The Myth of Italian Instrumental Decline: a fable invented by historiography

One of the most persistent commonplaces in music history goes more or less like this: Italians are said to be a melodic, theatrical people, incapable of building the grand architecture of instrumental music.

According to this fable, while Germany was developing the symphony, the quartet, and great instrumental music, Italy supposedly took refuge in opera, progressively renouncing the seriousness of “pure” music.

It is a very elegant story. The trouble is that it is also historically false.

Not only did Italy by no means abandon instrumental music, but it was precisely Italian musical culture that built many of the models later developed by the European tradition.

The alleged Italian instrumental decline is not a historical fact. It is a historiographical myth. One need only look at the musical reality of the nineteenth century to see this. Band music was immense and accompanied the civic life of towns and cities; the piano repertory kept growing without pause; organ music continued to be cultivated in churches and musical centers; and the vast output for guitar and mandolin — what would that be, vocal music? — shows how widespread instrumental practice really was. Instrumental transcriptions and fantasies circulated everywhere, turning famous arias into virtuoso pieces for piano, violin, or small ensembles. In academies, many operatic arias were performed in instrumental versions for one or more instruments, while songs were often played in concert with flute and other solo instruments. And then there is musical theater: operatic overtures are symphonies in every sense, intermediate pieces and dances are orchestral music, and ballets themselves belong fully to the instrumental repertory. Can one really speak of decline in the face of such a vast and pervasive production? More than a historical fact, the idea of a presumed Italian instrumental inferiority appears to be a commonplace repeated far too long and far too carelessly.

Instrumental music is born in Italy

Long before anyone speaks of Viennese classicism, quartets, or German symphonies, European instrumental music takes shape in Italy.

The sonata, the concerto, and the symphony are born and developed precisely within the Italian tradition between the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth.

Arcangelo Corelli, Giuseppe Torelli, Antonio Vivaldi, Alessandro Scarlatti, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, and many others built an instrumental language that became the model for all of Europe.

Their works circulated everywhere: in Paris, in London, in Dresden, in Vienna.

Many of the composers later celebrated by historiography as founders of modern instrumental music studied precisely these models.

To claim that Italy was extraneous to the development of instrumental music is equivalent to claiming that Gothic architecture was born without cathedrals.

The problem is not the music, but the narrative

So where does this idea of Italian instrumental decline come from?

It arises above all in the nineteenth century, when German-area music historiography constructs a tale in which musical modernity culminates in the Austro-German tradition.

To make this narrative credible, it became necessary to construct in the laboratory a genealogy: first the Baroque, then Classicism, and finally Romanticism. An orderly and reassuring sequence that completely ignores the periodizations of Italian cultural history, which are far clearer if one looks, for example, at the history of literature.

Within this scheme, Italy progressively becomes a problem: too present in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to be ignored, but too independent to be easily integrated into the story of German supremacy.

The simplest solution is to turn it into a brilliant but superficial musical civilization, full of grand theater and grand melody but, according to this narrative, incapable of producing a true instrumental tradition.

A convenient caricature, repeated for generations until it comes to seem like historical truth.

Opera and instrumental music are not separate worlds

Another error of this narrative is the idea that the presence of opera somehow suffocated the development of instrumental music. In reality, music for voice is already music for instrument, because the voice is an instrument. If one sings a Japanese melody, it is not necessary to know the words in order to appreciate its musical line: what strikes the listener is the melody, not the text. In other cases, the opposite happens: much instrumental music seems to be built over implicit words. The structure of phrases and cadences often takes up the same articulations as sung arias.

Over the centuries, music intended for the voice could be replaced or doubled by instruments with great freedom, without asking permission from modern devotees of so-called performance practice. If one truly wanted to perform music as it was done at the time, one would have to remember precisely this: the freedom to adapt works to different instrumental forces was an integral part of musical practice.

In reality, within Italian musical culture the vocal and instrumental spheres have always been deeply intertwined.

The melodic language of opera directly influences instrumental writing. It is no accident that many concertos are praised precisely for their cantabilità, their singable quality. There is often even the well-founded suspicion that vocal pages provided the blueprint for solo instrumental pieces. But the reverse happens too: instrumental melodies become the basis for new songs. One famous example is La canzone dell’amore perduto by Fabrizio De André, built on the melody of the central Adagio from Georg Philipp Telemann’s Concerto in D major for trumpet, strings, and basso continuo.

Musical theater too is full of instrumental pages: operatic overtures are symphonies in every sense, intermediate pieces and dances are true orchestral laboratories, and arias shape the singable quality of instruments.

Many composers worked simultaneously in both fields and, for precisely this reason, the rigid distinction between theatrical music and instrumental music is to a large extent a later historiographical construction. In the real practice of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European music is far more fluid.

Selective historiography

The myth of decline works above all through a very simple mechanism: selection.

In Italy, people play the guitar and the mandolin. Fine. Once that is established, they are immediately reduced to inferior genres, unworthy of being compared with Haydn’s symphonies. And why exactly? If band music does not appeal to the snob of the day, one simply pretends it does not exist. In this way, entire repertories disappear from the historical narrative only because they do not fit the predetermined model.

By the same method, people go on repeating that Martucci supposedly “reformed” Italian instrumental music, as if nothing had existed before him. And then, in the periods after Martucci, the manuals return to speaking of instrumental music as if it were languishing in Italy. In short, throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, both before and after Martucci, hundreds of composers wrote for instruments, but historiography prefers not to see them.

A few great German names are remembered, and everything else is forgotten. Meanwhile dozens of Italian composers go on writing sonatas, concertos, symphonies, and chamber music. Many work abroad, others directly influence European schools, and still others remain active in Italian musical circles, even if the dominant narrative prefers to ignore them.

When one decides in advance who is supposed to stand at the center of history, everything else inevitably becomes marginal.

A prejudice that refuses to die

Even today one still hears it repeated that Italy supposedly “abandoned” instrumental music in order to retreat into opera.

It is a formula as widespread as it is imprecise. It takes no account of the real complexity of European musical life and ignores the role of Italians in shaping modern instrumental languages. It is the result of a historiographical tradition that prefers not to confront the complexity of history.

Putting things back in their proper place

The history of European music is not a contest among nations, but a network of exchanges, models, and reciprocal influences. Within this network, Italy played a decisive role both in the development of opera and in the birth and diffusion of instrumental music.

Recognizing this fact does not mean constructing a new musical nationalism. It simply means putting history back on its tracks and remembering that many of the commonplaces repeated for generations creak far more loudly than people would like to admit.