I refer to the message from Ed Emery of 25 sept. Re LA GATTA CENERENTOLA.
And would like to add my support for his call for as many to go and see it.
It a very worth while show for anyone who has an interest in Naples or some
knowledge of it.  They will be pleasantly surprised not to find the sugary,
melodious music usually associated with Neapolitan Songs.

On a more specific note, addressed to Ed in particular, (see  his note on
the work)  I would like to have his view on the the following points:

Although the work has a connective tread, it is a colloection of poems and
music (almost a pout-pourri) not always related to the original legend, or
the Basile favola  (see f.e. the song Michelemma').

I also have a problem with the social (marxist) interpretation by de Simone.
There are elements which can be related to the social history on Naples and
the struggle of its people but, as in other interpretations (see R Viviani)
the link is tenuous.  The Neapolitan...popolino (or lazzari, as it was
commonly refered) has always had a schizophrenic relationship with its
history, oscillating between revolutions (at times well ahead of its times
and of other countries) and "feste, farina e forche", as the king used to
say.

Similarly, on the question of the "political or oppositional" content of the
poplar song, we must notice that, whereas the "northern" popular songs may
have had a strong vein of political or patriotic content, in Naples, at
least in the mainstream tradition of the last two centuries, the content is
to a large extent, love, sea, sun, fish, or other typical local
characteristic.

Finally, I am interested in some of the revival of Italian songs,
particularly during the Fascist period, including the war.  You mention Il
nuovo Canzoniere and i Dischi del Sole.  Do you have any further
information.  I should be very grateful for some.  Thanks.

Sergio Viggiani


-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Emery <[log in to unmask]>
To: Italian Studies <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 25 September 1999 19:38
Subject: LA GATTA CENERENTOLA... AN OCCASION NOT TO BE MISSED



London
25 September 1999

This is one of a regular series of Occasional Papers which I send out, on
matters of potential interest to Italianists.

It is posted on the Italian Studies list by permission of George Ferzoco.

If you wish to receive similar mailings, feel free to contact me.

Ed Emery.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


IN SEARCH OF CINDERELLA
DECONSTRUCTING "LA GATTA CENERENTOLA"

[to be performed at Sadlers Wells, London, 2-6 November 1999]

Buried in the small print of London's theatre listings, an item of news
creates a buzz among those who know about these things. La Gatta
Cenerentola is coming to town. Phone round friends, organise a group
booking for the evenings in question. Because a performance of La Gatta is
not to be missed.

I have had the musics of this show in my head for the best part of twenty
years. Taped from a record, barely even labelled, but played over and over,
because the songs reach out and take you, somehow, captive. And now the
extraordinary good fortune to be asked to translate the libretto. And hence
to write a small commentary.

>>Defining the Undefinable<<

So what is La Gatta?

It is a level of the arcane, the unaccustomed and the incomprehensible
presented with all the musical verve that you could wish for.

At the same time it deals in universals. Primordial human values.

Listen it it with your eyes shut. Search for the moments where you can
engage with the show's meanings. Near the end of Act Three there is a scene
in which insults are traded and a fight begins to develop. This is the
"Scena delle ingiurie" - the "Insult Scene". What do you hear?

Four voices of women. The Washerwomen. Arguing with brawling venom and
invective. The idiom is Neapolitan. Somebody has started counting - "One,
two, three, four..." - and in between the counting they invoke the names of
saints and God the Father. A rowdiness develops, a fight seems about to
start, and just at that moment a male voice calls for a tarantella. The
orchestra strikes up. A chorus of men launch into a song which sings the
praises of six sisters and their sexual parts. It begins to dawn on you
that the women's roles here are being sung by men. And they begin trading
massive insults across the stage - insults that seem plumbed from the
depths of their being. Their target is another woman, the Stepmother, and
by the timbre of the voice you know that she too is played by a man. She
returns the insults with catty vigour and inventiveness.

Begin to isolate the elements in all this: A density of meanings and double
entendre. The intercrossing of sexual innuendo and role-plays.
Trans-sexuality. A rude brawling vernacular. Strains of folk idioms in a
music that also has touches of the opera buffa. An earthiness of imagery.
The extraordinary quality of voice that the singers have. And the sheer
physical energy of the material. It is clear that we are in a very, very
special place.

But how to define it as a whole? The director himself, Roberto de Simone,
makes an attempt in his Introduction. Self-confessedly he fails. As an
artefact La Gatta is so many-layered and multifarious that it defies
definition.

He offers an initial account, translated here in paraphrase:

"When I began thinking about La Gatta Cenerentola, I thought spontaneously
of a melodrama. A melodrama that was ancient and modern at one and the same
time. Just as fairy stories (favole) are both old and new at the moment
when they are told. A melodrama as a fairy story. We would have people
singing as a way of speaking. And speaking as a way of singing. And much
would also be understood from that which is not actually spoken in words.
So we had to decide which words we would dress in sounds, and which sounds
we would dress with words, and where we would make do without using words
at all. We would use ways of speaking which were different from those that
you'd use to sell cans of tinned meat. They would be the sounds of a
different world, in which all languages are one, in expressing the
universal experiences of love and hate, of violences that are done and
suffered in the same way by everybody. We would develop another way of
speaking and expressing meaning - not only through grammar and vocabulary,
but also through everyday objects. And through the things that people
everywhere have done for thousands of years - giving birth, making love,
dying, feeling joy, feeling fear, cursing and being cursed, toiling in
physical labour, and enjoying the playfulness of play. Like the sun and
moon do, and have done, and always will do..."

His account is also a challenge. In a way it seeks to put La Gatta beyond
the range of textual criticism, as if it has a mystical life beyond
apprehension.

The critical eye rises to the challenge. For instance, we might locate the
piece (what do we call it... a piece of musical theatre... an erudite
pantomime... a folk opera...?) in a historical context, and thus fix at
least some of its meanings definitively.

>>The History of Cenerentola<<

What is the history of La Gatta? Where does it come from?

It is a reworking of a version of the Cinderella story taken from the
Pentameron of Giambattista Basile, b. Naples 1575.  A Neapolitan soldier,
public official, poet, and short-story writer, whose collection of 50
rumbustious tales (Lo Cunto de li Cunti)  written in the Neapolitan
language was one of the earliest fairy story collections based on folk
tales, and provided material for later writers, such as the Brothers Grimm.
His stories included original versions of Puss in Boots, Rapunzel, Snow
White, the Three Oranges, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella.

In 1976 Roberto de Simone composed and put together a musical version of
this Cinderella story, building it around song drawn from the folk
traditions of Naples and its surrounding countryside. The show was
presented at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, and was immediately a
major critical success. It toured Italy, running up 400 performances, and
in two subsequent revivals it toured internationally.

However it is not just a story of Cinderella. It is a complex reworking of
many possible stories of Cinderella, drawn from local folk traditions and
from historical sources going back to the Middle Ages. It plays openly with
sexuality and violence, with gender roles, with magic and local
imaginaries, and with hopes for change in a better world.

Reworking these themes into a kind of popular mini-opera, it creates a
sumptuously-dressed spectacle, a play that is at the roots of pantomime as
we know it, and simultaneously a celebration of the mystery that is Naples.

>>Themes<<

To understand La Gatta, you have to know that all human life is there, from
birth to death and everything in between. As De Simone himself puts it,:

"In the story of Cenerentola, there is the story of a whole people: their
frustrations, their aspirations, their sufferings, their desire for change,
their natural religion which has been repressed by the official powers that
be, the aspects of a matriarchy which has been subjected to the violence of
patriarchy, and the consequent negative aspect of that matriarchy after
what it has suffered from patriarchy."

Before we deal with the generalities, let's answer the question from the
lady at the back of the stalls:

>>But why is it called The Cat Cinderella?<<

In short: it is no accident that this Cinderella has elements of cat in her
personality. In part her cat-nature derives from Basile himself. In part it
is indicative of the erudite and politically-worked vocation of La Gatta.
De Simone explains that the roots of the Cinderella story lie in the
tradition of animal transformation folk tales. In an alternative Neapolitan
variant Cenerentola appears as a fine-feathered hen belonging to a
washerwoman, and each night sheds her feathers to go to the ball with the
prince. In the area around Naples cat and hen alike are local cult figures
with maternal associations, and enter Catholic Christianity as attributes
of the Virgin Mary. But more than this: the cat is a nocturnal animal that
sees in the dark. It is associated with the devil. It also eats mice, and
in local folk traditions the mouse has a distinct phallic connotation. So
Cinderella's cat-nature is an expression of her sexuality. In Naples, in
fact, a woman's sex has the nickname of  "cat" - a mucella. That said, we
move on.

>>Popular song - research - and political movement<<

The motivating impulses of La Gatta are many and varied. In part the show
is a reflection on sexuality, gender, sexual repression and a possible
future liberation. In part it is the product of a very specific conjuncture
of the late 1960s and early 1970s - the moment when, worldwide, the impulse
to political and revolutionary change joined with an in-depth research into
popular and folk forms of music to create something entirely new.

The folk musics of yesterday were researched and found new life in the
contestational youth cultures of today. In the United States, folk ballads
gave us Bob Dylan and the collecting of blues music provided a base for a
decade of rock bands. In Greece, folk-song collecting by Theodorakis and
others created a mass musical culture based on indigenous forms. And in
Italy the movement took the form of in-depth ethno-musicological research,
collecting, archivising and recording of folk song. For instance, in the
work of the Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (1962-68) and the Ernesto de
Martino Institute in Milan, and the recordings (now available in
re-release) of Dischi del Sole.

This then fed immediately into performance, and it is fair to say that De
Simone's La Gatta, although a distinctly separate initiative, follows in
direct line of descent from Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano's Bella Ciao (1964)
and the Dario Fo-directed Ci Ragiono e Canto (1964-5). The folk songs and
political songs of an earlier age (from the Middle Ages down to the
Resistance songs of the partisans in World War II) were collected, were
performed publicly, were recorded and sold in shops, and to the extent that
they were contestational, they were sung by the kids in the street. No
analysis of Italian revolutionary political culture of the 1970s is
complete without an understanding of this moment.

Something of the flavour of this research work comes through in the
introduction to a song book published in 1976 (La Chitarra e il potere,
Savelli, Rome, p. 11):

"...popular song is always oppositional song, and therefore is always in
some sense 'political'. Songs of toil, tavern songs, prison songs and
religious songs have always expressed a view of the world that is
antagonistic to that of the ruling class, either by overturning that
world-view or by contributing to the creation of an alternative conception
of work, of popular celebrations, of justice, and of religious observance.
When such conceptions transform into an organised collective heritage, they
transform rejection into struggle, resistance into attack, desertion into
boycotting, prison escapes into destruction of the prisons, work-to-rules
into a rejection of wage labour and cultural subordination into a struggle
for hegemony. Within this transition, popular song changes from being
simply a testimony to the ongoing existence of an "other" culture... and
becomes political song, [...] and an allusion to a conception of the world
that is revolutionary..."

The confrontation on this cultural terrain had real substance. For
instance, the uproar caused at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto in
1964, when Bella Ciao was presented. The historic anti-war song "O Gorizia
tu sei maledetta" had been sung from the stage. It attacked the military
generals responsible for the disasters of World War I. Immediately after
the show (since censorship was still in force) the carabinieri mounted the
stage, accused the singer of having sung a verse that was not in the
official script, and threatened him with arrest for slandering the armed
forces. An artillery colonel left the theatre in tears, threatening to
sue...

>>Voice and dialect<<

Twelve years later, in 1976, the first production of La Gatta caused a
similar stir at the Festival di Due Mondi. Here the contestational aspect
was different. It dealt in the area of sentiment, emotion and sexuality
rather than class oppression. But the show was similarly based in diligent
ethnomusicology, research into oral traditions, and the re-presentation of
those traditions in a modern subversive format. In that period De Simone
was working in collaboration with the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, a
singing group which still specialises in research and performance of the
popular song of Naples and the Mediterranean region as a whole.

In his view there can be no easy categorisations of "Neapolitan music"
into high-brow, low-brow, folk music, classical music etc. Before it was
decimated by the plague of 1656, Naples had been one of the most densely
populated capitals of Europe. Peasants moved to the city to avoid the
appalling poverty of the countryside, and they brought their rural cultures
with them. As a result ancient peasant traditions of song, dance and
religious ritual find full expression within the "dominant" culture of
Naples.

This, in part, is what La Gatta researches. But more than that. Two hundred
years ago the music historian Charles Burney, on his musical tour of Italy
and France, arrived in Naples and was struck by the extraordinary quality
of popular Neapolitan song. He observed how the singers passed into
"modulations so strange that they are almost impossible to imagine".  It is
just  this quality of folk-voice that La Gatta sets out to explore. It has
succeeded in creating a particular voice, a style of singing, which is
crucial to the quality of the piece. Of the present cast members, the
casting of Cenerentola (Marina Bruno) apparently took two years of
auditions. De Simone says: "In this kind of singing you cannot use singers
that have a formal academic training. The vocal quality must be that of the
popular tradition." At the same time the production is built on techniques
of polyphony, choral singing and counterpoint.

The show also draws on the stylistic and vocal traditions of the opera
buffa, musical comedies in local dialect which flourished in Naples in the
early eighteenth century and which had links with the old Commedia
dell'arte. And here we find suggestive continuities with our own traditions
of pantomime.

As regards the language of La Gatta, it provides fuel aplenty for
controversy. First, is Neapolitan a language, or a dialect, or an idiom or
what? Second, is it a single linguistic form spoken across a range of
social classes, or is it a ghettoised minority form? Third, there are parts
of La Gatta which are incomprehensible even to Neapolitans, and where's the
point in that? Without trying to provide answers, I would simply observe
that another Italian ethnolinguistic performer, Dario Fo, is in the habit
of performing two-hour monologues spoken in substantially invented
sixteenth-century dialects of the Po Valley, and the miracle of theatre
makes even the incomprehensible comprehensible.

>>The characters of La Gatta<<

While it is hard not to be taken by the strong on-stage characterisations
of the Stepmother, Cinderella, the Sisters etc, De Simone stresses that
they are also to be read as archetypes, as symbols. They embody a whole
input of symbolic meanings which can be read, in one optic, as an entirely
Freudian text. Among the various "meanings" of Cinderella, the author
offers the following:

In Neapolitan culture, there still exists a strong culture of matriarchy.
Historically matriarchy was strong in the countryside, but in sixteenth
century Naples patriarchy was already getting the upper hand. In this
context Cenerentola becomes the typical female figure as conceived in
patriarchy - she is the "virgin", the negative victory of patriarchy over
matriarchy. She is to be virgin and pure both before and after giving birth
- hence the symbolism of the "loss" of the slipper, which is then regained.
The Stepmother, on the other hand, represents the old matriarchy subjected
to and redefined by patriarchal power, to become the oppressive "phallic
mother".

In characterising Cenerentola, De Simone cites specifically the rituals
associated with young girls arriving at their first menstruation. In many
societies a menstruating woman is considered to be polluted, and is shut
out of society - so, in this story, Cinderella is considered "ugly" and
"dirty", is excluded from everyday household life and is forced to live by
the hearth. At puberty the girl is often entrusted to a second mother, who
gives her the secrets of sexuality, and she takes on a new identity as
woman before she re-emerges into society - which gives us the well-known
elements of Cinderella's fairy godmother, and her dressing for the ball.

>>"You shall go to the ball, Cinderella..."<<

As regards "going to the ball", this too is full of symbolic meanings. De
Simone notes that dance is historically associated with religious
observation. Popular dance (ballo popolare) takes place in association with
celebrations of the Madonna, and people dance in the sacred space in front
of the church associated with the given celebration. Once it took place
actually inside the church, but it was banned from here by the
ecclesiastical hierarchies. So Cinderella's "going to the ball" has
symbolic meanings at multiple levels.

De Simone's La Gatta is constructed around popular forms of song - for
instance the characteristically Neapolitan form of the villanella. It is
also built around regional folk dance forms - tarantellas, tammuriatas,
morescas,  etc. These in themselves would take an entire article to
explain.

For the moment, suffice to say that in De Simone's use of the tarantella
there is a deliberate reference to dancing mania and possession
(tarantism). In the studies that have been made of this characteristic
common phenomenon in southern Italy, a typical symptom is the desire to
wear rich and sumptuous clothing - precisely the desire that is evinced in
the Cinderella story. Furthermore, the scene of Cenerentola's dancing with
the king is equivalent to the encounter with Saint Paul in the tarantella
exorcism. Here it shares stylistic elements with the traditional style of
tarantella: the encounter, followed by formal courtesies, then the onset of
desire, the fear of the relationship, and finally the instinct to flee, and
the gesture of running away. It is worth noting (the loss-of-shoe thematic)
that in all the popular tarantellas the women always remove their shoes and
dance in bare feet...

>>Naples as "Other" <<

In Dario Fo's 1997 show Il Diavolo con le zinne, the dry-as-a-stick elderly
housekeeper of an upright judge is possessed by devils. Thereupon she
becomes sexuality incarnate, and she is seized by an uncontrollable urge to
dance the tarantella. In this persona she abandons her native Lombard
dialect and begins to speak pure Neapolitan. In Fo's vision Naples -
female, sexual, fecund - is explicitly counterposed to the repressed, arid,
intellectualising sterility of the North. And this is the image of the city
that we have in La Gatta.

Over and above all, the show is a celebration of Naples. Naples as earthy
matriarchy. Naples as transgressive. Naples as the "Other" for the rest of
Italy. The Naples that has fallen to foreign invaders one after the other -
liberators and oppressors alike. The Naples who, time after time, has lost
her virginity:

"Napoli, Napoli, donna bella
Ha perso la chianella
Al re di Aragona e di Turchia
Ha perso anche la fantasia..."

"Naples, Naples, beautiful woman,
Lost her slipper
To the king of Aragon and the king of Turkey,
And she lost her dreams too..."

>>Epilogue: Gender and sexuality<<

At a key moment of La Gatta, having explored a whole canon of Freudian
concerns from incest through infanticide to matricide and much else
besides,  there is an elaborate, vulgar and sexually provocative stand-off
between the Feminella - a transvestite man - and the Washerwomen. It ends
in the transvestite being goaded into suicide. Whether or not you choose to
read this as a political statement, it poses the issue of gender and
sexuality right at the heart of La Gatta - an issue which then finds its
resolution in the poignant soliloquy of the Gypsy Woman that closes the
show and echoes in your head for a long time after:

"Ma io credo ca pe' sta' bbuono a stu munno
o tutte ll'uommene avarriano 'a essere femmene
o tutt' 'e femmene avarriano 'a essere uommene
o nun ce avarriano 'a essere
né uommene né femmene..."

"I think that to make this world a decent place
Either all the men would have to be women
Or all the women would have to be men
Or there would have to be
Neither men nor women..."


++++++++++++++++++

NOTES

Roberto De Simone (b. Naples 1933) is a musician, a composer, a theatre
director and musicologist. He has directed operas in the world's major
opera houses, and from 1981 to 1987 was artistic director of the San Carlo
Theatre in Naples. He is currently director of the Music Conservatoire at
San Pietro a Majella, Naples. Writings include Disordinata Storia della
Canzone Napoletana, Valentino, Ischia, 1994.

** The Naples-based Media Aetas company, who are touring the present
edition of La Gatta, have a 20-year history of musical and operatic
stagings of works, ranging from Pergolesi (La Serva Padrona) and
eighteenth-century opera buffa, through Stravinsky (Pulcinella and The
Soldier's Tale) to the modern idioms of jazz and blues. They have also
staged original works conceived by Roberto De Simone, a many-faceted output
ranging from sixteenth-century song to a Requiem for Pier Paolo Pasolini. A
musicological feast, backed by many years of musicological research and
documentation. Four of the original NCCP members are in  the present
touring cast - Rino Marcelli (the Stepmother), Virginio Villani (chorus
leader and Prologue), Giovanni Mauriello and Patrizia Spinosi - providing a
precious continuity with the original production.

Media Aetas is developing a site at: http://www.mediaetas.it

The NCCP has a web page at: http://www.artreview.com/music/nccp/index.html.

** The full meanings of La Gatta... are not easily available to audiences
coming to view it unprepared, nor are they available through the songs,
which are extraordinarily opaque and synthetic. What is really needed is a
full translated version of the text (La Gatta Cenerentola, Einaudi, Torino,
1977), together with a critical apparatus. I am looking to see whether this
can be done.

** The original cast recording of La Gatta, with Nuova Compagnia di Canto
Popolare, was issued by EMI with the catalogue number EMI 1182158. The
Dischi del Sole records, an archive of the popular and political song
movement of Italy in the 1960s-70s, have been re-released in both CD and
vinyl formats by Ala Bianca of Modena.

** La Gatta Cenerentola will be performed at Sadler's Wells, London, on 2-6
November 1999, as part of the Italian Festival 1999. Further details at:
http://www.askonasholt.co.uk

Ends










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