Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  The question of precedence aside, many of the aesthetical positions in Ginna’s Pittura dell’avvenire can already be found in Boccioni’s work. The conception of the artist as a medium (Boccioni would say clairvoyant) and the aim of painting “not the attitudes of a human, contorted in pain, but the vibration of his pained soul or PAIN ITSELF,” are positions that Boccioni had established in his 1911 Roman lecture.27 It is possible that Ginna (a documented occultist at least from the Metodo of 1910 onward) might have influenced Boccioni (and with him Marinetti, Russolo, Pratella, Balla, and other futurists), but it seems more feasible that their respective research would have proceeded on parallel courses. Certainly it is conceivable that all drew from the same parascientific, alchemical, and theosophical sources, which in turn all derived from French symbolism.

  Still, even in Ginna’s late work L’uomo futuro, published in 1933 and pervaded by fascist rhetoric, the influence of the occult is far from extinguished. Throughout that pamphlet, including in the introduction by Marinetti, Ginna is the “precise alchemist of infinite scientific and mediumistic researches.”28 In fact, once more reconciling fascism and futurism, Ginna theorized in this book a future man resembling a “ ‘Homunculus’ arisen from the greatest revolution recorded in history [i.e., the fascist revolution].”29

  This future man, generated by an alchemical process but with an obvious relationship to Nietzsche’s superman, was an allegory for Mussolini’s process of biologically forging “il nuovo italiano,” the new Italian race. For Ginna the future man would be “naturally inclined toward the future, and always futurfascistically [futurfascisticamente] at the orders of the Duce.”30 Among the opinions printed at the end of the book and signed by eminent personalities who supported Ginna’s ideas—Benito Mussolini is the first in the series—one proclaiming “The Futurists are the mystics of action” is mysteriously signed “The Theosophists.”31

  Of the two brothers, the elder, Arnaldo, is difficult to pin down, not only because he signed his works with eight different pseudonyms, including the name of his brother.32 He defined himself as “ungraspable” because of his “encyclopedic” approach to life and art.33 And it is true that he occupied himself with many disciplines in many different scientific and artistic fields, including literature, cinema, painting, photography, “cine-painting,” and the technology of sound; the list is long.

  Of his activity as a painter, which shows links to postsymbolist and occult aesthetic, his Nevrastenia of 1908 deserves mention; Mario Verdone has called it the first example of abstract painting, for it precedes by two years Kandinsky’s first abstract work.34 Furthermore, Ginna was the one responsible for the sections of Arte dell’avvenire that deal with the visual arts. In a late writing titled A proposito dell’arte dell’avvenire, he stressed the primacy of his 1908 abstract painting activity and backdated to that same year the ideas expressed in the pamphlet Arte dell’avvenire, claiming that they were his.35

  According to Ginna’s testimony, Ginanni Corradini’s early relations with the futurist movement and Marinetti were maintained through Paolo Buzzi, at the time when Buzzi worked for Marinetti’s periodical Poesia. 36 This was probably in 1910, the year in which the Corradinis also began their association with Balilla Pratella. Ginna recorded that Marinetti exposed Boccioni, Carrà, and Russolo to the Corradinis’ ideas early on, and he remembered that in 1910 Marinetti sent the first edition of Arte dell’avvenire fresh off the press as recommended reading to the futurist group in Milan.

  Boccioni thereupon became interested in the theories laid out in that pamphlet and in the Corradinis’ researches on “chromatic music”: one cannot help but suppose that both Arte dell’avvenire and, even more so, Metodo, which was unquestionably the better known of the two pamphlets, were topics of discussion within the group of futurist painters.

  The theories presented in the Corradinis’ essays, together with their practical application in painting, were only sporadically appreciated by the futurists. Eventually Boccioni criticized their efforts as a too “literary” kind of pictorial art. Lista claims that the disagreement between Ginna and Boccioni hinged on the way in which dynamism came to be understood: whereas Ginna (in line with Balla and later Evola) understood it as a formal speculation aiming toward the abstraction of forms, Boccioni understood it as a vitalist and figurative perception of modernity.37 The polemic they engaged in was overcome with the exhibition in 1914 at the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome; on that occasion Boccioni cordially invited Ginna to show his works with the rest of the futurist group.

  Though the group of futurist painters would have been familiar with the researches of the Corradinis at least from 1910 on, Ginna in his memoirs claims that the actual meeting de visu with Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, and Russolo did not occur at the Casa Rossa before 1912, the year of Ginna’s Musica cromatica. While the Milanese futurists may have encountered theosophy at the same time as the Corradinis did, the influence of the Corradinis on the Milanese group is noteworthy. The Corradinis’ writings surely anticipated by decades, and perhaps even influenced, some aspects of Russolo’s late research. In fact, they dealt, as Russolo later did, with meditation, yoga, magnetism, and the experiments of Mesmer.

  In any case, the Corradinis’ visit to the Casa Rossa conferred an official tone to the brothers’ adhesion to the futurist movement, an adhesion that, although meeting some resistance from Boccioni, was being discussed by Marinetti and Pratella at least by the beginning of 1911. It was the composer Pratella, in fact, who pleaded the brothers’ cause when they wished to join the futurist group, as confirmed by an exchange of letters among Ginna, Corra, and Pratella, and between Pratella and Marinetti, from the end of 1910 to the early months of 1911.38

  PRATELLA, KANDINSKY, AND THE EXTRA-HUMAN

  The Corradinis’ first direct contact with Pratella, who was also from Romagna, came at the end of 1910, and their friendship with him lasted for the rest of their lives. Traces of their influence can be observed in Pratella’s writings, but it is undeniable that they too benefited from the exchange. In the conclusions of his 1910 “Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi,” published on January 11, 1911, Pratella invited young composers to

  FEEL AND SING WITH A SOUL TURNED TO THE FUTURE, DRAWING INSPIRATION AND AESTHETICS FROM NATURE, THROUGH ALL ITS PRESENT HUMAN AND EXTRAHUMAN PHENOMENA; TO EXALT THE MAN AS A SYMBOL RENEWING HIMSELF PERPETUALLY IN THE VARIOUS ASPECTS OF MODERN LIFE AND IN HIS INFINITE INTIMATE RELATIONS WITH NATURE39

  According to the musicologist Luigi Rognoni, this paragraph betrays familiarity with Kandinsky’s “Spirituality of Art.”40 Pratella may well have been introduced to Kandinsky by the Ginanni Corradinis.

  Alternatively, the link between Pratella (or Marinetti, who most likely edited the above passage) and the ideas of Kandinsky may have resulted from Pratella’s familiarity with Schoenberg’s work. Pratella was certainly well informed about the latest trends in contemporary music, since Marinetti kept him up to date. Pratella’s rather provincial anxiety about keeping up with the latest musical trends can be deduced from a letter that Marinetti wrote to Pratella on April 12, 1912, to accompany a package of newly published scores that Pratella was requested to study. Marinetti wrote: “I send you everything there is of the most advanced as far as music in Paris.”41 And this was not a single instance. Daniele Lombardi claims to have observed numerous first editions in Pratella’s library of scores by Scriabin, Debussy, Ravel, and others, signed as gifts by the xenophilic young Marinetti, who evidently force-fed Pratella with musical novelties as they became available in Paris.42

  Pratella’s musical knowledge was, however, limited mostly to what was musically fashionable in Paris, at the time an important center of European cultural life and the place where, as Marinetti tells him in his April 1912 letter, Pratella would have to achieve artistic victory if he wanted “to appear to the eyes of all Europe as an absolute innovator.” If Pratella’s musical knowledge was indeed limited to Parisian fashions, then he may well hav
e had a merely superficial acquaintance with Schoenberg’s theories and music, as Rodney Patyon has pointed out.43 This superficial knowledge may explain Pratella’s harsh—and groundless—critique of Schoenberg in his essay “Musica futurista e futurismo” of May 4, 1914.44

  Yet it is also possible that Pratella (and Marinetti) were drawing not directly on Kandinsky but on the Ginanni Corradinis, who, though unacquainted with Kandinsky’s ideas, were influenced by similar theosophical sources and may thus have arrived at related aesthetic positions. Pratella knew the Corradinis’ work well, as is clear from his epistolary exchanges with them. In a letter to Pratella of April 8, 1911, Ginna outlined his synesthetic credo by citing a phrase of Tiberghein: “The sensory organism that comprises hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch is like a keyboard that resounds to impressions of the physical world and perceives what happens outside.”

  Other writings of Pratella reflect that pantheistic approach found in the January 11 manifesto quoted above, and one that is in line with that found in some of the Corradinis’ statements.45 In his “La musica futurista: Manifesto tecnico” of March 29, 1911, Pratella declares:

  Sky, water, forests, rivers, mountains, tangles of ships, and swarming cities are transformed by the souls of musicians into marvelous and powerful voices, which sing humanly the passions and the will of mankind, [which sing] for its human joy and griefs, and which unveil, through art, the common and indissoluble bond that bounds it to all of nature. Musical forms are only appearances and fragments of a single and entire whole.46

  On February 28, 1915, at the height of the polemical debate between Papini, Soffici, and Palazzeschi, on the one side, and Marinetti on the other—the quarrel between the “futurists” and the “Marinettists” that was to end in a historic break—Pratella published a letter in Lacerba addressed to Palazzeschi, Soffici, and Papini, in which he proclaimed his principles:

  You three [. . .] will never be able to comprehend what Futurism is: because though you may have the virtue of laughing scornfully, you do not have that of loving. We futurists have them both. Be as shocked as you like, call me an idiot, a cretin—I am used to the harmless stoning of loud idiots—that will not prevent me from affirming before all of you and others my religious faith, pantheistic and futurist, in life.47

  Traces of the theories expounded in the Corradinis’ Arte dell’avvenire (and Musica cromatica) can be seen in what is considered to be Pratella’s most ambitious work from the years of his adherence to futurism: the opera L’aviatore Dro, written between 1913 and 1914.48 The libretto, described by Pratella as “a modern and humanized variation of the myth—Daedalus, Icarus, Phaeton,” already makes clear that this opera is a metaphor for Dro’s progressive purification of body and spirit.49 The spiritual ascension occurs in three stages: that of potential aviator, earthly aviator, and, finally, celestial aviator, at which point, in Pratella’s words, “the hero Dro, liberating himself from matter and now finally purified, begins his real and eternal flight of the spirit.”50

  As in work of Marinetti and Boccioni, the machine is only a means to elevate the spirit—or, in the Blavatskian terminology of the manifesto La radia, to “immensify” the spirit. Payton has correctly explained that “Dro’s machine and his technical achievement in mastering it are only means to his spiritual enlightenment. Indeed, on the purely mechanical and technical level, Dro fails, and the aircraft falls.”51 The opera’s unstated reference to Marinetti’s 1910 novel Mafarka il futurista, in which the protagonist, gifted with wings, aspires to fly toward the sun to dethrone it, would have been obvious to Pratella’s intended audience.

  L’aviatore Dro is a work of total theater that uses lights, colors, sounds, noises, and scents according to synesthetic principles that betray theosophical origins. In the opera’s first act, the sequence noted as “Dreams” is composed of eight distinct sections in which the music is paired with scents and different-colored light that are meant to flood the scene, as indicated in the score:

  At the first diffusion of aromatic vapors, a very thin veil will fall upon the stage, behind which all subsequent action will develop.52 The sequence is divided in these eight sections: “Dark-blue light.—Sleep-nightmare. [. . .] Light-blue light.—serene. [. . .] White Light.—Flowing sweetness. [. . .] Yellow gold light.—Sun—Blazing joy. [. . .] Orange light—Sensuality. [. . .] Rosy light—Desire—Impatience. [. . .] Bright red light—Spasm—Charm. [. . .] Dark red light—Pleasure, blood, fire.

  These sections were to be followed by one with “very intense lunar light; the shadow of the internal half.”

  In this work, Pratella merges his knowledge of the Corradinis’ Arte dell’avvenire and Musica cromatica with what he learned from studying Scriabin’s Prometheus, which Marinetti had urged on him; indeed, the use of stage scents in Pratella’s opera also points to his having known of Scriabin’s unfinished Mysterium.53

  Prometheus was so famous in Paris that it is unthinkable that Marinetti did not at least know of it; it would not be implausible that it was among the Scriabin scores Marinetti sent to Pratella. In his article Musica futurista e futurismo of May 4, 1914, Pratella not only demonstrated familiarity with Prometheus but recognized its importance—though he also strongly criticized some of its elements.54 Here Pratella characterizes the luminous keyboard in Prometheus that pairs sound and colored lights, which is one of the score’s best-known—and overtly theosophical—features, as a courageous invention.

  Pratella was aware of the relations between mediumistic activities and composing techniques; this is clear from his description of Satie’s music in the essay Musica futurista e futurismo. Pratella first mentions that Satie was part of the circle around “Sar Peladan,” whom Pratella defined as orientalist, spiritualist, half mystic, and half presumed magician. He goes on to discuss Satie’s use of agogic performance indications, observing that Satie at times substitutes for the usual indications (adagio, allegro, etc.) instructions of a mystical or mediumistic character such as “ignore your own presence”; Pratella may have lent this issue particular attention because Marinetti, in one of his letters, had rebuked him for not being sufficiently “futurist” in his own use of performance indications.55

  Pratella’s synesthetic interest is also evident in his Giallo pallido, one of the most inspired works in his oeuvre. This single movement for string quartet, written in 1920 as an intermezzo for Luciano Folgore’s drama Rose di carta, was published in 1924 by Bongiovanni as opus 39.

  The “pallid yellow” of the title might be more easily linked with D’Annunzio’s decadentism, or even some of the crepuscolari poets’ languor—aesthetics that were fully in agreement with the theories of Achille Ricciardi—than with the ultra-brilliant colors theorized and employed by futurist painters a few years earlier.56 However, the color choice is in fact the result of Pratella’s and Folgore’s alignment with the artistic group Novecento and its motto “return to order.” Although futurism’s synesthetic interest survives even in this later Pratella work, the brilliant proclamation of color certainly disappears, just as the “polenta yellows, the saffron yellows, the brassy yellows,” obviously not found in Achille Funi’s canvases, had disappeared from Carrà’s canvases of the 1920s. Giallo pallido’s distance from the early phase of futurism is embodied in the aesthetics found in Folgore’s drama: whereas Carrá in his manifesto of 1913, Pittura dei suoni, rumori e odori, railed against “the banal sense [. . .] of flowers too pallid and withered,” Giallo pallido is the story of three women of withered beauty, symbolized by the paper roses in pallid colors.

  FLORENTINE SPIRITUALITY: THE CEREBRALIST GROUP

  In 1912 a relationship began between the Corradinis and what was to become the Florentine wing of the futurist movement. This wing was the group around Emilio Settimelli and Remo Chiti, which published the periodical La difesa dell’arte and, starting in 1912, Il centauro, and which separated from the group around Papini, Prezzolini, and Soffici, who in 1912 were publishing the futurist-inspired journ
al Lacerba. At the end of the Lacerba adventure, following the break between Marinetti and Papini, Ginna and Corra put Marinetti in contact with Settimelli and Chiti. Thereafter, and for years to come, Corra’s and Settimelli’s periodical L’Italia futurista replaced Lacerba as the official organ of the Florentine wing of the futurist movement. The group around L’Italia futurista, sometimes called the “cerebralist group,” in addition to Corra and Settimelli included Ginna, Chiti, Irma Valeria, Maria Ginanni, Rosa Rosà, Russolo, and many others: this group focused in particular on the study of the occult sciences.57

  Early evidence of their interest is the manifesto “Pesi, misure e prezzi del genio artistico” of 1914, in which Corra and Settimelli proposed radically to reform art criticism. In addition to addressing art terminology, they aimed to demystify artistic production and to value and evaluate on the basis of calculating the psychic energy used in the process of artistic production. The 1914 manifesto was conceptualized in the same year in which Corra published the first “synthetic” futurist novel, Sam Dunn è morto. This work, which constituted a pivotal stage in Corra’s career and anticipated the stylized writing of Massimo Bontempelli, was first published by Marinetti for the Edizioni di Poesia in 1914; then, most likely for its occult overtones, it was republished in serial form in 1916 in L’Italia futurista. The protagonist of the novel, Sam Dunn, is a man gifted with extraordinary psychic powers with which, through patient mental work, he proposes to act as a go-between and “channel into our reality energies belonging to a world of more complex phenomena.”