Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Canti Popolari del Piemonte

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 135; Issue: 536 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.135.536.15

1535-1882

Luisa Del Giudice,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Costantino Nigra's Canti Popolari del Piemonte is largely a ballad collection (canzone epico-lirica)—despite its broader title (Piedmontese Folk Songs)—from the Northwest, Gallo-Romance-speaking region of Italy, and more particularly from Canavese, its culturally conservative heartland. Originally published in 1888 (again in 1957, at 50 years after Nigra's death, and by the present editors in 2009), it is here re-edited in 2020. These ballads constitute an integral—if little-known—corner of the pan-European “international ballad” repertoire, radiating from contiguous Southern France. Nigra immediately became—and has remained—the touchstone for Italian folk song studies for more than 130 years and is Italy's equivalent to Francis Child vis-à-vis anglophone ballads. He brought a new and rigorous scientific (philological) method to apply to song variants and was conversant with the most notable folk song scholars of his day, with whom he corresponded and whose works filled his volume's extensive bibliography.Nigra was a fervent patriot and esteemed political figure, and his oeuvre therefore must be read within this late nineteenth-century nation-building context with internal (Italian regional) and external (pan-European) political ramifications (cf. Del Giudice 1999). The right-hand associate of Camillo Cavour, Prime Minister of the Savoyard Kingdom, and architect of Italian Unification, Nigra by age 30 was ambassador to Napoleon III's court (seeking removal of Austrians from Italian soil), and subsequently to St. Petersburg, London, Paris, and Vienna. He sought political hegemony for Piedmont within Italy, and Italy's closer connection to a pan-European democratic modernity without.Nigra's scholarship, which had begun as early as 1854, arrived at two innovative conclusions: Italy's song tradition was ethnically divided into a ballad-rich, Celtic-vernacular substrate North versus a Latin, lyrical, and literary-tending South (we later learn that there are not two but many Italies); and ballads were coeval to the historic events they narrated (an archaizing tendency later discredited). His findings, unsurprisingly, supported his plea for Piedmontese primacy within an emerging nation and within a ballad-reverent Europe searching for its heroic vernacular epics. But events took another course, and so the 1888 corpus is merely Nigra's fulfillment of an earlier promise, completed by a disillusioned man who had retreated from politics—a “relique” himself.The volume under review has many merits, but foremost among these may be restoring the orality to the ballads via two CDs comprised of 155 soundtracks relating to 86 of the 153 texts published by Nigra (about 33 are without trace in other nineteenth-century publications and have been lost to oral memory). In musical clips of first strophes, with a few complete ballad soundtracks for the better-known, these recordings trace the strong and still vital textual and musical links back to Nigra's nineteenth-century ballads. These editors have kept the faith as meticulous scholars of the philological minutiae of textual analysis and the history of song texts and melodic contours, while also speaking of a broader ballad “system,” its dynamism, and its executive styles. Their examples of field-recorded songs are chosen from among the hundreds of (strictly Piedmontese) recordings made between 1954 and 1988, held in various archives—all at great personal effort, thereby calling our attention to the dire straits of sound archives in Italy, which cope with antiquated methods, poor storage conditions, and a lack of funds to house and digitize them. Franco Castelli, Emilio Jona, and Alberto Lovatto (three generations of collectors deeply embedded within this song tradition themselves) draw on archives such as the Centro Ricerca Etnomusica e Oralità (formerly CREL, Turin), Amerigo Vigliermo's Centro Etnografico Canavesano (Bajo Dora), National Music Academy Santa Cecilia (Rome), the Lomax Collection (New York), Roberto Leydi's collection (Bellinzona, Switzerland), and the more modern sound archive of the Regione Lombardia (Milano). Their offerings are pure gold.Further, they provide in their introduction an excellent history of Italian ballad/folk song collecting, evolving from literary, philological scholarship to an ethnomusicological and anthropological matrix, which takes due note of the actual (not romanticized) sociocultural profile of the singing classes (urban and rural) and their lives of labor. (The threesome has also published separate folk song volumes on the Great War, rice paddy workers, and protest songs.) For the first time, photographs of Nigra and his nineteenth-century contemporaries, as well as those of twentieth-century fieldwork, are also added, providing invaluable illustrative social contours to the recordings themselves. Such complementary new auditory and visual components are invaluable.This reviewer especially commends the editors’ attention to gender. They conclude that the Piedmontese ballad tradition is primarily conserved, and in its most archaic form, by women in small family groupings as a canto collettivo domestico within peasant milieux across the Italian North alongside political social protest songs, erotic ditties, recitations, and more. Among these songs, noble ballad “idiom” lived alongside an italiano popolare koiné of broadside ballads. Their songs and singing style favor narration and meaning, whereas the male milieux of public choral performance (e.g., tavern or public feast) favored musical embellishment and the “singing act” per se. For women, these ballads still provide the symbolic “space” for confronting, deriding, denouncing, and overturning the ancient patriarchal regime. Theirs is an autonomous and separate system of meaning that voices desire, sentiments, and aspirations that could never have found expression within normal discourse. The songs provide a system of communication for shared values and resistance—both a safety valve and a pedagogical tool, as poignant exempla transmitted through generations of women.I opened this volume with shaky hands and quiet reverence. Nigra ballads formed my gateway genre into Italian folklore studies; they were the first love that prodded me on several decades of field collecting in the contiguous Lombardy region, as well as in the diaspora for my (contested) University of California, Los Angeles PhD, followed by several publications, recordings, and Kommission für Volksdichtung ballad conferences. I have memorized many ballads in dialects not my own. I have sung them to my daughters as lullabies. But apart from Linda Barwick's work on Donna lombarda (Nigra 1) and mine on Cecilia (Nigra 3) (Del Giudice 1995), precious little is yet accessible to the anglophone folk song scholar many decades later on Italian balladry.