This chapter uses Pirandello’s collaboration with Italian modernist composer Gian Francesco Malipiero on the opera The Changeling as a way into discussing Pirandello’s relationship to and understanding of music more broadly. Several of the author’s short stories, including such works as “Old Music,” “Farewell, Leonora!” – both written in 1910 – and “Zuccarello the Distinguished Melodist,” dating to 1914, make note of shifts in Italian musical taste in that period and therefore suggest a certain attention to music on the author’s part. But Pirandello’s interest in musical vanguardism is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that he collaborated with Malipiero, a musician so experimental that he was dubbed the “Pirandello of the music scene.” The essay recounts their collaboration as a window onto the two men’s personalities, experimental performance at the time, and the complications for artists and intellectuals who collaborated with the Mussolini regime.

Few surprises in the history of nineteenth-century music are more dramatic than that of Franz Liszt’s sudden move to Weimar in 1848. The decision to exchange an immensely successful career as a virtuoso pianist for the life of a Kapellmeister baffled many of Liszt’s contemporaries. Although he had held an honorary position as ‘Kapellmeister Extraordinaire’ in Weimar since 1842, he had spent no more than several days at a time in residence. Few understood the motives behind Liszt’s sudden decision to move to Weimar permanently, but hindsight reveals they were well-calculated. Liszt was no longer flourishing psychologically. As a soloist, he had spent the last decade engaged in a series of gruelling, trans-continental concert tours that required him to interact directly with thousands of fans. ‘I have spent the past six months living a life of shabby squabbles and virtually sterile endeavours’, Liszt wrote to his friend, George Sand. ‘I have willingly laid my artist’s heart open to all the bruises of an active public life.’1 Simply put, Liszt was worn out, and he imagined that a move to Weimar would enable him to escape the emotional labour2 he had been forced to engage in for years as a touring musician.

The ancient Roman figure of Janus, with his two faces – one looking towards the past, the other towards the future – serves as a fitting image for Liszt’s first encounter with Italy in the late 1830s. The region’s breathtaking beauty has been credited with luring him over the Alps. As Chateaubriand once noted: ‘Nothing is comparable to the beauty of the Roman horizon, to the sweet inclination of the plains as they meet the soft and flowing contours of the hills.’1 Such sensual descriptions attracted many visitors to Italy, but there was more to Liszt’s travels than scenic diversion. When he first journeyed south in August 1837, he and his companion, Marie d’Agoult, joined a steady stream of artists, aristocrats, writers and musicians who for centuries had made the long and difficult trip. Like these travellers, Liszt was drawn by Italy’s reputation as the cradle of European culture and by the beauty of its literature and art. Indeed, it was the literature and art of Italy’s past that made the most lasting impression on Liszt’s aesthetic ideas and later efforts as a composer.

In spite of Mahler’s tyrannical bearing as an orchestral conductor, and his preference for composing in complete isolation, collaboration was in fact central to his success as a performing musician. In the realm of opera, it was collaboration that eventually enabled him to realize, in living form, his artistic aspirations and to create what we commonly think of today as the role of the modern opera director. The contributions of his collaborators in Vienna, above all the innovative graphic artist Alfred Roller (1864–1935), illustrate the areas in which Mahler relinquished his dictatorial control of operatic production, and the reasons that pushed him to this personally difficult step. Roller’s modernist reading of Wagnerian theory, informed by a belief that scenery and costumes should not fool the eye but rather “create the atmosphere of the drama,” made fundamental contributions to the style of production that became Mahler’s signature in Vienna.

Shortly before the death of his father, George Gershwin told his friend and biographer Isaac Goldberg that the saddest part of knowing that the end was near was the realization “that there is nothing we can do to really help him.” One year later, in the spring of 1933, in accordance with Jewish burial traditions, the Jahrzeit of Morris Gershwin’s death was commemorated with the unveiling of his tombstone at the Westchester Hills Cemetery, a Jewish reform cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Although the Gershwins were not observant Jews, they did participate in certain traditions of their faith.

George Gershwin has long been a challenging figure to categorize and evaluate within mainstream music historiography. Few have gone as far as the Russian composer Alexander Glazunov, who, after attending a performance of Rhapsody in Blue, deemed him “half human and half animal.” But music historians and chroniclers have reacted variably to the composer’s rather anomalous achievement and place in the history of Western music.

To explore and gauge such differing perspectives on Gershwin, in particular his more serious compositions, I have examined his coverage – or lack thereof – among a fairly broad range of mainly American texts on Western and in particular American and twentieth-century concert music.

George Gershwin was an avid traveler, and for most of his adult life he was on the move. There were work retreats in upstate New York, golf excursions and beach trips south (e.g. Florida, Cuba), premieres up and down the East Coast, a trip to Mexico, film projects in California and five trips to Europe. Gershwin’s relationships with his cousins, the poet and folklorist B. A. (Ben) Botkin and his older brother, the painter Henry (Harry) Botkin, deserve to be foregrounded in any discussion of Gershwin’s travels. Through his relationships with them, Gershwin acquired a deep interest in, and knowledge of, folklore and modernist art – topics that increasingly influenced his approach to composition during the last decade of his life, when he went from being a mere traveler to a cultural tourist.

Gershwin scholars and critics looking back on his career often focus on Gershwin’s modernity, his skillful use of jazz in his concert repertoire, and marvel at his ability to cross the divide between popular and classical music. Many people interpret Gershwin as essentially an art music composer who happened to work in musical theater. The over-representation in musicological scholarship that privileges Gershwin’s “classical” works such as Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, and Porgy and Bess compared to his songs and musicals demonstrates the bias of the field toward the long compositions that are routinely performed in concert music spaces and analytical approaches that are grounded within the classical repertory. But viewing Gershwin as primarily a theatrical composer provides a different vantage point on his career, and one, I argue, that is truer to the development of his compositional voice.