L’immagine dell’Italia nella pittura e nella musica dei viaggiatori transalpini del XIX secolo

In the Italian landscape painting, since the end of 18th century to the first half of 19th, there are many scenes of peasant dance, into many different contexts. The subject is frequently present in the works of the German painters that worked in Rom; it represents the typical dances of centre and south Italy: the saltarello and the tarantella. We can find some examples on Joseph Anton Koch’s painting, like Vintners’ Festival near Olevano, oil on canvas dated 1812, that depicts peasants dancing with the tambourines’ accompaniment, or The Tiber near Rome with Rustic Festival, oil on canvas of 1818, with dancing girls too. We can find other examples in the pictures of the Swiss painter Léopold Robert. The peasant dance scenes can be inserted in the gender picture tradition, beloved by the grand tour north European travellers. During the 18th and 19th century the grand tour culminates with the discovery of Mediterranean culture trough a very long journey around Italy. This picture tradition is a filtered and stereotyped modality of approaching to popular Mediterranean culture, which is also very evident in writings about the grand tour: diaries, letters, traveller notes, and so on. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the dance scene iconography even stimulates the composition of symphonic music evoking peasant dance style; this music only rarely is based from direct experience on folk music. I’ll present, as example, two movements from two different symphonic compositions, dated about 1830: the Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony and the Berlioz’s Harold en Italie. Both the composers spent an educational period in Italy and frequented the north European painters in Rom. Both of them, with some differences, shared the north European approach to Italy. They affirmed having derived their inspiration from gender pictures and put in music a filtered reception of folk dance. A reception filtered through iconographical experience, that becomes in this way a medium of Mediterranean musical culture to north Europe.