Without wishing to throw my austere explorer’s hat into the ring on the whole Columbus Day controversy, this is an interesting article in the Washington Post about the origins of the now-reviled holiday and its significance to Italian-American history. Don’t like it? Thank American “nativist” backlash against Italian immigrants and violence against Italian-Americans – and a Hail Mary pass (my dad’s people may have been Italian, but my mother was Irish) by President Benjamin Harrison to stem anti-immigration sentiment. Hey, if things had played out differently, Americans could just as easily have been arguing about Giovanni da Verrazzano.
The greatest irony is the article’s concluding observation. There is nothing at all incendiary in the fairly objective tone of the piece (which the Post has published as an “opinion”), but the comments are full of passionate vitriol.
What’s all this got to do with music? Whether due to personal interest or in pursuit of a paycheck, there are plenty of composers who wrote works inspired by, or commissioned to celebrate, Columbus: Leonardo Balada, Antonin Dvořák, Manuel de Falla, Alberto Franchetti, Philip Glass, Victor Herbert, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Richard Wagner, Sir William Walton, and Kurt Weill are just a few that spring to mind.
No political message intended; I simply find the article – and some of the music – interesting.
Well, at least, to my knowledge, nobody raises hell anymore about Amerigo Vespucci (for whom “America” is named) – except perhaps Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin.
