The book of impossible love. The story of Giulia Spinelli and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi – toscanalibri

Jumps in time (from the 1980s to the 1830s), alternating places (Turin, Paris, especially Naples), genre crossings (novel, meta-novel, auto-fiction, essay). Such is “The Book of Impossible Love” by Giuseppe Culicchia, which, to prevent the reader from becoming disorientated, immediately warns in the first pages that this is indeed “the tragic story of an impossible love”, but that to get to the heart of the story it is necessary to “proceed little by little” following the author in digressions that he does not consider “really such”. So it takes a while to reach Naples – the Naples that exudes history and stories, a magical mixture of the sacred and the profane – up to Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, in via Toledo, in front of a nineteenth-century canvas that portrays a girl “with her head covered from a veil, hands clasped and very sad eyes.” This is it Giulia Spinelli, sixteen year old of noble origins, so young and already condemned to despair. Disappointment for love. She fell in love with her music teacher, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, a love that was indeed impossible, because he could not boast of noble coats of arms. Giulia’s brothers had been very explicit: either the affair was ended or Pergolesi would be killed. To save him, she sublimates her love by becoming a nun in the monastery of Santa Chiara. He demands, however, that during the vows ceremony he be the one to play the organ. Legend has it that both died from the heartbreak of their separation. Giulia only a month after entering seclusion. John the Baptist a year later, but not without having completed his famous Stabat mater. The last pages of the score show the effort, the pain and the rush to conclude the music of that prayer whose torment would have meant for the young composer (he died at the age of twenty-six) total symbiosis with his own pain. Even Giuseppe Culicchia at times seems to proceed through symbiosis, at other times with studied detachment and a dialectical attitude. Many themes are taken as a pretext for each other: music, faith, cinema, literature, the seductive Naples. The (intended?) result is a reading that, page after page, can never be said to be satisfying. At least until, having closed the book, you listen again to that sublime thing that is Stabat mater Of Giovanni Battista Draghi said Pergolesi.

***

It was a summer evening, and the city had emptied out as usually happened in those years – when the Big Factory closed and its employees returned to their places of origin or went on holiday, or stayed at home if they couldn’t afford either neither of the two options – and in my pocket I had just enough money to go to the cinema. In a room in the center they were showing Amadeus, Miloš Forman’s film dedicated to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the time I had no familiarity, if I may say so, with classical music: I was in the midst of my disheveled period or, if you prefer, ska-punk and my love for Wagner and Beethoven and Bach and Purcell and Handel and Bruckner and Monteverdi and Schubert were yet to come. The only piece of so-called classical music that I knew and actually adored was by Mozart: the second movement going from Concerto for piano and orchestra n. 21 K. 467. I had listened to it for the first time as a child when I came across a film entitled on one of the first private TV channels Elvira Madigan, shot by the Swedish director Bo Widerberg and whose protagonist, Pia Degermark, won the Palme d’Or for best actress in 1967, a film I fell in love with and in which that truly sublime song was the soundtrack. And in short, the memory dear to me of that film, which among other things told the true story of an impossible love, was the only reason why I went to the cinema that evening to see Forman’s feature film. Once I purchased my ticket, I sat in the theater and waited. Suddenly, the lights went out. I didn’t know that I would soon meet Jesus.
Who among you has seen Amadeus perhaps remember how at a certain point Salieri, listening to Mozart’s music, stated that that was the music of God. Well, I, as mentioned, didn’t believe in God at the time. And when many years later, at a certain point in the my life, writing a novel entitled The heart and darknessI came across the Ninth Symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler on 19 April 1942 and I realized the greatness of Ludwig van, I did not think that that was the music of God. It was simply Beethoven, as Bach is Bach and Purcell is Purcell and Monteverdi is Monteverdi and Wagner is Wagner and Bruckner is Bruckner. And a rose is a rose is a rose. So that evening, in that cinema, in Mozart’s music I heard Mozart, not God. And so I met Jesus. However, not in the notes written in his own hand by Wolfie, as his wife Constanze called Wolfgang Amadeus, who signed himself as in letters to his wife.
But wait a moment. Is there a difference between God and Jesus? There are those who in the past have argued a lot about the issue, which is in fact complex and not entirely clear, and who have seen different positions within Christianity itself, including arguments, excommunications, councils and stakes.

[…]
Anyway. Maybe I should have talked to Jesus about all these things, that evening when I happened to meet him in the darkness of the cinema, at the age of twenty. But I couldn’t do it. Not because you can’t talk to Jesus: Jesus is not God and, as the Scriptures report, he knew how to listen. If I didn’t speak to Him it was simply because Jesus opened his mouth first, and I couldn’t do anything but listen to Him. Jesus, when he speaks to you, you don’t interrupt him. Especially when he talks to you like he talked to me that evening. With a voice of unimaginable beauty. A pure voice, very sweet and at the same time painful. Because what other words could be more appropriate when referring to Jesus? Purity. Sweetness. Pain.
That evening, in the darkness of a cinema, Jesus spoke to me with purity, sweetness and pain through two fragments of the Stabat mater by Giovanni Battista Draghi, known as Pergolesi: the When corpus morietur and theAmen in the version conducted by Sir Neville Mariner with the Westminster Abbey children’s choir. That evening Jesus spoke to me through an organ that played a wonderful melody accompanied by the voices of children capable of sublimely singing the words of those songs composed in Naples in 1736 by Pergolesi when he was just twenty-six years old. Here I am, Jesus, I thought that evening in the darkness of that room, listening to Him. Excuse me.
Forgive me for doubting You.

[…]
When Jesus stopped speaking, the film started again, although in truth it had never stopped. When I left the cinema, I still had his voice in my ears. When I returned home, I remained for a long time with my eyes wide open in the darkness of my room, unable to sleep.
That must have been the effect Jesus had, if you were lucky enough to meet Him. At least that’s what I thought that night.

[da Il libro dell’amore impossibile di Giuseppe Culicchia, HarperCollins, 2024]