Roberto De Simone

Credits

Lyrics, music and direction by Roberto De Simone*

Orchestra arranged and conducted by Antonio Sinagra

Members: Nunzio Areni*, Nando Caccaviello, Roberto Civitella, Giuseppe Finizio, Beniamino Forestiere, Alfredo Golino, Franco Manfrin, Vito Mercurio, Andrea Santaniello, Corrado Sfogli, Domenico Schiattarella, Antonio Schiappa

Voices: Antonella D’Agostino (tracks 1, 11, 14, 17), Virgilio Villani (tracks 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 18), Fausta Vetere* (tracks 3, 8, 12, 17), Peppe Barra* (tracks 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 18), Patrizio Trampetti* (tracks 5, 6, 11, 18), Francesco Tiano (tracks 5, 7, 12, 13), Mauro Carosi (tracks 5, 7, 10, 11, 13), Josè Cacace (track 5), Giovanni Mauriello* (tracks 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 17), Franco Iavarone (tracks 7, 13, 18), Isa Danieli (tracks 14, 15, 18), Antonella Morea (track 14), Biancamaria Vaglio (track 14), Concetta Barra (tracks 16, 18)

* Members of the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare

Lead guitar (track 9): Umberto Leonardo

Recording and mixing: Maurizio Roselli (Studio Zeus, Naples)

Production and organization: Bruno Fantuzzi

Genesis of the work

Roberto De Simone was perhaps the most important musicologist Southern Italy has ever produced: not only for the many essays published by Einaudi, but also for the recovery and reworking of traditional music he carried out with the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare (hereafter N.C.C.P.), which managed to rescue from oblivion both a vast repertoire and an entire approach to arranging it.

In the Neapolitan song tradition as it stood at the dawn of the Seventies, in fact, nothing remained of its ancient origins: leaving aside its commercialization at the hands of various festivals, one need only think of Roberto Murolo himself, of the "Antologia cronologica della canzone partenopea", who, with his spare guitar and gentle voice, approached the material with an undeniably modern touch, however refined.

This is not the place to trace the entire process that led to the birth and rise of the De Simone-led N.C.C.P., but it's worth recalling a few key moments that laid the groundwork for "La gatta Cenerentola".

The first is the concert at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, which in 1972 revealed their existence to Italy's more cultured audiences. The band earned that important slot thanks to the intervention of Eduardo De Filippo, who appealed directly to the great actor Romolo Valli, then director of the Umbrian festival.

The second step is the staging of "La canzone di Zeza", De Simone's first attempt to fuse Neapolitan musical tradition with theatrical tradition.

The N.C.C.P. thus put together a concert/show telling a story set within the world of Pulcinella, whose musical accompaniment already displayed some of the guiding principles of "La gatta Cenerentola": De Simone blends together different eras of Neapolitan music as well as different contexts, ranging from villanelle - of popular origin, born in the sixteenth century - to opera buffa - of learned origin, born in the eighteenth century.

To this must be added a further contrast: that between the precision of the arrangements (which also draw on archaic instruments such as the chitarriola, putipù, theorbo, trombino and tammorra, alongside the better-known and/or more modern ones, from the guitar onward) and the dynamism of the performance, something the performances of centuries past probably could not have achieved, partly for technical reasons (it should nonetheless be noted that, however energetic, N.C.C.P.'s performances left no room for improvisation, but were studied down to the smallest detail, with De Simone even having the group rehearse with a metronome, to avoid any possible slip-up).

It was thus only a natural outcome that in 1976 Eduardo, enthusiastic about the new project De Simone had presented to him, once again turned to Valli so that the Festival dei Due Mondi could once more lend its prestige to the Neapolitan musicologist.

"La gatta Cenerentola" thus debuted over five consecutive evenings, from July 7 to 11, 1976, at the Teatro Nuovo in Spoleto.

The story and its symbols

"La gatta Cenerentola" is based on the fairy tale of the same name by Giambattista Basile, published as part of the posthumous collection "Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille" (1634-36). De Simone, however, heavily reworked it, removing some characters and adding new ones, as well as altering certain events, drawing both on his own creations and on alternative versions of the tale belonging to the oral tradition, gathered during his research in the Campanian hinterland.

Cenerentola lives with her stepmother and six stepsisters, who scorn her for not sharing a blood tie with the rest of the family, treating her in effect as a servant. One day word arrives that the king has proclaimed three evenings of dancing: the stepmother immediately shows interest in having her eldest daughter take part in the event and mocks Cenerentola when she declares the same wish.

However, thanks to the intervention of a monacello (a spirit typical of local folklore), Cinderella discovers a magic trick that lets her obtain a series of sumptuous gowns, which she wears to attend the ball all three nights, capturing the king's attention. When she flees the royal palace on the third night, though, she loses a slipper.

Two of the king's emissaries then set out to scour the city, trying the slipper on every girl and announcing that whoever it fits will become queen. Cinderella, fearful, only agrees to the trial after being pressed by a group of washerwomen who are her friends.

It might look like a linear plot, broadly similar to the universally known version of the fairy tale, but it boasts a series of scenes that expand its structure and heighten its symbolic scope.

For instance, when Cinderella is forbidden from attending the ball, her frustration at missing the chance to meet the king — loaded with an obvious sexual undertone — is rendered through a fantasy scene, played by four male performers in women's clothing, who sit side by side sewing and reciting a rosary that turns out to be a list of the men they'd like to sleep with.

This isn't the only space given to homosexuality, which resurfaces in the finale with a character entirely disconnected from the rest of the story, the femminella, who, after arguing with the washerwomen over her unfulfillable desire to wear the slipper, kills herself by throwing herself into a well.

In both cases, the use of the homosexual element carries strong symbolic weight: in the first instance, these aren't real characters at all but the personification of Cinderella's feelings; in the second, it's an outside element whose purpose seems to be to expose the aggressiveness of the washerwomen, all of them longing to wear the slipper and thus meet the king, the forbidden fruit hidden behind it. They feel undermined by the ambiguity of the femminella — who dares to share their same hope despite being a man — and only after her suicide do they regret having verbally attacked her: at that point their stance takes on a positive connotation, driving them to oppose the stepmother and support Cinderella.

It's also worth noting that the stepmother and her elder daughter are played by men, in a mechanism of partial cross-dressing whereby, despite wearing women's clothes, they retain distinctly male mannerisms and voices. This is a technique that has existed since time immemorial in southern Italian theatre, believed to date back as far as the Atellan farces, more than five centuries before the birth of Christ, in pre-Roman times.

A secondary but perceptible interest on the part of the female characters, regardless of whether they're played by women or men, also seems to be that of giving the city a homegrown queen: the king's two emissaries are one French-speaking and the other Spanish-speaking, symbolizing the various foreign dominations that overlapped in Naples across the centuries, against which the rise to power of a local girl would represent a kind of redemption.

The organization

To stage the show, De Simone, with the help of producer Bruno Fantuzzi, puts together the Compagnia il Cerchio, comprising a twelve-piece orchestra and a cast of fourteen actors.

N.C.C.P. is present in full, with the exception of Eugenio Bennato: wind player Nunzio Areni finds his place in the orchestra, while the others are enlisted as actors/singers. Fausta Vetere plays Cinderella, Peppe Barra the stepmother, Patrizio Trampetti the elder daughter, Giovanni Mauriello both the monacello and the femminella.

Among the most important performers from outside the band are Isa Danieli, the leader of the washerwomen, and Concetta Barra, Peppe's mother, whom De Simone himself encouraged to resume the theatrical career she had put on hold as a young woman after having children. She is given the role of the gypsy, a figure unconnected to the story who appears at a few key moments to clarify the narrative and suggest certain religious symbolism, such as the parallel between Cinderella and the Madonna di Piedigrotta, who, according to legend, lost a shoe on the seashore.

A particularly important figure in the success of the work, one who isn't always given his due, is conductor Antonio Sinagra, author of all the intricate instrumental arrangements. Although he worked following De Simone's directions, his share of the credit in creating the magic formula underpinning the songs is beyond question.

Alongside the rehearsals, the same personnel record the album with the show's soundtrack, which contains all the songs and a few particularly important spoken passages ("La scena del rosario" and "La scena delle ingiurie"). Notable among the performers is classical guitarist Umberto Leonardo, who plays the instrumental "Villanella a ballo" (the musician would go on to orbit De Simone's world in the years that followed).

Released in 1976, the record made it onto the national chart in April '77, riding the wave of success from the show's Italian tour, reaching number 34 (if that sounds modest, consider that no other theatrical soundtrack of the era managed to chart at all).

The music (excerpt from the article “The Gold of Naples” by Salvatore Setola)

De Simone transformed “La gatta Cenerentola” into a folk melodrama that, over time, has become a genuine classic of Italian popular theatre.

The eighteen tracks are welded into the classic structure of opera: there are arias (“Jesce sole”), duets (“Duetto”), choruses (the soldiers' and the washerwomen's), and recitatives (the hilarious litany of the “Scena del rosario” and the rhyming, assonant torrent of abuse in the “Scena delle ingiurie”), yet they're performed in a carnivalesque style that draws as much on operatic singing as on the masked performances of commedia dell'arte.

The “high” dimension is evoked by the classical instrumentation (strings, brass, harpsichords), while the “low” one is conjured by the language of the lyrics: a colloquial idiom – the Neapolitan spoken by ordinary people – ennobled by the intricate metrical schemes in which the verses are arranged.

The bond with popular musical forms is further cemented by the songs (“Canzone delle sei sorelle”, “Canzone del monacello”), the villanelle (“Villanella di cenerentola”), and dances of native (“Tarantella”) or Arab (“Moresca”) origin.

In short, “La gatta Cenerentola”, magnificently uniting the two traditions that made Italian music famous the world over – the national operatic tradition and that of the Neapolitan song, both at once genuinely cultured and genuinely popular – restored enchantment, magic and dreaming to a musical era in Italy otherwise dominated by the socio-political neorealism of the singer-songwriters impegnati.

The reactions

Despite its overwhelming success with audiences, “La gatta Cenerentola” sparked a surprising polarisation among critics: against a majority of enthusiastic journalists stood a handful of isolated but heavyweight dissenters, who sharply criticised the work and stirred up an unwelcome climate of controversy around it.

It was Eugenio Bennato, however, who sowed discord even before the press did: that same year he left N.C.C.P. over disagreements about the band's direction, and after declaring the group disbanded – a claim events would soon disprove – he attacked De Simone's new work, calling it too aristocratic. He was soon echoed by giants of Italian cultural criticism such as Goffredo Fofi and Michelangelo Zurletti, who branded it a product for the bourgeoisie, with arrangements too elaborate, betraying the spirit of authentic tradition.

Things went even worse in Naples, where almost all the local critics panned a work that had otherwise won over the rest of Italy: they objected to the use of foul language and to the disjointed structure (characters like the gypsy woman or the femminella, and even tracks like “Jesce sole”, were indeed independent from the rest of the story, and their added value went unrecognised), they questioned the authenticity of some of the popular figures depicted, but above all they criticised the portrait of Naples, which came across as raucous, superstitious and violent, rather obtusely ignoring the fact that the Naples portrayed was hardly the Naples of the time (and even if it had been, there's no reason De Simone should have been obliged to paint an artificially idyllic picture of it).

The show had, after all, been born under a cloud of suspicion from the local authorities: the Campania regional government refused to fund the production, which in the end came, of all places, from Emilia Romagna – as shown by the choice of the Bologna-based Fantuzzi as the project's organiser.

Finally, in January '77, Naples too got its own staging, at the Teatro San Ferdinando, which Eduardo had already made available for rehearsals. Despite a hostile intelligentsia, audiences responded with great warmth, save for an invasion by a group of autoriduttori (the same ones behind the trial against Francesco De Gregori) during one of the evenings.

Epilogue

“La gatta Cenerentola” is today regarded as one of the most important works in the history of Italian theatre, and its soundtrack is a universally celebrated record (it even found room in a mainstream publication like Rolling Stone, in its list of the best Italian albums). Its huge success unfortunately strained the relationship between De Simone, increasingly drawn to anthropological research and theatre, and the rest of the band, who had no ambitions as actors: before long, the founder would leave behind his own creation, which nonetheless still exists today, under the stewardship of Fausta Vetere.

De Simone continued to hold a central place in the Neapolitan music scene throughout the Eighties too, arranging “Napoli – La sua canzone”, Sergio Bruni's landmark album/box set.

The diaspora of N.C.C.P. also gave rise to other distinguished careers, most notably that of Peppe Barra, who in the Nineties hit upon a series of albums of great experimental worth.

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08/11/2021