Respighi & The Pines of Rome
- Joe Duffy
- Aug 13
- 5 min read
When Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome premiered in December 1924 at Rome's Teatro Augusteo — a concert hall built, fittingly, right on top of the mausoleum of the Emperor Augustus — a fair portion of the audience did not care for it. The first movement turns the sound of children playing into something jagged and dissonant, mimicking kids playacting at soldiers and battles, and people hissed. A few minutes later, when a phonograph recording of a nightingale drifted out over the orchestra, more hissing followed. Nobody in that hall had heard a recorded sound built into a live symphony before, and not everyone was charmed. Respighi, by most accounts, didn't much care. Going into rehearsals, he's said to have told the musicians: "Let them boo. What do I care?"
By the final movement, the room had changed its mind. As the last chords of The Pines of the Appian Way rang out, the same audience that had jeered twenty minutes earlier erupted into what Respighi's wife, Elsa, later described as applause "such as had never been heard at the Augusteo." A second performance sold out two weeks later. The piece a few listeners found bewildering on first contact is now one of the most recorded orchestral works of the twentieth century — and on January 30, it opens NCO's 2027 season.
Trees That Watch
Respighi moved to Rome from Bologna in 1913, and what caught his imagination first wasn't a monument or a ruin. It was the pines. He later said the city's "marvelous fountains" and the "umbrella-like pines that appear in every part of the horizon" spoke to him more than anything else in Rome. When he sat down eleven years later to write Pines of Rome, he treated those trees less as scenery and more as witnesses — fixed points that have quietly stood over very different centuries of Roman life, one after another, without moving.
Each of the piece's four movements is tied to a real place. All four still exist. You could visit them this week.
I. Villa Borghese
The first movement opens in a public park, children playing and shrieking under the pines, dancing in circles, mimicking marching soldiers. This isn't invented atmosphere. Respighi's wife, Elsa, had played in these exact gardens as a girl, and in 1920 she sang him the songs from her own childhood there. He transcribed them as she sang. Those melodies open the piece.
You can hear the playground directly in the orchestration: quick, bright woodwind figures flit around like swallows, brass fanfares mimic kids playing at soldiers and battles, and the whole movement moves in restless, tumbling bursts, never quite settling, the way children's games never do.
II. Near the Catacombs
The second movement is the piece's only real stillness — hushed strings, a distant chanting trumpet, a mood scholars have compared to a solitary chapel in open countryside. It's set among the pines near the Catacombs of San Callisto, along the old Appian Way, an area historically planted with cypress, Rome's traditional symbol of mourning.
The orchestra goes underground here: low strings and organ pedal tones sink the sound almost below hearing, evoking the caverns themselves, while an offstage trumpet intones a chant-like hymn marked "as distant as possible." Horns and trombones answer like priests, and the whole passage rises and sinks back into silence, exactly as Respighi described it.
III. The Janiculum
Movement three moves to the Janiculum, a real hilltop park above Trastevere with one of the best night views in Rome — and pines that have sheltered actual nightingales for centuries. This is the movement where the famous recording appears, which gets its own section below.
It opens with a solo clarinet marked "come in sogno" — "as if in a dream" — drifting over a soft piano arabesque, joined later by oboe and a singing solo cello. The music settles into something closer to a love scene than a nature scene. Then, right as the clarinet returns one last time, the recorded nightingale answers it — the orchestra falling quiet enough to let a hundred-year-old bird have the last word.
IV. The Appian Way
The finale returns to the Appian Way itself, still lined with ancient tombs and pines today, where Respighi imagined a Roman legion marching home in triumph as the sun comes up.
The movement builds from almost nothing: a steady, muffled footstep rhythm in the low strings and timpani, barely audible at first, growing louder step by step as if an army were approaching from far down the road. The full brass eventually joins in, including six ancient buccine (long Roman trumpets, usually played on modern flugelhorns), and the organ's lowest pedal notes are meant to make the ground itself seem to tremble. It ends at full volume, sunrise and triumph arriving together.
Following the Sun
Line the four scenes up in order and a second structure appears underneath the first. The piece moves through a single day — afternoon into dusk into night into dawn — while simultaneously moving backward through Roman history: 1920s children at play, then the early Christian catacombs, then a moonlit dream, then the ancient Roman Republic. The hinge point sits at the Janiculum, movement three, which happens to be traditionally sacred to Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings and endings who looks forward and backward at once. Whether or not Respighi planned that symmetry consciously, it's hard to un-see once you notice it.
A Very German Nightingale
The recording built into the third movement wasn't something Respighi captured himself, despite a persistent myth to the contrary. It's a specific commercial disc, "Il canto dell'Usignolo" ("Song of the Nightingale"), recorded around 1910 by a Bremen businessman named Karl Reich, who bred nightingales and canaries as a hobby and got one of his birds to sing directly into a recording horn. It's believed to be the first commercially issued recording of a live bird anywhere — made more than a decade before it had anything to do with Rome at all.
Respighi specified the exact disc and the exact playback machine, a Brunswick Panatrope, right in the score, and had it cued live during performance, timed to answer the clarinet's dreamy solo just before it. No orchestral composer had scored a phonograph as an instrument before him. His own explanation was simple: "I simply realized that no combination of wind instruments could quite counterfeit the real bird's song."
So the nightingale you'll hear on January 30 has, strictly speaking, never set foot — or wing — in Italy. Before it ever sang over the Villa Borghese, it was, we're reliably informed, rather German.
Pines of Rome arrived two years into Mussolini's rule, and the finale's image of a triumphant Roman legion was the kind of gift fascist rhetoric was happy to claim as its own. Respighi himself stayed carefully apolitical throughout — he never joined the Fascist Party and quietly protected friends who openly opposed it — and there's no evidence the piece was written to order. The timing, by every account, was coincidence rather than intent.
Hearing It Live
That same hundred-year-old recording — cued note for note, exactly as Respighi wrote it into the score in 1924 — plays live when NCO opens its 2027 season with Eternal Rome: Love, Memory & Empire on January 30. The pines are still standing in Rome. The nightingale still sings, unchanged, a century later. Come hear both.
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