1934 Florence

Apr 2, 1934 – Apr 7, 1934
Florence

Festival info

Start: Apr 2, 1934

End: Apr 7, 1934

Locations: Florence

Hosting member(s)

Description
Description

From contemporaneous reviews

“Sotto il cielo di Firenze, con la chiarezza del pensiero latino, la Società internazionale di musica contemporanea ha forse involontariamente preso atto d’una condizione di fatto, di un’aspirazione degli animi, d’una segreta necessità artistica del populo, del populo di tutto il mondo: riavvicinarsi alla musica del suo tempo.”

(“Under the Florentine sky, with the clarity of Latin thought, the International Society for Contemporary Music has perhaps involuntarily become conscious […] of the aspiration of [many] souls, of a secret artistic necessity […] from people all over the world: to reconcile [themselves] with the music of their time.”)

— Andrea Della Corte, “Il XII festival cella S.I.M.C. si inaugural domain a Firenze,” La Stampa, 1 April 1934.
(Cited and translated in Davide Ceriani, “Under the Florentine Sky, with the Clarity of Latin Thought — Italian Music Critics and the 1934 Meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Music,”
in Music, Criticism, and Politics (series editor Luca Levi Sala), Volume 7
– Music Criticism 1900-1950 (ed. Jordi Ballester and German Gan Quesada), Brepols Turnhout (2008), p. 429.

“It is interesting to speculate what the programme of such a festival would have contained had the I.S.C.M. been functioning in 1834. Beethoven, Schubert, and Weber, the three great influences of that and later generations were already dead. Cherubini, Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, Hal6vy, Marschner, and Mendelssohn had already won reputations too big to allow of their inclusion. Schumann might, perhaps, have found a place, since he was on the point of starting the Neue Zeitschrift fir Musik; Field certainly would not, though possibly Chopin would have been invited to submit a work. Berlioz could have shown no list of teachers to impress the executive committee, so he would have been ruled out; Wagner would have failed on the ground that he was too conventional, and Liszt’s success as a virtuoso would
almost certainly have disqualified him. And so the I.S.C.M. Festival of 1834 would probably have brought forth as little music of lasting interest as the 1934 gathering has done.”

–Walter Legge, “The I. S. C. M. Festival at Florence,” The Musical Times, Vol. 75 (June 1934), p. 552.

Programme information
Locations