ABSTRACT
Amidst that great stirring of ideas affecting music in the last 25 or 30 years, the chapter corresponding to the Italian rinovamento is one of the most interesting. The hypertrophy of descriptive “programme” music – and what was worse, the “realism” of a more recent date – had been matched in Italy by a gradual drying up of symphonic and instrumental music. The operatic wave flooding all Europe was claimed to be musically representative of the country: and the collapse the tradition of pure instrumental music had suffered seemed to signal a total exhaustion of Italian symphonic accomplishments.
