Symbolism in music

Musical Symbolism in Italy

Italian composers of the so-called Generation of ’80 were the protagonists of the Symbolist aesthetic, a movement that marked an aristocratic and spiritual reaction to the objective harshness of late-nineteenth-century Realism and Verismo.

Rather than representing social chronicle or crimes of passion, musical Symbolism favoured an allusive and refined language, aimed at exploring the inner world, dream, mystery, and the secret correspondences between the arts. The Symbolist composer positions himself as a seer who, through shifting music, attempts to reveal—by symbols and analogies—a deeper and invisible reality, in line with the crisis of Positivism and the emergence of a new spiritual sensibility.

Ottorino Respighi and orchestral synaesthesia

Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936), through his orchestral synaesthesia, is the musician who most consciously applies the Symbolist aesthetic to instrumental music. The symphonic poem, his favourite genre, is a free evocation of atmospheres without the constraints of a linear plot. His most famous works, the Roman Symphonic Poems—with The Fountains of Rome as a manifesto—do not describe monuments realistically, but evoke the symbols they represent, according to suggestion and the changing light of different hours of the day.

There is a close correspondence between timbres and Divisionist colours. His orchestral art finds a perfect parallel in the painting of Giovanni Segantini and Gaetano Previati: just as the Divisionists break colour into filaments to obtain a symbolic light, so Respighi breaks the orchestral mass into refined timbres to create a rarefied soundscape full of allusions. The use of timbre—i.e., “orchestral colours”—is symbolic, as in paintings where light generates ever-new shades and hidden meanings.

Respighi’s work aligns with the Idealism of Benedetto Croce, asserting the autonomy of art as pure intuition. Music does not imitate reality, but becomes an autonomous form of knowledge: a privileged language for grasping—through notes that function as symbols—the most hidden aspects of existence.

Riccardo Zandonai and the aesthetic rite

Riccardo Zandonai (1883–1944) is known for the sensuality of his music, which becomes a true aesthetic rite. Though sometimes considered an heir to Verismo, Zandonai chose subjects that embody D’Annunzian Aestheticism and Panism, two currents central to Symbolism and Decadentism.

Francesca da Rimini (1914), on a text by Gabriele D’Annunzio, is a manifesto of this orientation. Passion is no longer popular chronicle, but a rite of beauty and sensuality, and words are chosen for their intrinsic musicality, while the orchestra envelops the listener in refined atmospheres. Zandonai builds a vocal–instrumental continuum in which every sonority becomes a symbol, and music probes the ambiguities of desire and the unconscious.

Giacomo Puccini and the symbol that becomes drama

The late works of Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) represent a meeting point between melodramatic realism and the Symbolist aesthetic. Though considered the heir to post-Verdi opera and Verismo, Puccini—especially in his late works such as Madama Butterfly and Turandot—writes through symbols, which he masks behind an Oriental exoticism.

In Turandot, a legendary and mythical opera, he abandons objective reality to embrace a symbolic subject. The princess’s riddle is itself an allegory of love and knowledge. The orchestra, with extreme timbral refinement, becomes in Puccini’s hands a means of creating unprecedented atmospheres and of recording, like a seismograph, the subtlest vibrations of the characters’ inner life.

Against vulgarity

The Symbolist artist withdraws disdainfully from the vulgarity of politics and the harshness of class conflict, building a paradise of artificial aesthetics, made of beauty and myth. Symbolist composers—and later the Decadents—worked in conscious polemic with Verismo, obeying the changing sensibility and tastes of the time.

Their music reflects the Liberty style (Art Nouveau), with its sinuous lines and its obsessive search to infuse beauty into every aspect of life. It is an art that tries, through artifice, to arrest time and to save—at least in form—a world that already feels close to its sunset.

Symbolism and crisis

From symphonic poems to salon romances

Symbolism and Decadentism presented themselves to the broader public as an escape from materialism and the social reality of the fin de siècle. Symbolists took refuge in a world of artificial, dreamlike beauty, rich in esoteric and poetic references. This aesthetic was not limited to major opera houses or symphonic poems: it also spread to genres meant for domestic consumption, such as the salon romance and chamber music.

In bourgeois and aristocratic salons, far from the problems of the emerging mass society, a refined and restless sensibility developed. Many Italian composers, including Francesco Paolo Tosti (1845–1916), set themes by D’Annunzio and Pascoli to short pieces for voice and piano. Melodies such as Ideale and Malìa, only apparently simple, are charged with languor and twilight melancholy, becoming perfect examples of musical Aestheticism. Tosti thus offers the beauty of music as a refuge for the soul.

Ildebrando Pizzetti and lyrical spiritualism

Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), a central figure of the Generation of ’80, pushed Symbolism toward a more inward and austere dimension. His early lyrics for voice and piano are permeated by a severe spiritualism and by an almost obsessive attention to the text, echoing the poetic language of Pascoli. His music is pure lyrical intuition, able to dig into the depths of feeling and to restore—like a poem—the most intimate vibration of the soul.

The dreamlike song and popular Symbolism

The “dreamlike” song, characteristic of the popular Symbolism of this period—especially in the Neapolitan Belle Époque—takes on Symbolist overtones and transforms reality into pure suggestion. A Vucchella (1892, D’Annunzio / Tosti) is the best-known example of the fusion between learned Symbolism and popular form.

The lyric does not describe realistically: it evokes through the sensual language of analogy. The small mouth (“vucchella”) becomes a symbol of beauty to contemplate—an icon of desire and harmony. It is the meeting point of poetry and melody, where music turns into an inward gaze and the image dissolves into sound.

Piano music: neurosis and the unconscious

Writing for solo piano became, between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, one of the privileged places of inner refuge. The compositions of Stefano Golinelli (1818–1893) anticipate the lyrical intimacy that will characterise Symbolism and Decadentism, revealing a new introspective language, far from Romantic theatricality.

Giovanni Sgambati (1841–1914), though devoted to symphonism, also wrote piano pages such as the Nocturnes and the Fogli volanti, delicate poetic miniatures that translate into music the need for introspection. These pieces embody a retreat into interiority and a musical response to the crisis of Positivism: a sound world of shadows, melancholies, and secret vibrations, mirroring the refined neurosis of an age suspended between dream and disenchantment.