Program Notes

Vittorio Giannini was born into a family of professional musicians in Philadelphia’s vibrant Italian immigrant community in 1903. His father Ferruccio was a successful tenor, and his mother Antonetta a violinist with whom he took his first music lessons. As a child he was sent to the Milan Conservatory where he completed his studies as a violinist at the age of 14. Upon his return to the United States, he took up composition at the renowned Juilliard School. His older sister Euphemia became a professor of voice and diction at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, while the younger Dusolina was one of the fabled divas of the 1930s and 40s. Only his brother Francesco, a promising cellist,  abandoned his musical career to become a psychiatrist.

The question that many must be asking is how an unpublished and unperformed setting of the Mass ordinary, written in the United States by Vittorio Giannini in 1943, is to receive its world premiere in Poland 66 years later. Last summer, the undersigned delivered a paper on the roles of Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich and composer Zygmunt Stojowski in the Polish relief effort during World War I. Incidental to that event, I  also compiled a list of songs  dedicated to Sembrich. One of these was a song by Giannini entitled, Tell Me, Oh Blue, Blue Sky, written in 1927, Dedicated most respectfully to Madame Marcella Sembrich.

The find piqued my curiosity, and basic encyclopedic research led me to a mention of a Mass based on the carol Adeste fideles among the composer’s compositions. Correspondence with the North Carolina School for the Arts, which Giannini had founded and where he had served as its first president (and subsequently heavily endowed) directed me to the Wachovia Bank in Winston-Salem, where the Italian-American’s manuscripts and unpublished works are kept in the  vault. The bank contacted Giannini’s descendants who granted permission to send me a photocopy of the full score, and permission to perform the work.

The music of Giannini is not known in Poland for several reasons. Among his most successful works are songs and operas written in English, a language, which for the most part, has not yet been welcomed by Polish singers or opera companies into their standard repertoire. Equally appealing are his beautiful works for concert band which are included in the canon of the repertoire of North American wind ensembles (the excellent Third Symphony for Band, to name one). In Poland, the performance tradition of serious music for concert bands is not as well entrenched. Indeed, were it not for the fact that both of Giannini’s sisters studied with the brilliant Marcella Sembrich at the Curtis Institute where the celebrated star headed the vocal department, the Polish-Italian-American connection might never have been made. In the summer of 1927, the composer accompanied Dusolina and Euphemia to Sembrich’s summer home and teaching studio at Bolton Landing on the shores of Lake George in upstate New York. It was here that he composed the earlier mentioned song for Pani Marcelina that continues to enjoy considerable popularity and is found in the repertoire of several famous singers in the English-speaking world, including soprano Roberta Alexander and baritone Thomas Hampson who have recorded the piece. 
  
Missa ‘Adeste fidelis’ was written in 1943. Composed for men’s choir and organ during World War II, it makes one wonder if an all-male musical ensemble could have been available to Giannini. This may in fact be the reason that the work was put aside and has never before been performed. In addition to the Mass ordinary, a chorale prelude based on the carol opens the work and a festive postlude brings the work to an end. Because the postlude in its current state requires extensive reconstruction, it is not included in today’s program.

The mass’ thematic material is based on two motifs taken from the Latin carol that are reiterated throughout the Mass. The first consists of the first four pitches of the carol’s incipit, while the second is based on the beginning of the carol’s refrain, Venite, adoremus. The carol itself dates from the last quarter of the 18th century. Its immense popularity caused the carol to become one of the few non-Gregorian melodies to appear in the Liber usualis (a 1,900 page collection of Gregorian chants compiled by the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Solesmes in France) where, in 20th century editions, it is given as a benediction hymn for the Christmas season. Adding to the carol’s fame, was a 1942  popular recording of Adeste fideles (in Latin!) by the crooner Bing Crosby, one year before Giannini wrote his Mass based on the same carol. 

Giannini was a Neo-Romantic who imbued his music with the aesthetics and principles of Romanticism, even when using Baroque forms such as the fugue or passacaglia. Certainly, he was a Traditionalist in a century of great musical change.  

In his biographical entry for Giannini in Voices in the Wilderness (2006) Walter Simmons records that, despite his Italian upbringing, the composer was not a practicing Catholic. Nonetheless, he describes him as a “spiritual person.” In any case, this non-practicing, spiritual Catholic left a considerable legacy of sacred music. In addition to the Mass heard this evening, his catalogue includes the following religious works: a large-scale Requiem Mass; a piece for double bass and orchestra inspired by Psalm 130 (De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine), Four Devotional Motets for choir a cappella, A Christmas Canticle for choir and orchestra as well as an unfinished tetrology of operas based on the life of Christ.

Vittorio Giannini died in 1966 at the age of 63.

Joseph A. Herter