Lorenzo Mattei: “The magic of Taranto of Rota and Paisiello”

These days the good ghosts of Taranto, which have never abandoned it even with the polluted air of Ilva, are closer to anyone who has an ear to perceive them beyond the incessant noise of war and politics. The Giovanni Paisiello Festival is twenty years old and the twenty days of its development (from 30 September to 20 October) become an opportunity to talk, with the artistic director Lorenzo Mattei, about the illustrious spirits who rose or passed from Taranto and are there, as mentioned , still remaining.

Class ’74, Florentine by birth but of paternal Romagna ancestry, Mattei has lived in Bari for 22 years having first taught at the conservatory and today History of Music at the university. By connecting the dots of his biography, a triple bond is revealed with the genius of Nino Rota, who accustoms anyone who approaches him to read the clues that he disseminated with magical grace.

The Rotian track in Taranto?

Rota settled there in 1937 to teach theory and solfeggio at the Paisiello Musical Institute. At the time it was a small structure in an extreme southern province and represented a radical choice of life. Rota certainly did not need the money for teaching, had international relations and came from an educated Milanese family. He wanted to make a clean sweep, as an artist in search of popular roots that he came by drawing on this frontier.

Then the teaching at the Niccolò Piccinni conservatory in Bari, of which he would become director.

In Bari the environment was different: a large commercial port, the city of the Laterza family that looked to the national and international reality. But even here Rota chose to live in Torre a Mare, at that time a fishing village. I am convinced that from these experiences derives the band and circus aspect of his music transfused into the soundtracks for Fellini. In Bari Rota activated his book of relationships, even with direct assumptions that today would be unthinkable, and attracted the best of Italian instrumentalism.

You have crossed Rota’s footprints as director of the Paisiello Festival and already as a teacher at Piccinni, but another occasion brings them back to Romagna.

For a bond that my family and I share with Fellini with Rota: the acquaintance of Tonino Guerra. He was the best friend of my grandfather Gianni in the Montefeltro, where I spent parties and holidays. Guerra was a poet even when he was listing his shopping list and I witnessed the creation of his he Orto dei Forgotten Fruits in Pennabilli. For him, safeguarding an apple variety was imperative, because it represented the memory of the men who had cultivated it.

How did you discover music?

When, in elementary school, I wanted the Smurfs record. My father instead brought me a piano. I graduated in Florence with a pupil of Benedetti Michelangeli, then the passion for musicological studies prevailed over the piano activity.

Paisiello’s work is a mare magnum for a musicologist. A genius from Taranto who was formed in Naples and imposed himself throughout Europe.

He was a champion of self-promotion, a forerunner of social media management. He had the ability to save creative energy to achieve maximum results and the performers loved him because his music enhanced his talents. Analyzing the scores they are of a disarming simplicity when compared to Mozart, but functional to the scene. “La Frascatana” had almost 200 replicas, like no other work in the whole eighteenth century. He united north and south and worked for everyone: from Catherine of Russia to the king of Poland, from the Bourbons to Napoleon. He was called to inaugurate the Bolshoi in St. Petersburg and the Phoenix in Venice, because he guaranteed a very high artisan product. Like Gucci, or Ferrari.

As a man, however, Paolo Isotta who also adored him as an artist remembered him as a “coward, opportunist and womanizer”. In politics, then, a weather vane.

And he adopted a “shark strategy” towards his colleagues that spared no one. He spoke well only of Mozart, whom he had met when Amadeus was fourteen.

Another genius loci of the music of Taranto is Mario Pasquale Costa, a different era, the same fortune as Paisiello, the same Neapolitan adoption.

Their native houses are fifty meters away. Costa lived the flourishing nineteenth-century season of lounge music and his fame suffered less obfuscation thanks to the popularity of songs such as “Era de Maggio”, “Scétate”, “Serenata Napulitana”.

Is there an author that you would still like to enhance?

While in Taranto we have the fortune of an Association of Friends of Music which this year turns one century, in Bari I am trying to promote a festival for Niccolò Piccinni. The institutions, from the mayor to the superintendent of Petruzzelli, seem rather deaf to me. Bringing Piccinni to the stage, perhaps in the theater named after him, which is a miniature San Carlo, is considered less convenient than bringing us a “Traviata”. It is mistakenly believed that his music is elite but it is not so: in Genoa they found a score, “The hairdresser”, with a Zelig-like gag. And if we always want to play on the downside, keep TikTok. I’m tired of looking like the classic possessed professor who doesn’t know what “people” want. By the way, does he know that Piccinni’s house cannot be visited? They realized that the disabled bathroom is not up to standard.