Leone Sinigaglia 1868-1944: Spoliazione e Morte di un Compositore Ebreo Perseguitato dal Fascismo. Marco Fiorentino. Turin: Italy. Silvio Zamorani Editore. 2024.   

Reviewed by Jesse Rosenberg

In the early twentieth century the Turinese composer Leone Sinigaglia reached a measure of popularity inside and outside of Italy mainly on the strength of a handful of instrumental works. He was also identified with research into folk songs of his native Piedmont region, which he came to know “from the mouth of the people” (as he claimed in the dedication of his folk song collection Vecchie Canzoni Popolar del Piemonte) during excursions into the countryside, and of which he published a number of arrangements. But the days when works such as his concert overture Le Baruffe Chiozzotte appeared on concert programs and radio broadcasts are long gone. In recent years the music of Sinigaglia has undergone a reappraisal, and a fair selection of his works has been recorded. A modest-sized monograph devoted to Sinigaglia appeared in 2012. [1] The reasons for this are not exclusively musical. The proportion is impossible to quantify with any precision, but at least part of this renewed interest is the fact that Sinigaglia was a victim of the Holocaust.

In his preface to this highly unusual biographical study of the composer Leone Sinigaglia (1868–1944), Marco Fiorentino candidly admits that he is not a musicologist. In fact, he is not a professional academic or researcher of any kind, but a corporate spokesman, as indicated by the brief description on the rear flap of the book. The author is nevertheless an assiduous digger into family history, and his efforts to document the final years of Sinigaglia’s life have yielded remarkable fruits.

I qualify the biography as unusual on account of its almost exclusive concentration on the last six years of his life (1938–1944), during which time he had ceased to compose (a sharp falling-off of his creative output was already evident by the mid-1930s, and the closest he came to musical activity was working on Italian singing translations of selected Lieder by Franz Schubert). Eschewing any consideration of Sinigaglia’s music and artistic career, Fiorentino aims only to document what the composer experienced in the period beginning with the promulgation of the Italian anti-Jewish “Racial Laws” in 1938 to his death of a heart attack at the age of 75. This occurred on June 16, 1944 in the Mauriziano hospital in Turin, which the medical staff had courageously allowed to function as a refuge for Jews during the Nazi occupation. Sinigaglia died at the moment when two zealous Italian collaborators appeared at the hospital to arrest him for deportation.  

In undertaking this study, Fiorentino naturally absorbed the important research by Giorgio Fabre, Annalisa Capristo, and others into the persecution and deportation of Italian Jews. His main original contribution derives from his mastery of hitherto unexamined sources. In this, his work was greatly facilitated by the gathering after World War II of a number of dispersed archival sources into a single collection, the Fondo Leone Sinigaglia, housed at the Verdi conservatory in Turin. But Fiorentino has also been assiduous in tracking down important information in other libraries and archives in Turin, Milan, Florence, Palermo, and elsewhere. He was thus able to draw on an extraordinarily rich assortment of documents which permitted the reconstruction, on an almost day-to-day basis, of Sinigaglia’s movements during this tragic period. Now and then the author acknowledges a minor lacuna in what can be known for certain, such as Sinigaglia’s place of residence during a certain week of 1942 or the surname of someone mentioned in a letter from Alina to a friend, but overall the account is impressive in its thoroughness. Much of the book consists of direct quotations from the many sources Fiorentino consulted, skillfully woven into a coherent and well-organized narrative marked by a tension between the objective goal (getting the facts straight) and a tone of controlled fury.

The opening chapter summarizes the history of the Sinigaglia family and the close ties which bound them to other Jewish families in Italy: Rosselli, Finzi, Pincherle (Primo Levi was also a remote cousin). In the next chapter, Fiorentino offers a concise summary of Leone Sinigaglia’s activities in two distinct areas, music and mountain-climbing (in the latter field he was a recognized authority, authoring a series of articles which were published in book form English as Climbing Reminiscences of the Dolomites in 1896).  After beginning his studies in Turin with Giovanni Bolzoni, Sinigaglia moved to Vienna with the hope of receiving instruction from Johannes Brahms, who instead recommended his close friend Eusebius Mandyczewski. This accomplished musicologist, known for his work on the critical editions of the music of Josef Haydn, Franz Schubert, and Johannes Brahms, became Sinigaglia’s teacher during his time in Vienna (1894–1901). He then relocated to Prague for nine months of study with Antonín Dvořák. As Fiorentino observes, this pedagogical itinerary places Sinigaglia together with Giuseppe Martucci, Giovanni Sgambati, and Marco Enrico Bossi as Italian musicians who bucked the overwhelming trend of an opera-mad country to cultivate the instrumental genres as developed in the period of German romanticism and its latter-day adherents.   

The next two chapters deal with the immediate repercussions of the Racial Laws. These went into full legal effect in September 1938 but had been anticipated the preceding July by developments such as the establishment of the governmental agency overseeing “demography and race” and a well-publicized “Manifesto of Racist Scientists.” Since Sinigaglia was independently wealthy, the professional restrictions on Jews initially did not affect him much, amounting to petty humiliations such as being expelled from the Royal Academy of St. Cecilia and the Italian Alpine Club. Although public performances, broadcasts, and the publication of music by Jewish composers were banned, Sinigaglia’s music had been little heard since the years following World War I; the new restrictions did not affect him to the extent that they affected, for example, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (who went into exile for this very reason).  

Sinigaglia nevertheless initiated an official application for “discrimination,” a term which Anglophone readers may find confusing. In the context of official antisemitic policy in Fascist Italy, Jews considered “discriminazione” were regarded by Jews as positive and desirable, for if an application for such status was approved, the applicant was exempted from punitive restrictions. In applying for discrimination, Jews naturally stressed their patriotism and contributions to various aspects of Italian society (a decorated hero of World War I would stand a good chance of obtaining approval). One of the most extensive archival sources discussed by Fiorentino is the dossier of papers relating to Sinigaglia’s application for discrimination. A document from the dossier, designated “Cenni Biografici su Leone Sinigaglia” (“biographical notes on Leone Sinigaglia”), is in fact a statement by the composer on why he merited this official status of discrimination.

Aware of the extraordinary significance of this document, Fiorentino transcribes it in full. In setting forth what Fiorentino characterizes as a kind of curriculum vitae, Sinigaglia opts for the exaggerated nationalist and populist rhetoric favored by the regime. The first two sentences give a good idea of this strategy: “In the artistic production of Leone Sinigaglia there emerges an essential italianissimo character in his music. Through many travels and sojourns abroad, Sinigaglia remained, both in his music and in his sentiment, profoundly Italian; far removed from, even actively rejecting, every internationalism and every decadentism.” This is followed by a brief list of compositions which would appear to support this characterization: a concert overture inspired by Baruffe Chiozzotte (a comedy by the great Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni), the Danze Piementesi (Dances of Piedmont), and a collection of Sinigaglia’s arrangements of folk songs from Piedmont (here he quotes his own characterization of the songs as having been gathered from the mouth of the people)—an oddly selective list. In reality, the latter two works are more regionalist than nationalist, but more to the point are the works which go unmentioned: the string quartets, the Cello Sonata op. 41, the Violin Sonata op. 44, the Variations on a Theme by Franz Schubert op. 19, and a host of other titles that might undermine the argument that Sinigaglia’s music was invariably, thoroughly Italian. Probably for the same reason, there was no mention of the composer’s fruitful contacts with Brahms and Dvořák, which in any other context would have been displayed as noteworthy feathers in his cap. Such were the hoops that Sinigaglia felt constrained to jump through in order to obtain “discrimination.” This oddly one-sided account of Sinigaglia’s music is followed by a list of his patriotic acts, mostly philanthropic, dating to World War I, such as sending packages to soldiers on the front.

Despite these efforts, Sinigaglia’s application was rejected in May 1939. Fiorentino persuasively opines that the failure was due to the old-fashioned framework of Sinigaglia’s benevolent patriotism, hardly in keeping with the bellicose and colonialist Mussolini cult of the late 1930s (some of the state documents on this case note that the composer had never joined the Fascist party). In practice, however, enforcement of the restrictions to which Sinigaglia was now legally bound was neither rigorous nor consistent. According to the Racial Laws, he and his sister could no longer employ an “Arian” servant; archival documents cited by Fiorentino establish that Sinigaglia’s request that he be permitted to do so, submitted in December 1938, was granted (on a “temporary” basis) in August 1939. Neither Leone nor Alina should have been allowed to stay in a hotel frequented by “Arians,” but in fact they were guests at the Grand Hotel in the Alpine village of Ala di Stura, fifty kilometers northwest of Turin. Legally Sinigaglia was forbidden to have a radio, but in December 1941 Sinigaglia’s written request that an exception be made for him was granted by the Ministry of the Interior. Even occasional broadcasts of Sinigaglia’s music continued to be transmitted.  

Faced with the voluminous evidence presented by Fiorentino that antisemitic restrictions were considerably softened, readers will find themselves asking what the negative effects of that policy on Leone Sinigaglia actually were. The question brings us to the word “spoliazione” in the title of Fiorentino’s book, referring to the expropriation or, more simply, the theft of Sinigaglia’s possessions. The composer had inherited from his father a very large collection of artworks and other valuable objects: paintings, sculptures, ceramics, miniatures. Fiorentino devotes a chapter to Sinigaglia’s donation in 1939 of a conspicuous proportion of these items to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (where they are still on display). But many other objects were lost, or only recovered in the years following Sinigaglia’s death. In 1942 Leone and Alina left their apartment in Turin for their countryside villa in Cavoretto, taking some but far from all of their belongings. This was done out of concern for the aerial bombardments of Turin by the Allies, but in fact it was impossible to know where one might be safe in the midst of war. In 1943, after the fall of Mussolini’s government and the consequent occupation of Italy by the Nazis, the siblings returned to their apartment in Turin, and several months later Sinigaglia received the heartbreaking news that the villa in Cavoretto had been requisitioned, ransacked, and damaged by bombing. By this time the German occupation had given an ominously new character to the war in northern Italy.

Fiorentino suggests that Leone and Alina were not fully aware of the danger they faced as Jews, attributing this in part to their cordial relations with certain members of the royal family. In the early years of the twentieth century, Leone was on intimate terms with Queen Margherita, who shared his passion for the mountains; he also enjoyed a friendship with the heir to the throne, Prince Umberto II (who was to become the King of Italy for a little under forty days in the Spring of 1946 following the abdication of his father, Vittorio Emanuele III) and Umberto’s wife Maria José. As late as February 1943 Sinigaglia received a cordial telegram from Umberto II. With friends in such high places, it is hardly surprising that the Sinigaglia siblings felt safe, protected by the rulers of a Kingdom allied with Nazi Germany. Letters written by Leone and Alina from this period, reproduced or excerpted by Fiorentino, reflect a general concern for the destructive effects of the war rather than any sense of a holocaust in the making. 

The events leading to Sinigaglia’s death from a heart attack at the moment of his arrest are reconstructed, as with all the other episodes considered by Fiorentino, with utmost care. His archival research extends to the postwar fate of Renato Fracchia and Gastone Soave, the two Fascist guards who came to the Mauriziano hospital to deport him. Both were found guilty and sentenced to death for collaborationism, extortion, and theft, but both were exonerated after several appeals.  

Fiorentino dismisses the view that Sinigaglia’s heart attack was fortunately timed insofar as it spared him a more horrific death at Mauthausen or another concentration camp; a primary goal of the book is to combat the cynicism of this view by documenting the steadily increasing fear and alarm that the composer felt beginning in 1938. In his concluding pages he discusses the composer’s Jewish roots in considerable detail, providing several genealogical diagrams to clarify his descent and relations. Fiorentino is himself a distant relation of the composer, which gives to this part of the book a notable personal cast. He mentions at this point that Sinigaglia had very little to do with the Jewish community and wrote nothing at all that might be considered “Jewish music”—he even composed an Ave Maria. In fact, Sinigaglia composed two different “Ave Maria” pieces, one a setting for voice and piano and the other for string quartet, and was responsible for other examples of Christian-inspired or -flavored music besides: an arrangement of a folk lullaby for the baby Jesus, a Mater Dolorosa for voice and piano, and an orchestral evocation of a pilgrimage to a Marian sanctuary (the third movement of his Suite “Piemonte”). Doubtless these examples reflect the composer’s strong identification with his native Piedmont region, obviously marked by Roman Catholic religiosity, rather than his own religious sentiments. It is noteworthy in any case that the publisher of this book, Silvio Zamorani, while not specializing exclusively in this field, has released numerous scholarly volumes (over sixty) of Jewish interest. Sinigaglia never converted and never renounced his Jewish identity, but the fullest expression of that identity may well have been his shocked recognition of what was happening to him on June 16, 1944. 

Jesse Rosenberg
Clinical Associate Professor of Musicology, Northwestern University

[1] Gianluca La Villa and Annalisa Lo Piccolo, Leone Sinigaglia: la Musica delle Alte Vette (Verona: Gabrielli Editori, 2012).