"Canta pe' me Stanotte"-Neapolitan Song-De Curtis-Franco Tenelli

Canta pe me(1909).Canzone Napoletana, sometimes referred to as Neapolitan song, is a generic term for a traditional form of music sung in the Neapolitan language, ordinarily for the male voice singing solo, and expressed in familiar genres such as the lover's complaint or the serenade. It consists of a large body of composed popular music—such songs as O sole mio, Torna a Surriento, Funiculì, Funiculà and others.The Neapolitan song became a formal institution in the 1830s through the vehicle of an annual song writing competition for the yearly Festival of Piedigrotta, dedicated to the Madonna of Piedigrotta, a well-known church in the Mergellina area of Naples. The winner of the first festival was a song entitled Te voglio bene assaie; it was composed by the prominent opera composer, Gaetano Donizetti. The festival ran regularly until 1950 when it was abandoned. A subsequent Festival of Neapolitan Song on Italian state radio enjoyed some success in the 1950s but was eventually abandoned as well.The period since 1950 has produced such songs as Malafemmena by Totò and Carmela by Sergio Bruni. Although separated by some decades from the earlier classics of this genre, they have now become "classics" in their own right.Many of the songs are, indeed, world famous because they were taken abroad on the great waves of emigration from Naples and southern Italy, in general, roughly between 1880 and 1920. The music was also popularized abroad by performers such as Enrico Caruso, who took to singing this popular music of his native city as encores at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the early 1900s. Thus, Caruso is responsible for the fact that operatic tenors since then have been required to know these songs. This has led to such recent phenomena as The Three Tenors—three opera singers performing, at least in part, popular songs from Naples; one of them, Plácido Domingo, has in fact recently recorded a full CD (Italia ti amo) of traditional and some more modern Neapolitan and Italian songs. Important performers in the last few decades include Roberto Murolo, Sergio Bruni, Giuseppe di Stefano, Renato Carosone, and Mario Maglione. Murolo is known not only as a singer, but as a scholar and anthologist of the music; his collection of twelve LPs, released in the 1960s, is an annotated compendium of Neapolitan song dating back to the twelfth century and is the "Bible" for those interested in performing or simply learning more about the music.Extremely important in defining what makes a Neapolitan song is the matter of language. All such songs are written and performed in Neapolitan dialect. They are never translated into standard Italian (although there are versions of many of the songs in other languages). Anyone in Italy—Neapolitan or not—who sings these songs has to sing them in Neapolitan. The matter of dialect has not prevented a few non-Neapolitans from writing dialect lyrics for the Neapolitan song. The most famous example of this is "'A Vucchella" by Gabriele D'Annunzio.Naples (Italian: Napoli, Neapolitan: Nàpule) is an historic city in southern Italy, the capital of the Campania region and the province of Naples. The city is known for its rich history, art, culture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,500 years old. Naples is located halfway between two volcanic areas, the volcano Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, sitting on the coast by the Gulf of Naples.Founded by the Ancient Greeks as "Νεάπολις", Neápolis (New City), it held an important role in Magna Graecia and then as part of the Roman Republic in the central province of the Empire. Naples was the capital city of a kingdom which bore its name from 1282 until 1816 in the form of the Kingdom of Naples, then in union with Sicily it was the capital of the Two Sicilies until the Italian unification.Today the historic centre of the city is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The metropolitan area of Naples is the second most populated in Italy and one of the largest in all of Europe with around 3.8 million people. In the central area, the city itself has a population of around 1 million people--the inhabitants are known as Neapolitans or poetically partenopei. The language spoken by its inhabitants, the Neapolitan language is spoken with similar variations throughout most of Southern Italy.

Channel: Music
Uploaded: November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am
Author: francotenelli

Length: 06:55
Rating: 5.00
Views: 3250

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