Among the Italian texts Elliott Carter sets for his new song cycle Tempo e Tempi are works by Eugenio Montale.  Sospeso performs these songs on Thursday, January 22, 2004 with soprano Lucy Shelton.

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981), the Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975.  Montale made his breakthrough as one of the chief architects of modern Italian poetry in the 1920s.  With his difficult, pessimistic and obscure poems he has superficially related with his contemporaries Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo as a cofounder of the hermeneutic school of poetry in Italy.

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa as the youngest of five children of Domenico Montale, who ran an import business, and Giuseppina (Ricci) Montale.  His formal education was cut short by ill heath.  He spent his summers at the family villa in a small village nearby the Ligurian Riviera, and images from its harsh landscape later found their way to his poetry.  Originally Montale aspired to be an opera singer, but he also spent his time reading Italian classics, French fiction and such philosophers as Arthur Schopenhauer, Benedetto Croce, and Henri Bergson.  During World War I he served as an infantry officer on the Austrian front.  Upon to his return to his family home, Montale took up singing again.  After the death of his voice teacher in 1923, he abandoned his operatic hopes, and started his literary career by writing for several publications.

In 1927 Montale moved to Florence, where he worked briefly for a publishing house.  He was appointed director of the GabinettoViesseux research library in 1928.  He worked as a critic, and along with James Joyce helped the writer Italo Svevo (1861-1928) to gain critical attention.  His first collection of poetry, Ossi di Seppia (Bones of the Cuttlefish), Montale published in 1925.  It included several poems about Liguria and its scenery.  In the following collections, such as Occasioni  (1939), Montale’s expression grew more subjective and introspective.  The poems examined his personal emotions, set against contemporary events.  His own lyrical production the author commented in Intenzioni (Intervista Immaginaria) (1946).  He once remarked that “I do not go in search of poetry.  I wait for poetry to visit me.”

In 1938 Montale was dismissed from his work for refusing to join the Fascist Party.  Montale withdrew from the public life and spent the following years translating into Italian such writers as William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Herman Melville, Eugene O`Neill and others.  Montale was especially impressed by Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, which caught the pessimism and mood of confusion felt by many between the world wars.

After the war he moved to Milan, where he wrote the literary page for Corriere della sera, the most influential Italian daily newspaper. He wrote among others about Ezra Pound, whom he considered a profoundly good man in spite of Pound’s sympathies for the Fascist regime in the 1930s, Ettore Schmitz, who became famous as the author Italo Svevo, W.H. Auden, a “cosmopolitan poet in every sense of the word,” Emily Dickinson, “a virile soul”, and Henry Furst, an unknown poet who published his poetry in private editions.  Montale reviewed almost all important new Italian books and his opinions influenced other reviewers.

“Montale is an ardent defender of simplicity and clarity and an enemy of irrationalist methodologies.  He thinks of criticism largely as “reading,” lettura—I would say “close reading”—though this close reading must be supplemented by what he calls “framing,” meaning an interest in history and in the social milieu, which Montale conceives in the widest terms as the whole of Western civilization.  This criticism demands from the critic a personal engagement and even justifies a serious participation in contemporary life” (René Wellek in A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, vol. 8, 1992).

Montale’s third major collection of poems, La Bufera e Altro (The Storm and Other Poems), was published in 1956.  Satura (1971), Montales’ fourth collection, experimented with dialogue, journalistic notation, aphorism, commentary, and half-strangled song.  In such poems as ‘Gotterdammerung’ and ‘Non-Magical Realism’, he satirized proliferation of ideologies, which promised more than could accomplish:  “Twilight began when man thought / himself of greater dignity than moles or crickets.”

In 1967 Montale became member-for-life of the Italian Senate. He died in Milan on September 12, 1981.  Montale was married to Drusilla Tanzi; they had met in the 1930s and were married in the 1950s. The couple had no children.

In his poetry, Montale attempted to move his expression to new directions and create new myths. He developed a style that mixed archaic words with scientific terms and idioms from the vernacular.  Montale focused the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, unanswerable riddles of human existence, making his texts an effective commentary on life.  Montale’s newspaper articles have been published among others in Fuori di Casa (1969). Montale’s last books, Satura, and his diaries written in verse, Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973), Diario di Quattro Annini (1977), were closer to everyday life and had autobiographical material.

From The Author's Calendar.