Tarantella Napoletana: A Song History

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Many people recognize this tune as Italian without being able to name it, and WQXR rejects the idea that it is anonymous stock music, crediting it to the 19th-century Neapolitan composer Luigi Ricci.[1] The melody turns up within the final musical number of his 1852 comic opera La festa di Piedigrotta, named after the Piedigrotta Festival of Naples, whose songwriting competition gave rise to a number of popular Neapolitan songs.[1][2] Oxford Song likewise lists the piece as a tarantella from that opera, dated 1852.[3] The tarantella itself is a lively Italian folk dance for couples in 6/8 time, and its name, like those of the tarantula and of tarantism, comes from the town of Taranto.[4] Popular legend holds that the dance was the cure for a tarantula bite, and Britannica describes tarantism as a form of hysteria in 15th- to 17th-century Italy whose sufferers apparently recovered through wild dancing.[1][4]

Sepia photograph of a couple dancing in a Naples courtyard while others play guitar and tambourine and watch

Giorgio Sommer, Napoli Tarantella, albumen silver print, ca. 1870. Neapolitans dancing the tarantella around 1870, less than twenty years after Luigi Ricci's 1852 comic opera of Naples; the photograph has no connection to the tune.

The opera itself is seldom staged; writing in 2018, WQXR noted that it did not appear anywhere in Operabase.[1] It was recorded, though: Princeton University Library holds a private-issue Celebrity Record Co. LP of the opera, catalogued as probably from the 1960s, with Nino Sanzogno and the Orchestra Alessandro Scarlatti di Napoli among its performers.[5] The tune has also been played for laughs in American commercials, including a Rubbermaid spot criticized in an Italian American organization's report on stereotypes in U.S. advertising, and a 2017 episode of Portlandia made a joke of it.[1] Judy House and Kirk House include a four-part arrangement titled "Tarantella Napoletana" (with no composer credited in the listing) in The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts, Book 2, a 104-page collection of eleven ensemble arrangements in four or five parts each, published by the two arrangers.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Tarantella Napoletana"

Sources

  1. WQXR: "That Italian Song You Know But Can't Quite Identify? We Name That Tune.".
  2. IMSLP: "Tarantella Napoletana (Ricci, Luigi)".
  3. Oxford Song: "Luigi Ricci".
  4. Britannica: "Tarantella".
  5. New York Public Library Research Catalog: "Piedigrotta [sound recording] / Luigi Ricci".
  6. Judy House and Kirk House: "The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts, Book 2".
  7. Image: Giorgio Sommer, Napoli Tarantella, albumen silver print, ca. 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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