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 Inviato: 14 Mar 2008 - 17:45 Oggetto: Canzone napoletana today: because melody matters |
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(excerpts adapted from Wikipedia)
Naples is was internationally known for its own peculiar music. I will link some randomly chosen music videos to cited songs in this post, not because I like those specific performers, but just to prove how much popularity some melodies gained through time, up to the point that several artists of almost any race and language in the World still know and sing these songs today. Take for instance this "Era de maggio" sung by a female Japanese performer, singing in almost perfect neapolitan. But most of these songs were written several decades ago. Most of their authors are dead and buried, just like their public. The remaining performers look like dinosaurs. Most of Italian and Neapolitan youth seem no longer to be interested in that tradition. The fact is that many of the songs from the past were conceived for, written and sung by a totally different kind of individuals that lived in a totally different city among a totally different society. This society has changed radically and so did the current neapolitan popular music panorama, as some videos will show you at the bottom.
First, some history (and being "history" we can already point out that we are talking about something that belongs to the past). Canzone Napoletana, sometimes referred to as "Neapolitan song" in English, is a generic term for a traditional form of music sung in the Napolitan language, ordinarily for the male voice singing solo, and expressed in familiar genres such as the lover's complaint or the serenade. It consists of a large body of composed popular music - such songs as 'O sole mio, Torna a Surriento, Funiculì Funiculà and others (see Dicitencello Vuie, for example). The Neapolitan song became a formal institution in the 1830s through the vehicle of an annual song writing competition for the yearly Festival of Piedigrotta, dedicated to the Madonna of Piedigrotta, a well-known church in the Mergellina area of Naples. The winner of the first festival was a song entitled Te voglio bene assaie; it was composed by the prominent opera composer, Gaetano Donizetti. The festival ran regularly until 1950 when it was abandoned. A subsequent Festival of Neapolitan Song on Italian state radio enjoyed some success in the 1950s but was eventually abandoned as well. The period since 1950 has produced such songs as Malafemmena by Totò and Carmela by Sergio Bruni. Although separated by some decades from the earlier classics of this genre, they have now become "classics" in their own right.
Many of the songs are, indeed, world famous because they were taken abroad on the great waves of emigration from Naples and southern Italy, in general, roughly between 1880 and 1920. The music was also popularized abroad by performers such as Enrico Caruso, who took to singing this popular music of his native city as encores at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the early 1900s. Thus, Caruso is responsible for the fact that operatic tenors since then have been required to know these songs. This has led to such recent phenomena as The Three Tenors—three opera singers performing, at least in part, popular songs from Naples. Important performers in the last few decades include Renato Carosone, Mario Maglione, Giuseppe di Stefano, Sergio Bruni, Roberto Murolo. Murolo is known not only as a singer, but as a scholar and anthologist of the music; his collection of twelve LPs, released in the 1960s, is an annotated compendium of Neapolitan song dating back to the twelfth century and is the "Bible" for those interested in performing or simply learning more about the music.
Extremely important in defining what makes a Neapolitan song is the matter of language. All such songs are written and performed in Neapolitan dialect. They are never translated into standard Italian (although there are versions of many of the songs in other languages). Anyone in Italy—Neapolitan or not—who sings these songs has to sing them in Neapolitan. The matter of dialect has not prevented a few non-Neapolitans from writing dialect lyrics for the Neapolitan song. The most famous example of this is 'A Vucchella by Gabriele D'Annunzio.
If you wish to listen to some contemporary neapolitan perfomers, you may be interested in the following artists as well: Edoardo Bennato, Pietra Montecorvino or la Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare.
Ok, this was a very short and quick excursus on the subject of neapolitan music from the past. There are hundreds and hundreds more songs, we can't cite all of them. And tons of books in many languages were written on the subject so I won't bother continuing. I just wanted to make a point. Even though you don't know the language, do know nothing about music or just don't like this genre, I'm sure you can recognize some form of "art" in what you have just heard.
This was the past. Now the present. Today, is a fact that youth in Naples listen to Italian music most of the time, which has nothing to do with Naples or the neapolitan language (which is somewhat extinct as a real language and survives as a dialect, a deformation of Italian rather than a stand-alone language). On the other hand, many neapolitan-born peformers and authors refuse to sing or compose songs in neapolitan (for commercial, cultural or personal reasons). Foreign music is of course very popular too among the young, especially from USA (but the average listener won't understand a word of English - they just find it cool, without a reason). About the remains of the neapolitan song tradition... well... right now, while these lines were written, this is more or less what you can find on many local tv and radio stations in the area of Naples:
http://www.neomelodici.net/
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