The next stop is Naples, the capital of the kingdom of the two Sicilies and a city full of musical innovations in that period.
In the early years of the XIX century, Naples was one of the main musical centers of Europe. Its music schools, theaters, and widespread public and private performance activities employed many musicians of the Kingdom and attracted many foreign musicians to the city as well. The musical life was economically supported by the Royal House, and universally recognized excellences, such as the San Carlo Theater, were a source of pride and prestige for the Bourbon government. With the arrival of the French (1806-1815), even greater attention was given to music and theater, and an extensive reform project was implemented for the arrangement and reorganization of the sector. Following the model of the Conservatoire de Paris, in 1807, the Real Collegio di Musica was established: the first public music school in Italy, heir to the ancient Neapolitan Conservatories; female educational institutions were established for the education of "noble and well-born young ladies," and the annual government funding (the 'dowry') for the San Carlo Theater was increased from 4,000 ducats in 1806 to 45,000 in 1809 1.
Few cultural phenomenons had shown as much adaptability as Neapolitan song. This heritage managed to overcome social, cultural and economic distinctions, until it became emblem of the city itself. The power of this repertoire lay in its ability to spread entertainment similar to classical music, especially in the early XIX century. The activity of the music was represented by opera’s theater, that, however, had limited activity. As a result, higher-class audiences began to turn to private musical activities, promoted by municipal associations or clubs2.
Guglielmo Cottrau first, and his son Teodoro later, published “Passatempi Musicali”3, based on the tastes and demands of the bourgeois classes. This was an enormous anthology published in files from 1824 to 1865. This book includes songs intended for salons which show the coexistence of different typologies of popular traditional pieces, transcribed and arranged by academic musicians. It includes original compositions in folk style, transcription of popular songs and dance songs for piano. In fact, these people experienced music as a social and representative function4.
In the collections of the publishing house Girard , some oral songs appear; songs that have a longer history and that live a process of stylization walking away from the original ones. However this process permit the spreading or circulation outside the rural environment, otherwise impossible 5.
The first six books of Cottrau were an absolute novelty, quickly gaining popularity to the point of stimulating an editorial and production trend, with similar collections by other authors. In a short time, a repertoire that takes the form of a specific genre of vocal chamber music spread and, despite highlighting strong stylistic borrowings, both from cultured vocal production and from oral tradition, manages to define itself as an autonomous genre and to escape the hegemony of musical theater of era. In the salons of the aristocrazy or of the high bourgeoisie, melodies of opera live together with folk songs as Santa Lucia, Fenesta ca lucive, Palummella, Te voglio bene assaje…
Alongside the vocal repertoire, there is a rich instrumental repertoire consisting of fantasies, reductions, paraphrases, and transcriptions of the most famous operatic works of that time, drawing inspiration from Neapolitan folk songs. In Naples the cultured Hausmusik can count on Sigmund Thalberg (Pizzo Falcone Palace).
In the second half of the XIX century, also Vincenzo De Meglio published a significant amount of music with Ricordi. During this period, instrumental music appeared only sporadically: as support for vocal works, occasional entertainment, to teach purposes, or to popularize vocal and orchestral pieces.
Considering the customs of the Neapolitan audience, the definition of "cultured popular music" can be extended beyond operatic productions to include romance-songs with dialectal lyrics and heteronomous forms of instrumental music. Additionally, aristocratic salons became secondary theater spaces, but also places where different genres and repertoires could coexist. However, it's important to note that instrumental music, in these settings, often played a secondary role, with little autonomy or value in its own right. This doesn’t mean it wasn’t performed (in fact, it was widely played in conservatories), but the persistence of conventional musical culture dissuaded many composers, who preferred more financially rewarding opportunities.
The harp in the city
During this period, the harp made its first appearance in Naples, playing an almost pivotal role in orchestras. The first "virtuosa of the harp" at the Royal Theaters of San Carlo and Fondo, as well as the Palatine Chapel, was Caterina Tagliolini. Her extraordinary position was not only recognized by the periodical press but also by the numerous privileges she was granted: a salary second only to that one of the first violinist, a generous subsidy from the King for her services at court, and a fourth-row box seat for every evening performance at the royal theaters 6.
Image 13. arrangement of the orchestra at the San Carlo theater. Tiziana Grande, "La Scuola Arpistica Napoletana tra Otto e Novecento," http://www.associazioneitalianarpa.it/la-scuola-arpistica-napoletana-tra-otto-e-novecento/, accessed February 3, 2025.
Naples also became home to a nationally significant harpist school. Filippo Scotti, the first harp teacher at the Naples Conservatory, left behind a flourishing generation of harpists who succeeded one another, contributing richly to the history of the Italian harp. Unfortunately, little research has been conducted on this topic, and the importance of this class, along with the contributions of these composers, remains largely unknown—even in Italy7 .
One of the name that appear on "Gazzetta Musicale di Napoli" is Clemente Zanetti, already famous in Lombardy, later moved to Naples where he became a harpist at the court of Francesco I. He was also one of the first in Italy to use the Erard's double-action harp and he also composed various pieces for this instrument. When he died in Naples in 1937, Zanetti's group was passed on to Filippo Scotti, who in 1839 was appointed as the first harp teacher at the Naples College of Music. A document preserved in the historical archives of San Pietro a Majella at the College of Music shows that the approach to studying the instrument was no longer amateurish, but had become professional.8
In 1861, the first differences under the unified government began to be felt. The latter, in fact, considered harp lessons at girls' schools to be a luxury and prohibited them. Thus, Filippo Scotti began to educate a class of male students who were destined to spread the instrument throughout the rest of Italy and abroad. In 1874, the female classes was opened again, and for a few years, this required the splitting of the teaching position: Felice Lebano took charge of the male classes, while Filippo Scotti was responsible for the female ones 9.
Image 14. Felice Lebano. Tiziana Grande, La Scuola Arpistica Napoletana tra Otto e Novecento, http://www.associazioneitalianarpa.it/la-scuola-arpistica-napoletana-tra-otto-e-novecento/, accessed February 3, 2025.
But who was Filippo Scotti? He was a student of Curzio Marcucci (1775-1842), one of the most renowned harpists of his time. While Marcucci’s name may not be widely known, it is important say that he was a pupil of Leonardo Primavera, Italy’s first harp teacher, who had studied with Jacob Hochbrucker. Some sources(Roslyn Rensch, Harp and Harpists, 2017) claim that Marcucci himself studied directly with Hochbrucher, but I find this unlikely. In this regard, Riccardo Ruta10, one of the lasts in this generation of harpists, wrote a book on the history of the harp. Ruta compiled a detailed list of harp teachers across Europe, listing each with their students, organized by country—and for Italy, by city. His book, written while some of the teachers were still alive, identifies Leonardo Primavera as Italy’s first harp teacher 11.
For the first time, I developed a clear and reliable outline of who the harp teachers in Italy were, based on my research and Ruta’s findings. This work represents the first effort to systematically organize and clarify this information, which has previously been overlooked. You can see all the graph here. This work is significant not only because it provides the first comprehensive example of the hierarchy of harpists in Italy, but also because it helps the new generations of harpists to understand better the relationships between them. By discovering who was the teacher of who, valuable insights are gained into their musical style and how to interpret it. For instance, studying Caramiello first allowed me to grasp the style of his Sicilian contemporaries. Moreover, it highlights how prolific the world of harpists was, during a time when the pedal harp had just been invented in France, making its widespread success in another country far from predictable. This framework has also been invaluable in researching certain harpists, as we will see later, for example.
To summarize, from Filippo Scotti was born the following harpists:
- Alfonso Scotti (his son, 1805-1889)
- Giovanni Caramiello (1838-1938)
- Sebastiano Caramiello (1847-1903)
- Michele Lebano(1841-?)
- Felice Lebano(1867-1917)
- Francesco Bellotta(1834-1907)
However, the name of Clemente Zanetti, which appears in 'Giuseppe Mascia, Clemente Zanetti in «Gazzetta Musicale di Napoli», a. XIII (1865) nn.24, 25,26' (The Musical Gazette of Naples), does not appear in Ruta's book. I have not been able to understand why nor have I found this name in other sources; however I am sure he was an important harpist of the period due to the details provided by the source itself.
In 1865, it seems that Alfonso Scotti succeded his father in the conservatory and in 1880 Felice Lebano took the male class. Felice Lebano would leave the position in favor of a theater career as a solo harpist in Europe and South America, and would later become a harp teacher in Buenos Aires. In 1886, Felice Lebano will come back for a concert in Naples, where in the meantime his colluegue, Giovanni Caramiello12, took the harpclass in the conservatory of Naples. Instead Sebastiano Caramiello13 appointed harpist to the Russian Imperial Court, later he returned to Naples to teach there.
In the photograph on the side it is possible to see Giovanni Caramiello's harp class. On the right side there is Giovanni himself, but the harps that have been immortalized in this photo are interesting. According to expert harpist Sylvain Blassel14, the harp played by the oldest women could play on a Erard harp, greek style from London, double action, or another harp maker (Egan, Blazdell, etc) who made this Greek model15. As the photo was taken around 1905, a period in which the Erard harp was certainly already on the market and given that a real Erard harp shop will be opened later in Naples it is very likely that the left one will be an Erard.
The second one, however, is clearly different and considering that it was not so easy at that time to have more than one harp in a conservatory or institute, it is likely from an earlier period. The right one looks more like a single action harp from Paris, not Erard, but Challiot, maybe, dated 1820’s16. This is confirmed by the fact that it is played by a younger girl than the second one. So it was probably used by younger girls to start becoming familiar with the pedals exactly as is done today with 40-string pedal harps.
Image 15. The Caramiello's class. Tiziana Grande, La Scuola Arpistica Napoletana tra Otto e Novecento, http://www.associazioneitalianarpa.it/la-scuola-arpistica-napoletana-tra-otto-e-novecento/, accessed February 3, 2025.
Most of the foregoing harpists composed and transcribed some music for harp. Michele Albano, for example, was the harpist of San Carlo theater and published some original music transcriptions and harp method. Riccardo Ruta, cited before, was the pupil of Giovanni Caramiello, distinguished both as musician and scholar. He was the harp professor in the conservatory of Turin and Palermo and composed and transcripted music for harp. Moreover, he wrote a volume on the elements of harmony and a history on harp (cited before).
The class of Caramiello had many students including Alberto Salvi17.
Alberto moved with his family to the United States after graduating, and with his concert activity he managed to transform the harp from a salon-instrument to a concert hall-instrument, and he was also one of the first interpreters of compositions for harp and orchestra. It is meaningful to close this 'generational' circle of harpists by also mentioning Alberto Salvi's brother. Although, Victor Salvi began playing the harp at a young age, he had a deep passion for building them. In 1954, the first Salvi harp was built in New York. Afterward, he established his home in Piasco, Italy, where Salvi Harps remains a world leader to this day 18.
Image 16. Alberto Salvi. "La famiglia Salvi," Viggiano in Musica, last modified April 3, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160403031627/http://www.viggianoinmusica.it/arpa-viggianese/la-famiglia-salvi.html.
It is essential to remember where all of this began: Naples, at the end of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the dawn of a unified Italy. The people of Southern Italy, devastated by uprisings and the succession of different governments and monarchs, found solace in music. From this hardship, great talents emerged, laying the foundation for the harp tradition that is now widely recognized. I believe it is right, out of respect for those who devoted themselves to the harp during a time when it was considered a niche instrument, to remember these musicians and pass on a history that must be part of Italian harp cultural heritage.
Giovanni Caramiello19 will be our Cicero in this city, who will take us by hand to discover new and beautiful music, which recalls the echo of a people who act as a background to a bigger story.