Ferdinando Carulli

La Tempesta

La Tempesta is one of Ferdinando Carulli's first works written in the genre of "sentimental sonatas", a genre of "program" compositions, whose drafts date back to the period in which the musician still lived and worked in Italy, more precisely in Tuscany in Livorno, after his departure from Naples in 1797. These are large instrumental compositions dedicated to various topics, literary, mythological, historical, accompanied by introductory texts and captions commenting and describing the various musical episodes that constituted them. The piece is ideally part of the literary current inaugurated by the Accademia dell'Arcadia in 1690 in Rome, inspired by the recovery of the models of Virgil's lyric and sixteenth-century pastoral poetry by Sannazzaro. One of the eighteenth-century emulators of this current was Metastasio (1698-1782), an author who also enormously influenced eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical production with his lyrics, whose texts were often used by Carulli himself in his vocal compositions. "The Tempest" by Carulli seems to adhere to these models with grace and a certain naivety. It narrates in music the love affairs of two shepherd children, Nice and Fileno, forced in the woods to interrupt their amorous effusions due to a sudden storm, marked by wind, rain, hail, lightning and thunder. Taking refuge in a cave, the two protagonists face the appearance of a monster, overwhelmed, then, by Fileno in a scuffle, thus closing the story with a happy ending in music. The piece stands out for the happiness of its musical invention, indebted to the stylistic features of the Neapolitan school, and for the whimsy of the onomatopoeic instrumental effects used, which imitate rain, hail, lightning, and even the laments of the wounded monster (represented by rapid glissé on the low strings).