by Antida Carelli
The echo of the Notte dei Serpenti 2026 still hangs in the air of the Pescara summer. The concert-event, conceived and directed since 2023 by Maestro Enrico Melozzi, is the work of a versatile composer of Abruzzese origin whose activity ranges from musical direction to record production, who writes for the cinema and who is very active in popular music. Melozzi’s artistic flair is marked by a constant dialectic between the learned musical tradition and the most authentic popular culture. The concert-event, staged again at the end of September at the Auditorium del Parco dell’Aquila, celebrates the Maestro’s bond with his territory, presenting the ancient traditions of Abruzzo and fusing music and folk dance into an interweaving of ancient and modern forms.
This idea of music as encounter and mixture brought back to my mind, as we already look ahead to 2027, the year of the Beethoven bicentenary, the multicultural project carried out by the publisher G. Thomson with L. v. Beethoven, roughly in the decade between 1810 and 1820. The aim of the Scottish publisher, who had already commissioned arrangements of folk songs from Haydn, was to preserve and spread traditional Scottish, Irish and Welsh melodies, ennobling them with learned accompaniments and with poetic texts by leading authors.
In 1803 Thomson approached Haydn’s most illustrious pupil, Beethoven, who at first was not very interested in the proposal to rework traditional songs for chamber forces. Then, as he explored that mine of new ideas, of distinctly national melodies marked by the characteristics of each country’s music, the project began to arouse in him an interest that went beyond the excellent fee paid by the publisher. Working on the harmonisations, he realised that those melodies had great potential and were deeply interesting because they allowed him to step outside the rules of the tonal system. The features of folk music prompted the composer to overturn the rules of Western harmony: what had begun as a commercial project became a field of harmonic research.
Official historiography, indeed, holds that Beethoven went through a period of deep creative crisis between 1814 and 1817, and it is particularly in these years that the production of these folk-song adaptations is concentrated. Beethoven was perfectly aware that what comes from afar, what is different, can become new lifeblood and a source of enrichment, and perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the project is precisely its experimental will. He found in that music entirely new possibilities of rhythmic elaboration, introducing innovations and developing new compositional techniques: in short, a long story of preparation and experiment, lasting more than a decade, that leads straight to the variations of the second movement of the Sonata op. 111, to the fourth of the Bagatelles op. 126, to the Scherzo of the Quartet op. 131.
In all, Beethoven composed some 170 arrangements for voice, piano, violin and cello of Swiss, French, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian and Italian folk songs, among them Sicilian and Venetian melodies. In this substantial corpus, which makes up a not negligible part of his vocal output, marvels and extraordinary novelties lie hidden. These are apparently light works that offer the chance to appreciate Beethoven’s genius in a new context, reveal the full artistic conscience of the great musician and are a pleasure to listen to.
These pieces are almost ignored by musicology and very intimate, and they do not correspond to the Romantic Beethoven myth, that of the dishevelled, misanthropic man at war with the world. But they are also compositions that bear witness to a fascinating moment of encounter between popular culture and learned music, which are not separate worlds but different voices of the same humanity, in the name of that Enlightenment ideal of brotherhood that Beethoven pursued throughout his life.