Considered missing or lost on some official catalogs and musical encyclopedias, after one hundred and forty years the "Nonetto for strings" by Giovanni Sgambati finally sees the light of the official press with Casa Musicale Sonzogno, to which Sgambati offered his services as one of the three judges of the competition that saw victorious Pietro Mascagni with Cavalleria Rusticana.
The "Nonetto" wasn't published by the composer because he considered it too difficult, just as reported by Carlo Mannucci, biographer of the time, who in his book, L'arte a Roma: Biografie dei maestri di musica published in 1881, tells us: "In in 1867, he composed a Nonetto for only stringed instruments but he didn’t believe it to be appropriate to be published, given the excessive difficulty of execution. "
The work was originally thought for nine arches, as reported already in 1881 the biographer Mannucci. In this sense, the assumptions, disconnected from the analysis of the evident ‘solo writing’, and not for sections, fall and take us back to the problems of executability encountered by the same composer.
The "Nonetto" remains a complex and enlightened work; Sgambati was able to create a sequence of melodic and harmonic levels, divided into three movements.
Sgambati proposed to his contemporaries, and to us today, the actual existence of a true Italian instrumental romanticism, which turned unusual in that period when in Italy Opera was mainly composed.
The "Nonetto" assumes, along with all the work by Sgambati, a historical musical value for the Italian and European culture, adding a piece to the puzzle, still incomplete, of our music of that time.