At the end of the Second World War, the Italian conductor Bernardino Molinari moved to Palestine. He worked with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, precursor of the Israel Philharmonic, and also orchestrated “Hatikva”, soon to become the national anthem of the new state of Israel.
According to a 2010 article in the Jerusalem Post, based on an interview with the pianist and musicologist Astrith Baltsan, Molinari conducted a performance of “Hatikva” when the head of the Jewish Agency, David Ben-Gurion, declared independence in 1948. Soon after, Molinari disappeared – back to Italy, where Baltsan believes he was put on trial. She told the Jerusalem Post that he was “found guilty, became depressed and died isolated in a monastery” on Christmas Day, 1952.
Molinari had close links to Mussolini’s regime. The details are somewhat sketchy, but in a 2017 Musical Quarterly article, Paola Merli reported that he was a board member of the Fascist Union of Musicians, and acted as Mussolini’s informal music consultant. After the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936, he conducted often in Nazi Germany. There’s a photo online of one of his concerts, with Joseph Goebbels in the front row.
So, a musician who was likely highly sympathetic to fascism orchestrated the Israeli national anthem and conducted it at the declaration of the Israeli state. According to Baltsan, Molinari claimed the Virgin Mary had come to him in a dream at the end of the war, ordering him to help the Jews. He apparently arrived in Palestine on a British bomber, after there had been protests at two of his concerts in Rome, the second of which resulted in a walk-out from his own musicians, effectively ending his career at home.
Molinari also has an important place in the history of perhaps classical music’s greatest hit: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. He premiered the work in the US and also made the first studio recording in 1942, with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. This year, those famous four violin concertos – one for each season – are celebrating 300 years since being published in Amsterdam in 1725.
More than any other so-called great composer, Vivaldi all but vanished from music history after his death in 1741, despite being known across Europe in his day. It would take until after the First World War for his name and music to slip back into currency, coinciding with Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922. Inevitably, the rediscovery of an Italian master became intertwined with the nationalist politics of the time.
The musicologist Piero Rattalino has traced the modern history of The Four Seasons to before Molinari, when a four-hand piano arrangement was reproduced in an edition of Classics of Italian Music, a series of mass-produced booklets aimed squarely at amateur players. Published between 1918 and 1921, they sound innocuous enough, but they carried political overtones. In the aftermath of the war, those little volumes of music sought to reinforce a sense of national unity by celebrating Italy’s long musical past.
The series was overseen by Gabriele D’Annunzio, a writer once described by Ian Birrell in the Guardian as “a poet and lothario who seduced Italy to wartime slaughter with his rhetoric, scandalised Europe with his writing and set up his own city state in a forerunner of fascism… a revolting man… Little wonder he captivated Mussolini.” D’Annunzio, who had a giant ego, was named as director of the project on the covers of the booklets, but he had little to do with their day-to-day production. Composers were brought in as curators, including Alceo Toni, a future music editor of ll Popolo d’Italia, the main newspaper of the National Fascist Party.
It was Toni who rescored The Four Seasons for two pianists, creating what in musical terms is called a reduction. According to Rattalino, Italy was awash with amateur pianists at the time. The arrangement ensured maximum sales, while also serving the political intent of the series: to seduce the nation with Italy’s exemplary history in music, one middle-class home at a time.
Molinari also worked to an arrangement of The Four Seasons, which he published in 1927 with a dedication to Mussolini. But rather than reducing the score down for amateur players, he scaled it upwards to suit the size and instrumentation of a large, 20th-century orchestra. It’s thought that Molinari premiered his arrangement in America in 1928, playing the four concertos on different nights as guest conductor with the St Louis Orchestra. He may have been beaten to the punch in making the first radio broadcast – a recording dated to around 1939 recently emerged, featuring the British-Italian violinist Alfredo Campoli – but there’s no questioning that Molinari made the first studio recording in 1942. It was released on 78rpm records first, then reissued in the late 1940s on the new LP format.
Before Molinari’s recording, Vivaldi’s music was also promoted by the Italy-based American poet Ezra Pound, a fascist sympathiser and part-time composer. As Catherine Paul wrote in the 2016 book, Fascist Directive: “In the music of Antonio Vivaldi, Ezra Pound found an opportunity to be cultural administrator for Mussolini’s fascist regime, reviving modern Italian culture through its rich cultural heritage.”
Pound’s long-term mistress, Olga Rudge, a concert violinist, had played a private performance for Mussolini in 1927. Afterwards, Mussolini was reported to have told Rudge that he believed the still little-known Vivaldi to be “the greatest composer of all time”, ripe to be resurrected in his regime’s drive to re-establish Italy as the European capital of art.
Pound believed he could help. A canny operator, he obtained microfilm of Vivaldi works held in the Dresden State Library and copied the scores. The pieces were performed at concerts organised by Pound in Rapallo, where he lived, often featuring Rudge playing violin. Accessing a huge trove of Vivaldi manuscripts that had been discovered near Turin in the late 1920s proved more difficult. Rudge’s biographer Anne Conover writes that Rudge had briefly consulted two of the volumes in 1935, but when she returned a year later hoping to catalogue the full collection, she was turned away as the publisher Ricordi had been given the rights to the works.
Pound went up the chain, contacting Mussolini’s education minister, Giuseppe Bottai. “Dig out Vivaldi,” he’s reported to have ordered, and librarians had no choice but to comply. A 1936 Pound-organised recital featured an entire Vivaldi programme, with Rudge playing violin.
The most significant event of the era was Vivaldi Week in 1939, organised by the composer Alfredo Casella and the Accademia Chigiana, where Rudge worked. The series of concerts made international news and featured revived performances of the now-famous sacred work Gloria, and L’Olimpiade, marking the first time a Vivaldi opera had been staged since the composer’s death almost 200 years earlier.
One week later, war broke out. Funded by Mussolini’s regime, Pound made anti-American and anti-Semitic broadcasts for Radio Rome, resulting in him being indicted for treason and committed to a psychiatric institution in the US. Rudge’s instincts were musicological rather than political, but she nonetheless remained loyal to Pound, right up to his death in Venice in 1972.
The end of the Second World War allowed the Vivaldi revival to start afresh, and it was The Four Seasons that led the charge. American violinist Louis Kaufman, who had a history of working on Hollywood scores, was first to release a successful recording, completed on New Year’s Eve, 1947, hours before an American Federation of Musicians strike. But it was the Italian chamber music group I Musici, led by violinist Felix Ayo, who were first to sell over a million copies, with their second recording of the work in 1959, using the new technology of stereo.
In Britain, a 1969 version by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, with Alan Loveday as soloist, flew off the shelves, before self-styled “punk fiddler” Nigel Kennedy became synonymous with the work in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His label, EMI, masterminded a marketing campaign hardwired to ensure crossover success, including the release of a promotional 7-inch and CD single. It worked – Kennedy’s recording sold around 2.5 million copies – but there were consequences. Overexposure led Kennedy to become unfairly lodged in the public imagination as a one-hit wonder, which had a knock-on effect for Vivaldi himself. By the end of the century, it was like he’d been decapitated; The Four Seasons becoming a severed head removed from the main body of his work.
In the 21st century, The Four Seasons didn’t die, it was reinvented. Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons sought to reclaim the old Baroque potboiler, in his words, “as a musical object rather than a sonic irritant”. His recomposition wasn’t without controversy – Richter used only 25 per cent of Vivaldi’s score – but it was wildly popular, clocking up an estimated half a billion online plays. The Four Seasons and its once-lost composer have become seemingly bulletproof, surviving a grim association with fascism, to find extraordinary success in every format of recorded music, from 78s to streaming.
Phil Hebblethwaite’s “The Essay: Vivaldi – A Man for All Seasons” is on BBC Sounds
[See also: Nato on the brink]
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This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame