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Italy is in the throes of a musical renaissance. Like the France and the Soviet Union of the last two decades, she too has been touched by that flame of creative intensity, of passionate seeking after musical truths that has been the quickening spirit of modern music. For there is also an unworthy conservative element in Italy, best typified by Arturo Toscanini, orchestral conductor. Toscamni, as the greatest and most popular conductor in Italy, and as director of La Scala, the most important opera house in the country, has it in his power to push any composer far along the path of success.

The musical melodrama, that anachronism of eighteenth-century romanticism which has dominated Italy for nearly two hundred years, has at last fallen a victim to its own absurdities. In bitter reaction against the degradation and disrepute into which Italian music has been brought, there has sprung up in Italy a revolt and an ideal, a revolt against that slipshod and irregular relationship between the text and the score in which the voice alone is supreme. The ideal fusion of words and voice and instruments has long been the goal of Italy's two most gifted composers, Ildebrando Pizzetti and G. Francesco Malipiero.