19/09/2005 - Num. 24 2005

An island of music

From the famous Luna Caprese to the melodies of Roberto Murolo, Capri has played an important part in the history of Italian music

Other versions: It

by Paolo Prato

“Tu, luna luna tu, luna caprese, ca faie sunnà l'ammore 'a 'e 'nnamurate, addourme 'a Nenna mia ca sta scetata e fall'annammurà cu' 'na buscia"(You, moon, Capri moon, you who make lovers dream of love, make my Nenna who is asleep awake, and make her fall in love with a lie). These lines by Augusto Cesareo, carved in marble, are the words that greet tourists as soon as they set foot on Capri. They are not, however, lines of poetry. If you don’t know already, it is actually a song that welcomes visitors to the pearl of the Campania archipelago. And what a song! Engraved in marble is one of the most beautiful melodies of the Fifties, Luna Caprese.
Originally recorded by Nilla Pizzi in 1953, it climbed the Italian charts in 1960, this time performed by the metallic voice of Peppino Di Capri. A truly monumental song, it was written by Luigi Ricciardi and is now the musical symbol of the island, a Mecca of international tourism that manages through songs like this to keep its legend alive in space and time.
There are many of these "postcard" songs dedicated to Capri, as there are to all other self-respecting tourist resorts. Songs that work like Aladdin's lamps – all you have to do is rub a little to evoke the magic of an atmosphere, a souvenir, a fragrance. Frozen in a chorus, in brief – even silly – lines, as Proust would have said. With Naples so close, it wasn't difficult for Capri to establish a musical reputation. The capital of music for centuries, first opera, and then songs and cabaret, the city of Scarlatti, Paisiello, and Di Giacomo was also a cultural capital of Europe, rivalling Paris and Vienna as far as the performing arts were concerned.
Innumerable melodies are dedicated to the city and its most picturesque spots (Marechiaro, Mergellina, Santa Lucia, Capodimonte, Vesuvius, Toledo ...), and just as many celebrate the surrounding places that have contributed to its fame including Sorrento, Positano, Posillipo, Ischia and, as we have seen, Capri. This island began to be the subject of songs at the end of the nineteenth century.

THE FIRST TITLES
According to the Enciclopedia della Canzone Napoletanaby Ettore De Mura (Il Torchio, Naples, 1968), the earliest known song about Capri is 'A grotta azzurra(1889), by Pasquale Cinquegrana (who also wrote Ndringhetendrà) and Edoardo Di Capua (the composer of O sole mioand 'I te vurria vasà). "Chell è na grotta tutta turchina, comme so' l'uocchie ca tiene, oi né"(This is a grotto all turquoise, like your eyes), run the words of the song, dedicated to the famous grotto whose discovery in 1826 brought the island to the world’s attention. No longer a mere postscript to a visit to Naples, Capri began to attract increasing numbers of visitors from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, and by the end of the century had become a must-see on any tourist itinerary. Its fame spread thanks largely to photographers and illustrators, who captured the now familiar picturesque sights and helped to make it the romantic resort par excellence. This happened just as Europe was abandoning Romanticism to launch itself into the modern world – the modern world that the canzone was conveying so perfectly in cosmopolitan Naples with its cafés chantants, crowded theatres, restaurants overlooking the sea, presided over at lunch and dinner by gavotteplayers and musicians who entertained the diners with guitars and mandolins. One of the most popular songs was Custantina(subtitle: 'A canzone 'e Capri), which Giambattista De Curtis wrote in 1894: "Si vuo' campà felice, viene a Capre: addò nascett'Ammore e mo ce regna"( If you want to live happily, come to Capri: where love was born, and now reigns).
Four years later the author of Torna a Surrientopublished the less well-known Capri. Another 'A canzone 'e Capriwas published in 1915. The authors were Aniello Califano, better known for 'O surdato nnamurato, and Rodolfo Falvo ( Dicitencello vuje). Capri returned to the forefront in the Thirties with three "minor" works by major songwriters: the famous duo R. Chiurazzi-N. Valente ( Signorinella, Simme 'e Napuli paisà) with Capri gentile(1932), the duo Bovio ( Lacreme napulitane, 'O paese d' 'o sole) and Tagliaferri ( Piscatore 'e Pusilleco, Passione) with Canzone a Capri (1936) and the duo E. Murolo ( Mandulinata a Napule) and Nardella ( Chiove) with Marina piccola(1936). In 1953, another Marina piccolawas published by Cesareo and Ricciardi.
The great American songwriters also fell under the exotic spell of Capri, and produced memorable portraits of the island, such as Isle of Capri(1934), written by Jimmy Kennedy (Serenata messicana) and Will Grosz (Along the Santa Fe Trail). The song was launched by the Ray Noble Orchestra, but was immortalized by the duet between Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, as well as by Frank Sinatra. It is a typical Hollywood-style picture-postcard song: under the shade of a walnut tree, flowers all around, the "blue Italian sky" above, a romance is born among the old mandolins, pasta and wine ...
The return home, to Los Angeles, would create the effect of a legend, like the Trevi Fountain, St. Peter's and Giotto's bell-tower in other songs.

THR FIFTIES
The heyday of Capri songs was, however, the Fifties, when the island was at the centre of a musical trend based on a combination of upbeat, American-style rhythms and the Italian tradition. Capri, Via Veneto and Versilia were the places where young people danced the night away. It was the era of nightclubs, high society life and cinema, which lasted throughout the boom years. A long time had passed since Maxime Du Camp, the friend and enemy of Flaubert, had come to Capri in 1862 and written: "For these people, the foreigner is a prey; they live on him, throw themselves on him like a booty that belongs to them. They offer him shells, flowers, or pebbles, to earn a coin", just like what happens now in Havana or Delhi. In 1949, Truman Capote came to Ischia and described Capri as a "cupboard for tourists". In that same year, Claudio Villa sang about the island in words that seem almost to be taken from a holiday brochure: "Here, under the Capri sky, how wonderful it is to dream while the sea murmurs.
Here among espaliers of roses and flowering wisteria, paradise is love". Qui sotto il cielo di Capri, by Bonaugura and Fragna, refers to the island as a "blue legend". One year earlier, Roberto Murolo had recorded Scalinatella(by Bonaugura and Cioffi), inspired by one of the flights of steps in Positano or, more probably, by Capri. In the years immediately after the war, people had started once again to dance and sing, at open-air festivals or in the wild rather dissolute clubs that were opening here, there and everywhere. The fashion in music was the same all over Italy, from the Pipistrello to the Club 34, from the Rancio Fellone to the Rupa Tarpea, but the novelty in Naples nightclubs was the transformation the Neapolitan canzone, both old and new, was undergoing. There was more rhythm and less poetry. Slow dances were in fashion, "still the only known way of embracing a woman without having to marry her". Naples was in the lead as far as producing catchy songs for cheek-to-cheek dancing was concerned. And the stars of this new genre were the singers themselves. For one hundred years the driving force behind popular music had been the poets and the musicians, but the age of the nightclub saw the singers, or the singersongwriters, enter the limelight. There were performers like Carosone, who brought a humorous touch to the nightclub tradition, or like Murolo, who represented the romantic side of nightclub culture with his guitar and his whispered melodies. Although his songs were not written for dancing, they were still popular with couples who had just been on the dance-floor. "A curly boy playing the guitar", sang Buscaglione in the classic Love in Portofino(1958), perhaps referring to himself or to one of his imitators. One of the many who entertained the party-goers until the early hours on the Ligurian Riviera or on Capri.

PEPPINO ARRIVES
Besides Ugo Calise, Fausto Cigliano, Armando Romeo and traditional singers like Giacomo Rondinella and Nunzio Gallo, there stood out another great innovator, a singer who had decided to use the name of his native island: Giuseppe Faiella, better known by his stage name Peppino di Capri. It was he who embodied the transition from the Fifties nightclubs to the dance-halls of the Sixties, when vocal timbre and musical arrangement counted more than the songs themselves.
This was a consequence of the tourist boom in the area, which had created a need for background music. Peppino di Capri "translated" Neapolitan melodies into the language of international pop music, even inventing a hybrid dialect known as Anglo- Neapolitan, which featured in many of his songs ( “lassame sulo cu 'sti lacreme accussì... you and me").
Among his many hit records (34 chart entries between 1959 and 1964, a record in the history of Italian pop music) was Capri, written together with Mazzocchi and Cenci, where the island itself acts as a "confidant” for the song's love-sick hero.