Tuesday Tones

Continuing our series exploring classical music about or inspired by water, in one way or another, we have one of the most evocative tone poems of all time: The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. Respighi lived 1879-1936, and his gift for using the orchestra for illustrative effect is nearly unparalleled. His music sings with pictorial clarity that recalls Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, and echoes Richard Strauss, albeit with an Italian flavor. His scores are shot through with brilliant light.

Fountains is perhaps a bit more introspective than Respighi’s other famous showpiece, The Pines of Rome, but it contains its own moments of showpiece brilliance. One device that Respighi uses frequently, to great effect, is his off-setting of the beat; he also makes great use of a “shimmering” sound in the strings. More than any other composer, Respighi’s music always seems to have a visible “sheen” to it.

Here is more on the work specifically (credit):

Fountains is also in four movements, each representing one of Rome’s fountains at a different time of day. The opening movement depicts the Valle Giulia at dawn. Now enveloped in the suburbs north of Rome, the Valle Giulia was, during Respighi’s lifetime, a pastoral landscape. The orchestra gradually awakens, murmuring strings joined by plaintive oboes and English horn as cattle pass through the mists in the distance.

In the second movement, the majestic Triton Fountain on the Piazza Barberini springs to life in the morning light. The fountain was created by the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and his work – and Respighi’s as well – was inspired by the story of the end of the flood from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “The ruler of the seas sets his trident aside, smoothes the billows, and summons the sea-blue Triton who towers up over the depths… and commands him to blow into his sounding shell and by his signal recall the waters and the rivers.”

The third movement represents what is undoubtedly the grandest of Rome’s fountains, the Trevi Fountain, at midday. Respighi’s majestic writing for brass over swirling strings and cresting waves of percussion captures the fountain’s sheer scale, with its central depiction of Neptune in his shell chariot, emerging from beneath the sea and standing under a Roman triumphal arch.

The finale depicts the modest fountain in front of the Villa Medici, which sits atop a hill overlooking St. Peter’s, at dusk. Respighi’s orchestra provides the rich atmosphere of graceful birdsong, gentle evening breezes, and twinkling stars through a combination of sumptuous writing for strings and woodwinds and his use of percussion instruments such as the celesta and the orchestra bells. The work ends as gently as it began.

Here is The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Resphigi.