# Capricio Italien



## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Okay, I first heard it when I was 8 or 9 -- the now landmark Mercury Dorati/Minneapolis recording, featuring a track with Deems Taylor explaining how they recorded the Yale bell tower and real cannons at West Point for the 1812 Overture. I liked it then, and mostly still do, although I haven't played it for years.

But is it just me? At any point between then and now, it never reminded me a single bit of Italy (for that matter, the Souvenir de Florence never sounded at all Florentine). Are my ears on wrong? Rimsky's Capricio Espanol sounds vaguely Spanish; the Caucasion Sketches Russian; The Dances of Galanta Hungarian; even the Scotch Symphony has a Scottish flavor. Is it me, or Tchaikovsky's view of Italy?


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

I have an 1812 overture disk with Deems Taylor, great disk. Has Capricio Italien. On Living Presence label. I guess I need to spin it again sometime.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

MarkW said:


> But is it just me? At any point between then and now, it never reminded me a single bit of Italy (for that matter, the Souvenir de Florence never sounded at all Florentine). Are my ears on wrong? Rimsky's Capricio Espanol sounds vaguely Spanish; the Caucasion Sketches Russian; The Dances of Galanta Hungarian; even the Scotch Symphony has a Scottish flavor. Is it me, or Tchaikovsky's view of Italy?


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

I hear the opening bar ( in my head)as I reed your post .
Lovely peace.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

The _Capricio Italien_ is the work that launched my interest in "classical" music when I first heard a fragment of the piece in a Music Appreciation class assigned to me as a young junior high schooler. To borrow a term from Calculus, a term in current use ubiquitously in news interviews referring to politics, my encounter with the Tchaikovsky orchestral fantasy proved an _inflection point_ in my life. After that first hearing, I quickly purchased a record featuring the work, and I have treasured the music for over half a century since that time.

The piece is apparently fashioned after Italian folk tunes the composer picked up while on a visit to Rome. Tchaikovsky himself wrote: "I have already completed the sketches for an Italian fantasia on folk tunes for which I believe a good future may be predicted. It will be effective, thanks to the delightful tunes which I have succeeded in assembling partly from anthologies [published collections of folk music], partly through my own ears on the streets [the writing down of melodies by ear]." The opening trumpet call, Wikipedia informs us, was "inspired by a bugle call Tchaikovsky heard daily in his rooms at the Hotel Constanzi, next door to the barracks of the Royal Italian Cuirasseurs." There is also lively tarantella, a Cicuzza, and of course that vital march which closes the work. The entire piece is meant to conjure up the sound of a Roman street carnival festival. I believe the composer succeeds.

The question remains: what is "Italian music" to your ears?

Listen, if you will, to Italian composer Respighi's Roman trilogy, one of which, _The Pines of Rome_, is a long-time favorite of mine. One of the pieces is called _Roman Festivals_. I wonder, does _that_ sound Italian to you?

Of course, Tchaikovsky is writing a foreigner's vision of Italian music, and his strong Russian base will likely prove inescapable in anything he writes, much as is Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, titled _From the New World_ and based partly on melodies the Czech composer picked up while living in the United States, is much more so a Czech sounding symphony than it is American. Still, I wouldn't want to be without it.

I cannot be without the Tchaikovsky piece, either. It is seminal to my musical consciousness.


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