The Elegia eroica ('Heroic Elegy') is Alfredo Casella's most powerful contribution to the First World War effort. Returning to his native Italy permanently in 1915 after nearly two decades in Paris, Casella soon conceived this music dedicated 'to the memory of a soldier killed in the war': 'a heroic funeral march; a more intimate, deeply sorrowful central episode; and finally a fusillade of death that thunders through the orchestra subsides into a tender lullaby evoking an image of our country as a mother cradling her dead son.'

Still more starkly than in Casella's Notte di maggio ('A Night in May', 1913), the large orchestra—including six horns which launch the whole work—is often stratified into super imposed polytonal layers of woodwind, brass and strings (subdivided into as many as twelve parts); the score is peppered to a Mahlerian extreme with indications of expression, articulation and dynamics, the visceral impact of its searing dissonances and stunned lulls rivalling Stravinsky's Rite of Spring—from which there are occasional near-quotations.

It was all too much for the conservative Rome audience at the work's première in January 1917: 'in the final section,' Casella recalled, 'there suddenly exploded a tidal wave of indignation, overwhelming the sad, gentle berceuse of which not a single note could be heard. Few friends came to see me afterwards. I returned home that night with a sense of loneliness greater than I have ever felt, before or since.' Some critics immediately rationalised their resistance into accusations that Casella was anti-Italian—even though near the end solo trumpet, oboe and flutes, 'with infinite sweetness and poetry', introduce phrases from the nineteenth-century patriotic song 'Fratelli d'Italia' ('Brothers of Italy'), which is now the Italian national anthem. Closer to the mark was Domenico de' Paoli, who in 1939 called the Elegia eroica 'the most profoundly human of all musical responses to the tragedy of the War'.

(Naxos Music Library)

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Performance by: Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma, conducted by Francesco La Vecchia
Original audio: [ Ссылка ]
Original sheet music: imslp.org/wiki/Elegia_eroica%2C_Op.29_(Casella%2C_Alfredo)

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