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Declaration of love to a violinist
A documentary movie to the new recording of Wolf-Ferraris violin concerto
This is Guila Bustabo
born in Wisconsin, USA, in 1916.
She makes her first stage appearance as a four year old prodigy,
and at the age of eleven makes her debut at Carnegie Hall in New York.
She is supported and promoted by the greatest conductors of her time:
Furtwängler, Mengelberg, Toscanini.
An enthusiastic lady patron makes her the present of a most valuable instrument:
a “Guarneri del Gesù”. With it, she begins her first European tour,
in which she triumphs.
In the summer of 1939 the celebrated Bustabo writes a passionate letter of admiration.
It is sent to Munich, addressed to the great German-Italian composer, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari.
There is a tune from his opera “La Dama Boba”,
which she can’t get out of her head:
“The tune is flawless, absolute, perfect. It is love itself!
Not the shallow flirting of a carnival, but the calm flame which gleams eternally.”
And Bustabo asks the Maestro, to make her a transcription of the melody for violin.
The answer she receives, is a refusal, albeit a friendly one.
Wolf-Ferrari explains to her that this melody
can only develop its full effect in the context of the rest of the opera,
and without this, it would lose its meaning.
A correspondence develops,
which right from the beginning reveals a spiritual connection between the two artists.
When the composer sees Bustabo on stage,
he makes the decision to compose a violin concerto for her.
A concerto “in which the violin acts as a king of the orchestra.”
When she plays through the first sketches of the composition
at Wolf-Ferrari’s house, Bustabo is ecstatic.
“After I had departed yesterday evening - what bliss!
This immortal concerto, the composition of every note is blessed.
The first movement seems to shine in the pure light of eternity."
Work on the concerto is finished in the summer of 1943.
The score bears the inscription:
“For Guila Bustabo in admiration.”
During a heavy air raid on Leipzig, the entire orchestral material
falls victim to the flames.
The announced world première has to be cancelled at the last minute.
At the same time, Munich is also being heavily bombed.
In desperation, Wolf-Ferrari flees to Alt-Aussee in Austria.
To a friend he writes:
“What life’s real suffering is and means, is something of which,
in our youth, we had absolutely no idea.
We are all like Job, but not all so faithful
one tends to forget the stars.
Our eyes, unfortunately, look forwards, not upwards.”
In January 1944, amidst the most terrible ravages of war,
Guila Bustabo finally gives the violin concerto’s world première
at the Tonhalle concert hall, in Munich.
The war tears the two artists apart.
For months on end Wolf-Ferrari tries to discover Bustabo’s whereabouts:
“My violin concerto, born so happily in an hour of bliss,
I have to call tragic, as she who performed it so inimitably,
is now torn from me.”
The composer’s most ardent wish to see Guila Bustabo again
was not to be fulfilled.
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari dies on the 21st of January 1948
in his native city of Venice.
His last journey leads over bridges,
through the alleys and canals of Venice,
where on the cemetery island of San Michele,
he is granted an honorary grave.
The mourning congregation begins to sing.
Quietly at first, then louder and louder:
“Bondí, Venesia cara” - Farewell, dear Venice -
the principal theme from his opera “Il Campiello”.
Since then the violin concerto has languished in unparalleled obscurity.
Over the past 60 years performances of it have been so scarce,
that it was almost completely forgotten.
No one in the last decade has worked so hard to revive Wolf-Ferrari’s compositions
as much as Friedrich Haider.
Those who have studied Wolf-Ferrari’s complete works will know
that his violin concerto is among the most heartfelt,
splendid and deeply personal works that he composed.
For me, moreover, it is one of the greatest pieces
of the entire violin concerto repertoire.
Wolf-Ferrari is born in Venice in 1876.
His first big successes come at the beginning of the twentieth century,
when he revives the genre of the comic opera.
In the heyday of Wagner and Puccini this is tantamount to a revolution.
He is to adhere to tonality for the rest of his life,
for which people accuse him of not being “up to date”,
ignoring musical advancement.
And composing a violin concerto in D major,
in the middle of a devastating war?
What has this to do with any consideration of the way of the world?
These are not only presumptuous but also deeply stifling arguments.
To whom, exactly, does the composer have to justify himself?
And why should he always have to be portraying the world?
Art is a world in itself. His world. A free one!
What would happen if we found the score of the concerto in the attic one day,
with no indications as to who the composer was,
or when it was written?
We would then only be able to say
whether the music satisfies and affects us at all, or not.
But no-one could accuse it it of being conservative.
The house where Wolf-Ferrari was born stands only a short walk away
from what has been described as the “most beautiful street in the world”:
the Grand Canal in Venice.
The language his mother spoke was Venetian,
which he preferred more than his father’s native language of German.
Being a Venetian composer meant by definition,
that he had an inherent gift for melody.
One can hear in his slow and measured passages
just what concentrates the essence of Venice:
timelessness.
This feeling of being immersed in beauty
is a vital characteristic of his music.
Just what secret is the composer confronting us with
when, in the 1st movement for a mere two bars,
he quotes from “The Merry Widow”?
On an aesthetic level, Wolf-Ferrari has nothing to do with Lehar.
And in view of this, it is remarkable that he should quote him.
Right from the start I was convinced that in this quote,
he was hiding something, which actually, he wanted to reveal.
And for months on end, I wondered what could be behind it,
until I took a look at the text,
which is sung to this tune in the operetta.
And here all was revealed:
it concernes his mysterious relationship to Guila Bustabo.
In this house not far from Munich, Wolf-Ferrari lived for ten years.
And it was in this house
that the first sketches of the violin concerto were written;
and probably this was also
where the first encounter with Guila Bustabo took place.
I was pleased to be invited to visit the house by its present owners.
I recognise this part of the house from an old photograph,
taken when he was living in the house himself.
That’s right: In the house which he used to call his “Tusculum”.
Back then, this terrace wasn’t here.
There used to be stairs going up into this room,
and one of his grand pianos used to be over there.
Wolf-Ferrari sold the house to your father,
but you yourself didn’t get to know him. Or did you?
Oh yes, and that was very fortunate, especially looking back now.
I was only 15, but I was there,
when my parents discussed this and that with him.
And so I got to know him as a very kind,
demure, modest, almost quiet person,
who had an unbelievably friendly look about him,
and a friendly voice, too.
There’s just forest here, stretching for miles.
He was a loner...
Yes, but for a composer, of course, that’s just what you need.
The birds gave him a bit of competition in springtime.
You’d never believe it, but from March to around June,
the dawn chorus breaks out into a fantastic concert.
And Bustabo wrote to him in a letter that she could hear
the birdsong in the violin concerto.
Indeed, it’s remarkable here, especially in the evenings, the birds...
it’s quiet now, of course...
but in spring, it’s unbelievable...
He wasn’t a naturalist, but he worked it into his music, in a stylised way.
There’s no getting away from it...
Wolf-Ferrari is an Apollonian.
Everything is carefully thought out.
He doesn’t need any pathos to excite great drama.
A small harmonic change is all that is needed, and chasms open.
And it’s exactly because this music is so ensouling
and blissfully expressive, that sinking into mournfulness or menace
effects one doubly intensively.
It is striking, how quickly the “beauty aloft”
- i.e. the solo violin part -
is able to free itself from distress and out of the darkness,
to find its way into the light again.
This could be interpreted in an ideological way:
namely, that the beauty in our world cannot be harmed.
In the forth movement there is, for me,
one of the most beautiful and heartfelt themes in the concerto.
It makes you feel the consolation which art represented for Wolf-Ferrari.
Art - and beauty that is exalted above all else.