45. Celebrations

Italian love songs by Donizetti, Tosti, and Gastaldon Mozart: Divertimento in D Major for horns and strings Music is often written in celebration—of an emotion, an event, a rite of passage—and today we’ll listen to pieces written to celebrate these occasions. When you talk about Italian vocal music, you are almost always dealing with love. The first song in the set, “Me voglio fa’ ‘na casa” by Donizetti, captures the free spirit of a sailor’s love. The poetry, written in the Neopolitan dialect, adds a folk sensibility to this as well as the next song, “A’ Vucchella” by Tosti. In the last song in the set, “Musica Proibita” by Stanislao Gastaldon, we get perhaps the lustiest declarations, in words so provocative that a mother forbids her young daughter to sing them! After that, a celebration of a very different sort. Mozart wrote this Divertimento in D Major for horns and strings, in part, to mark the graduation of his friend Sigmund Robinig from law school, according to the All Music Guide. The work’s substantial instrumentation—with bass in addition to cello—and its larger-than-average proportions for a divertimento make it a particularly satisfying sample of Mozart’s work in this genre.