feste. The Fests Romane, of the Respighi you know, seemed to me to have actually quite a fascist spirit to them.

Mussolini and Hitler are alive and well on wine, Schnapps, and beer bottles labels and Hitler. That amazes me. My god, that’s pretty scary. I mean, I know they, you know, 'cause swastikas have gone from everywhere in Germany. They’ve got rid of them. But yet, fasces, of course you find all over the place in Italy.

Esther Exon Michael runs a museum today. Do go if you have an opportunity, it is a really one of my favourite museums in London and it has a very good cafe where you can get Italians.

Oh, somebody’s saying that gorgeous place and cafe.

Oh dear. That is worrying, some of the artwork you love so much reminds me of author Anne Rand. Oh please, you may be right. It’s a bit scary thought.

Italians do have good design in their DNA and I suppose this is Ellie Strauss never understood it was a very unfortunate alliance. Well obviously for Italy it was a disaster.

So if you want to see the Novecento, Novecento it is as much on display, the touring gallery of our Novo Day. No liberty style is something else. Liberty style is earlier and it’s the Italian version of our Novo. So Novecento is in the inter war period, it’s later.

Q: Do you agree that even great classical singers, the interwar period sang with quick vibrato? ‘Cause that was the style of singing in Vogue and divine. A: Yes, to some extent it, but it wasn’t the style, it wasn’t in Vogue everywhere. Again, there’s a whole lecture in that money or a whole discussion. That quick vibrato, you very rarely find it outside of Latin countries. Particularly, it was very much en vogue in Italy. Gigli is an exception, but you know, Lauri-Volpi and Spanish singers like and French singers. Yes, it was a style that was en vogue.

Not a question, not about fascist, but what I knew about Eric Estorick for today, 1956, he was taken by an artist in Prague to a warehouse in the outskirts of Prague and in a corner with the, were the torah that became known as the Czech Memorial Scrolls, that’s very interesting. 1564 were rescued and came to UK. Yeah, he’s an interesting man. And today they can be found in the– in synagogues around the world, yeah, thank you for that.

Italian culture was exported to South Africa in the form of POW sculptures. Sculptors like Eduardo Villa and Armando Bandinelli became major art figures. I don’t know about them, but that sounds interesting.

Q: How do you differentiate between the Italian fascist design style and art deco? A: There’s an overlap between the two and there there is actually real art deco in Italy, altogether. But the a lot of the design in Italy of course has that element of classicism of looking back to the ancient world.

We could recall the Jewish composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Yes, indeed. I did talk about him, of course, in another context about music on the West Coast.

Somebody else saying they couldn’t understand why Mussolini found Hitler, who yes, it’s so, I mean everybody says Hitler was so charismatic. To me, I can’t even begin to imagine why.

The background here is this, I’m in my flat in Paris, so I’m not in a museum. There are some people say it looks like a museum.

I didn’t, I saw the film of the Garden, the Vinci Contini. I’d love to see it again. I was very, very taken when I first saw it. Which of course is about the fate of Italian Jews.

In the late '90s there was an exhibition in the museum, Africa, Johannesburg about the impact of apartheid policies on South African architecture. Interesting, I dunno anything about it.

Q: Could I say something about Toscanini? A: My god, I could talk about him for hours all day long. Would very annoy my friend Michael in Munich, but I could. Most years, not this year or last year, I take a group of people to Parma for the Verde Festival. Of course Toscanini’s birthplace is there. It’s a wonderful little museum. And I have a whale of a time with all the gossip and all the stories about Toscanini. I could do a whole talk on him, I suppose. We’ll see if it fits in at some point.

US film about Margherita Sarfatti 'Cradle Will Rock’. Oh, do you know, I haven’t seen that. Very interesting.

And somebody else mentioned Finzi-Continis.

So I think that’s it for today. Thank you very much, everybody. And of course I’m reverting to my daytime job for the next few weeks, which is as an art historian. So I’m going to go back to where I left off with my survey of western art. So I’ll be going back to the early 19th century for the next few lectures. Thank you, everybody.

• [Judi] Thank you, Patrick. And thank you everybody who joined us and we’ll see you all soon, take care, bye-bye.

• Bye-bye.