The large double–door entrance to via
Cimarosa 25 in the Vomero section of Naples was
half–closed this morning, as is customary when someone
in the household passes away. And, as is customary, a
small white card was affixed to the door. It was written
by hand and read, succinctly, "For the death of Roberto
Murolo". He was 92. It was, perhaps, the only
non–violent thing that could have happened in Naples
yesterday to push today's visit to the city by the
ex–royal family of Italy, the Savoys, out of the
headlines. And it did.
There are three main reasons
why one–thousand miles of Italians, from the Alps to
Sicily,know something about the culture and language of
Naples. The first reason is the great playwright Eduardo de Filippo, on many a
literary critic's short list of Those Who Should Have Got
a Nobel Prize But Didn't. The second reason, on a more
popular (and more vital) level, is Italy's greatest film
comic, Antonio de Curtis, known simply as "Totò". The third reason is Roberto
Murolo, the gentle and erudite chronicler of Neapolitan
music and the best–known singer in the twentieth century
of the "Neapolitan Song."
If Murolo had
simply been content to remain a guitarist and singer, he
certainly would have done very well, but he was born to
more than that. His father was the highly–regarded
dialect poet Ernesto Murolo, part of the long tradition
of dialect literature that
included his own contemporary, Salvatore
di Giacomo, and reached back through the
18th–century libretti of the Neapolitan Comic Opera to the
16th–century Pentamarone
by Giambattista Basile, and
beyond. Thus, Roberto Murolo was very aware of being
part of that tradition, and his great contribution to
the music of Naples is a scholarly one. He dedicated
years of his life to researching, collecting and
documenting Neapolitan music and in 1963 published what
amounted to a musical encyclopedia of the music of
Naples, a 12 LP set containing songs from 1200 to 1962,
all carefully documented and explained and all
immaculately sung by Murolo, himself. He sang in the
precise pronunciation of a literary language, quite
different from the uneducated "street sound" that one
often associates with the term "dialect".
Update: Jan 2012.
Earlier this month, the city put a plaque
on Murolo's home to mark the 100th anniversary
of his birth. It reads in part: "... messenger and
traveller among different musical cultures, he
opened greater horizons for tradition." |
Murolo is not the
reason that Neapolitan songs such as 'o
sole mio and Funiculì–Funiculà are known
abroad. That goes back to yet an earlier generation, the
years at the turn of the century when so many Neapolitans emigrated and
took their music with them. Interestingly, however,
Murolo was part of the post–WW2 generation of Neapolitan
singers who resisted the onslaught of American popular
music and helped keep the traditional music of his
native culture from becoming passé.
Although he became
less active with advanced age, Murolo never really
retired. He took part in the 1993 version of the annual
Festival of Italian Popular Music in San Remo with a song
entitled "L'Italia è bella," a song against racism
and xenophobia. And while "cross cultural" music is run of
the mill today, Murolo was doing that as long ago as 1974,
when he sought out and sang with the great Portughese
performer of Fado, Amalia Rodriguez. Murolo was an
inspiration to the "friendly rivals" of his own generation
such as Sergio Bruni and to the
younger generation of singers such as Massimo Ranieri, Pino Daniele and Mario Maglione, all of whom
published tributes to Murolo in the paper this morning. As
with the passing of Eduardo de Filippo in 1984 and Totò in
1967, there is a very real sense of loss in Naples today.
to music portal
to top of this page