Matera is a city that does not resonate like others. Its voice does not rise from above but from deep within: from the tufa walls that absorb the light, from the slow breath of the Sassi that keep the echo of those who once lived there. Every sound here seems to carry a memory centuries old. It is no coincidence that precisely in this landscape, in February 1709, a child destined to change the musical destiny of Europe was born: Egidio Romualdo Duni.
He was the son of Francesco, chapel master of the Cathedral, and Agata Vacca. In that family, singing was not an ornament but a daily craft — a discipline of listening, a form of life. It is fair to imagine that little Egidio, before reading music, learned to recognise the tone of silence, the way a sound settles upon stone. Perhaps from this came his inclination toward a music that is clear, essential, lucid — a music that does not shout but reasons.
Tradition holds that he studied under Francesco Durante in one of Naples’ conservatories, and it is far from impossible. In those years Naples was the musical capital of Europe, a workshop where counterpoint met theatrical instinct and rigour was tempered by irony. Duni absorbed from that school not only technique but an ethical conception of composition: to write was to solve a problem of balance, not to display emotion. It was a lesson in discipline that never left him.
His Italian career began early and with success: Nerone (Rome, 1735) gave him his first renown; then came Adriano in Siria and La tirannide debellata, works that reveal an instinctive theatrical intelligence, an agile vocal style, and the ability to blend dramatic intensity with harmonic clarity. He disliked the complications of late Baroque ornamentation: already in these first operas one senses his tendency toward a precise design, a lucid symmetry, a comprehensible word. In a century inclined to excess, Duni preferred geometry.
In 1743 he was appointed chapel master in Bari, and later in Parma, at the Bourbon court, where the cosmopolitan atmosphere placed him in contact with French and German musicians. Parma was his secret workshop. There he learned the flexibility of a taste that knows no borders: the art of translating ideas from one language to another, of fusing Italian sensibility with the Enlightenment curiosity of the North. The Parisian theatre had begun to look with fascination toward Italy, yet one question remained open: could the French language sing? Rousseau had written that it could not, that French was intrinsically unmusical. Duni — a laconic southerner of few words and precise gestures — answered without polemics, through fact. He moved to Paris in 1757, and within a few years became musical director of the Comédie Italienne.
It was the decisive moment. In that city where everything aspired to intellect and elegance, Duni brought a Mediterranean sense of rhythm and phrase, the naturalness of musical speech. He invented — or rather codified — the comédie mêlée d’ariettes, the comedy alternating spoken dialogue and sung numbers: what we now call the modern opéra-comique. Yet his genius lay not in creating a genre but in understanding that opera could breathe like life itself — that an aria was not an island but a bridge, that song could be a natural continuation of speech. Duni did not theatricalise music; he musicalised conversation.
The French called him “papa Duni”: an ironic, affectionate title by which they recognised in him the master of a new art. They knew he was Italian but did not perceive him as a foreigner. He had grasped the phonetic secret of French — its contained nasality, its syllabic rhythm — and built upon it a new melody founded on precision rather than emphasis. In his little ariettas there is never vain virtuosity: everything serves the action, everything is proportionate to the word. He proved that clarity need not be coldness, that grace is a form of logic, and that irony can be a moral act.
Duni’s opéra-comique is not a light theatre: it is a moral theatre disguised as a smile. His characters neither shout nor declaim; they speak in song, and the audience recognises itself in that naturalness. Beneath the comedy lies a philosophy: man as a being who finds truth in the everyday, not in heroism. This was his real revolution, infinitely deeper than any formal experiment. In a century chasing the sublime, he restored dignity to the ordinary.
He was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the word: he destroyed nothing, provoked no scandal, sought no rupture. He was a silent reformer, as only southern spirits can be — capable of changing everything without anyone noticing at once. His reform passed through details: the use of duets as the engine of action, the shortening of arias to avoid repetition, the new role of the orchestra as interlocutor rather than backdrop. In every bar one senses the hand of a craftsman who does not wish to astonish but to make the theatrical mechanism work. It is a lesson in modesty and intelligence that still sounds astonishingly modern.
With Duni, Italian music emigrated to France without ceasing to be itself. It brought the art of song, but also the moral measure learned in Naples and, deeper still, the composure inherited from Matera. His Lucanian origins were not an accident of geography but a mental form. Lucania teaches patience, precision, the art of not wasting. Duni turned those virtues into an aesthetic: no superfluous notes, no misplaced theatricality.
His Parisian destiny lasted nearly twenty years. He died in 1775, when Mozart was still a youth and Gluck had already opened the path of classical drama. Yet without Duni neither of those worlds would have been the same. Gluck carried tragedy to fulfilment; Mozart perfected the synthesis of comic and dramatic; but Duni had prepared the ground, had shown that lightness could contain depth, that irony could itself be a form of measure.
As a southerner, his idea of “reform” was instinctively concrete: fewer proclamations, more deeds. Where Gluck wrote manifestos, Duni wrote ariettas; where Rousseau argued, Duni composed. It is the difference between those who speak of the world and those who make it work.
His case is also a striking example of how southern Italy managed to be European long before it became a nation: Duni in Paris, Jommelli in Stuttgart, Piccinni later in Paris, Paisiello in St Petersburg — all born from the same Neapolitan soil, all able to be heard abroad without betraying their tongue. Yet none embodied this balance more completely than Duni: he carried Italy into France without ceasing to be Lucanian.
There is another, almost symbolic connection linking his story to my own land. Pomarico, the town from which my mother’s family comes, is the same place where the grandfather of Antonio Vivaldi was born. One might say that between Pomarico and Matera flows an underground river of music, a vocation crossing centuries and frontiers. Vivaldi and Duni: two opposite and complementary destinies. The first, the fire of Venice — the vertigo of colour, the swiftness of gesture; the second, the calm reason of the South — the composure of form, the taste for proportion. Two ways of saying the same thing: that music does not spring from chance, but from a place of the soul.
Today, two and a half centuries after his death, Matera celebrates Duni with the Festival that bears his name, now in its twenty-sixth edition. It is not a formal commemoration but an affectionate homecoming. Every autumn, among the rock-hewn churches and baroque palaces, that long-slumbering music resounds again, and the whole city seems to breathe with it. The theme of this year — Patrimoni Sonori, “Sound Heritage” — perfectly expresses the meaning of the rite: the awareness that heritage is not a deposit but a gesture to be renewed. Bringing Duni back to Matera means returning to him the homeland that had never ceased to belong to him.
To listen again today to his works — Le peintre amoureux de son modèle, La fée Urgèle, L’école de la jeunesse — is like beholding an architectural drawing after centuries of exuberant painting: suddenly everything becomes legible. In his writing one breathes the sobriety of a man who knew the weight of time. His melodies do not seek effect but continuity. The orchestra is clear, never redundant; the voice converses rather than dominates. It is music designed to endure more than to shine — and indeed it endures.
In today’s Italy, which too often forgets its eighteenth-century masters, Duni stands as a model of civic modernity. His lesson concerns not only music but the way of being in the world: to work with rigour, to speak with measure, to join craftsmanship with intellectual curiosity. It is the ethics of skill against the rhetoric of genius, sobriety against the anxiety of display.
In this sense his figure still speaks to those who write and listen today, in a time of frantic communication and short memory. Duni reminds us that culture is not born of noise but of prepared silence; that beauty is not an urgency but a construction; that music, to be universal, must first be faithful to its origin. His origin was Matera — and from Matera he departed, as all who have something to say must, to return one day from another direction.
When, in the autumn evenings, the Duni Festival lights its concerts and the city’s stone becomes a sounding board, one hears not only the notes of a composer but the voice of an entire land finally recognising itself in the one who made it great. Perhaps Duni’s true legacy is not merely the birth of the opéra-comique but the certainty that even from the peripheries of the world a form of universality can arise.
And if Matera represents the solidity of time, Pomarico guards its genealogy. There was born the grandfather of Vivaldi, and there survives the secret of an Italy that made itself heard without clamour. It is a triangle of stone and sound — Pomarico, Matera, Paris. Within these coordinates moves the story of Egidio Romualdo Duni, and also a part of ourselves: that southern culture which unites measure with light, logic with feeling, rigour with tenderness.
Today, in a Europe that seems to have forgotten its Mediterranean roots, remembering Duni means recalling that true modernity is born of measure, not excess. It is the gesture of a man who, starting from a small southern city, taught the world how to be universal while remaining faithful to one’s own language. In this sense his lesson is not finished: it is an invitation to discretion, to intelligence, to a beauty that has no need to raise its voice to be heard.
And so, two hundred and fifty years later, Egidio Romualdo Duni speaks again — not from the stages of Paris but from the stones of Matera, which answer him like a subdued chorus. His music is not a monument but a breath: the breath of a land that continues to sing through those who, like him, knew how to transform silence into measure and measure into freedom.
