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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.
Read the rest of this entry »Let Our Music Be Played: Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism. Edited by Alessandro Carrieri and Annalisa Capristo. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021.
Reviewed by Jesse Rosenberg
The last twenty years have witnessed significant developments in scholarship concerning antisemitism in Italy during the ventennio, the twenty-year period of Fascist rule (1923-1943). Thanks to historians such as Michele Sarfatti and Giorgio Fabre, the benign view which had hitherto prevailed with regard to the antisemitic laws promulgated by the Fascist government in 1938 — that these were adapted without conviction, in adherence to the dictates of a new alliance with Germany, and represented an unexpected about-face in the treatment of Italian Jews — have been definitively rebutted. The editors of this superlative collection of essays are aware of these newly-acquired insights (one of them, Annalisa Capristo, has co-authored an important book with Fabre), but also, to judge by the variety of approaches taken by the contributors to the book, equally cognizant of the complexities involved in applying these lessons to the field of music.
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Musica Judaica Online Reviews 