“Zuccarello the Distinguished Melodist”
(“Zuccarello distinto melodista”)

Translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Zuccarello the Distinguished Melodist” (“Zuccarello distinto melodista”) , tr. Robin Pickering-Iazzi. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2025.

“Zuccarello the Distinguished Melodist” (“Zuccarello distinto melodista”) was first published in 1914 in the December issue of La Grande Illustrazione, where the title appeared with a comma: “Zuccarello, distinto melodista”. Pirandello then added it to his miscellany collection And Tomorrow, Monday… (E domani, lunedì…) published in Milan by Treves in 1917. A decade later he included it in Candelora, the thirteenth Collection of his Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno), published by Bemporad in Florence in 1928.

This story is one of several focusing on musical themes that Pirandello produced in the span of a few years, although the focus might seem to be less on the music itself than on the existential dynamics unveiled through the reflections of the narrator, Perazzetti, on the singular case of his own, somewhat bizarre interest in a seemingly insignificant concert-café musician, the titular Signor Zuccarello. The story is in fact heavily balanced toward existential and philosophical reflection, with the musical aspect taking a decidedly secondary position. Philosophically, it reflects aspects of Pirandello’s broader (pessimistic) worldview as well as his distinct theory of humor, which he describes in his seminal essay On Humor (L’umorismo, 1908) as a special mode of double-vision that allows one to see both the body and its shadow, both the way things appear to be as well as their disfiguring “other”, as well as both life and the forms of representation that seek to fix it and, in so doing, warp and distort it. Here, the case of Zuccarello is meant to exemplify the way in which we misunderstand what it means to achieve “the absolute,” a supreme spiritual value in both religious and philosophical discourse that is often portrayed as transcendent. For Perazzetti , instead, the absolute is almost pathetically immanent, not grandiose but limited – it is the discovery of what constitutes the core of one’s own world, one’s own vital seed that constitutes who they are and how they act in the world. These philosophical reflections are arrived at through the story of an unassuming local musician playing in a basement café along an unspecified street in Rome. It is not his external achievement that matters, but rather some quality that the narrator finds in his self-assured understanding of who he is; his honest acceptance of himself as himself. The principle here, we might say, is fundamentally Nietzschean: Zuccarello has managed, it seems, to become who he is. This makes the somewhat grotesque caricature of the man, his singing, and the world around him into a more complex, humorous image: he is both laughable and serious, and his achievement, properly understood, should make us all aware of our own finitude, our limits, and the vanity of the external ends toward which we normally strive.

Pirandello’s stories “Old Music” (“Musica vecchia”) and “Farewell, Leonora!” (“Leonora, addio!”), each focusing on musical themes that overlap with those of the present narrative, were both published in 1910, the same year that he realeased an earlier story featuring the same protagonist, Perazzetti: “It’s Nothing Serious” (“Non è una cosa seria,” 1910). The opening sequence of “Zuccarello the Distinct Melodist” refers back to this earlier story directly, situating it as a kind of continuation or further exploration of that character’s worldview.

The Editors

We knew that after Perazzetti had married that woman with the dog, not so much just for a laugh as to be careful not to take a wife in earnest, for a while he had devoted himself to studying philosophy, out of some connection unknown to me.[1]

It was easy for all of us to imagine what effects such study ought to have produced in a brain like his. But it took him personally to demonstrate one of them the other evening, by telling us about the following adventure in his own way.[2]

“I was,” he began saying, looking at his fingernails as usual, “I was, my friends, in one of those moments, unfortunately not rare, in which reason (I still have a bit, unluckily), sure of finally having reached that ‘absolute’ that all of us, without knowing it, are anxiously looking for in life…”[3]

“Not me,”

“Not me,”                     We interrupted him in chorus.

“Not me,”

“You beasts, if I tell you without knowing it![4] Reason, anyhow, suddenly realizes it is victoriously holding a ponytail tightly in its grip, do you understand? Instead of the absolute. A ponytail on a wig, that wig ponytail the ineffable Baron of Münchhausen was holding onto in order to pull himself out of the pond into which he had fallen.”[5]

We complained that if he continued to talk so incomprehensibly, we wouldn’t listen to him anymore, and so Perazzetti, patient, with his eyes closed and hands held forward, explained to us:

“Well then. Sooner or later, the end that we’ve set out for ourselves, towards which all our affections, all our thoughts are geared, and that therefore has acquired the intrinsic value of our very life for us, an absolute value—do you understand?—as soon as it’s reached, or even before it’s reached, turns out to be vain.”

“How so? Why vain?”

“But because we realize, good Lord, that like this end, any other one we could have set out for ourselves would have been vain just the same. Because the absolute, my dear friends, that absolute, which is the only thing that could calm our spirit, is never attained.”[6]

“Which is why it’s imbecilic to go searching for it,” one of us pointed out.

“Bravo! That’s what I say,” agreed Perazzetti. “But let me tell you, please. Every beginning is difficult. Then comes the good part. And here our life rushes outstretched toward that end, under the illusion that it will be able to touch and feel its own reality there. That end collapses or disappears, and our reality, or rather, the illusion of our reality, unexpectedly collapses and disappears along with it. And therefore (whatever it is, whatever it is not), suddenly bereft of the reality we imagined being able to finally touch, we see ourselves raving in the void and at every street corner can see madness passing by and, just like nothing, start conversing with it (which could even be the shadow of our own body) and ask it, for example, with much good grace and delicacy:[7]

‘Ah, my dear,  which of us is more of a shadow?’

Listen up.  Well then, I was in one of these delicious moments, holding the ponytail of my reason in hand.

Almost without realizing it, in the evening I was walking down one of the most populous streets in our city.[8] It seemed as if the people, all of them gone mad like me, were in turmoil, and the tram bells and car horns were calling for help when, by chance, I happened to lay eyes on a notice board between the two grated windows of a basement. Looking down between the grates of these windows one could make out a bar counter finished in green lacquer and sparkling with mirrors, about ten small marble tables with a lot of customers, men and women, sitting around them, and then a harmonium, etc. Two extremely harsh electric lights were striking the board, burning a violent, livid blaze on a red poster that bore the writing in large letters:

SIGNOR ZUCCARELLO

DISTINGUISHED MELODIST

Well then, in front of that name, struck by so much anger from those two lights, I stopped with the certainty acquired then and there that this Signor Zuccarello, who described himself on his own with sweet integrity as a distinguished melodist, must have reached the absolute, and therefore, had to be nothing less than a god.

“A god?”

If you reflect on it carefully, a person who has reached the absolute must consequently be a god.

A pernicious error of ours is this: imagining that in order to become a god it’s necessary to obtain inaccessible heights with extraordinary means.

No, my friends. Nothing beyond us, no heights. With the most common and simplest means, at a spot inside us, the right, precise point, where that tiny seed is inserted, which little by little develops by itself and will become a world.

Everything lies herein. Knowing how to find in ourselves this right spot to insert the small divine seed that is in everyone and will make us masters of a world.

No one finds it, because we look for it outside, mistaken that it must be up very high and extraordinary means are needed.  As we’re dazzled by vain illusions, lead astray by ambitious, extravagant hopes, distracted or even perverted by factitious desires, that tiny, infinitesimal point, which is the most common and simplest thing in the world, escapes us and we never manage to discover it. 

But here’s this Signor Zuccarello.

“The very sweetness of his name,”[9] I got to thinking, “must have led him to sing just like that one fine day, naturally, like young birds do. He discovered a decent little voice rising to his throat, and it was all he needed to effortlessly distinguish himself from other people. A false god would absolutely have proclaimed himself a famous melodist. Not him. For Signor Zuccarello, true god of his world such as it is, as it can be, as it must be, it is enough to proclaim himself a distinguished melodist. So much and nothing more. That is, as much as is needed to be him, and not another.”

I absolutely had to see him, to speak with him that same evening. The sight of him, a conversation with him, would surely have set my spirit right again, restoring calm and trust in life.

So I went into that basement concert-cafe.

It was necessary to go further down, below the room with the serving counter that was visible from the street.

Much further down.

But at the bottom of it, l did not mind the idea of having to go underground to meet the man who had reached the absolute. On the contrary, it seemed very right to me, and that it couldn’t have been otherwise.[10]

“How much, for the ticket?” I asked at the small window.

“Chairs or armchairs?”

“Are there armchairs, as well?” 

“Armchairs, yes sir. Three liras, covering admission, and also a drink of your choice.”

Hesitant, I looked at the ticket seller as if to ask:

“Is this all, for Signor Zuccarello?”

God only knows what the ticket clerk inferred from the lost look on my face, because evidently Signor Zuccarello was a number for him, like any other on the program, and:

“Normal prices,” he added, as if to hold onto a fact amidst the painful uncertainty in which my strange way of looking at him kept him suspended.

“Fine, fine,” I said to reassure him.

I gave him the three liras, took the ticket and went down two long flights of stairs.

While descending, I immediately sensed that the earth was avenging itself for the violation of its womb.

The earth could tolerate this womb being ripped open for the blind, silent rest of the dead. But that it might be opened, and so obscenely, for exposed arches, and that the blindness might be illuminated so shamelessly by two large lamps, and the silence so profanely offended by vulgar songs, strumming instruments, clattering dishes, nasty laughter and applause, this no, it could not tolerate this.

And here is its revenge: despite the owner’s efforts, the electric lighting and the music and the mirrors, that concert-cafe had the harsh wretchedness of a tomb.

I confess that down there I would really have liked to find the armchairs and chairs occupied by a multitude of dead people looking serious and composed with their good drink in front of them, untouched, veiled in dust and with some little spiders floating inside, who had come through subterranean paths to that concert-cafe of theirs, dressed in black clothes that were shiny from the dampness, creased and stained here and there by white crusts of mold.

I found something worse. People at death’s door, the aspiring dead, very few and oppressed by a desperate sadness. Every uncertain state is worse than every certain, bad state. They brought the cup of coffee, the beer stein, the glass of mint cordial to their lips with the gesture of a person who thinks:

“Since it’s still necessary for me to drink it…”

And no one was looking toward the small stage, where a skeletal Italian star was mewing, first raising her arms as if trying to grab onto a high note that she couldn’t hit, then lowering her hands with ungainly grace.

This songstress’s voice and the orchestra’s rumbling were a horrible, violent attack of shameful stupefaction on the tragic, disconsolate solitude of those few decrepit customers.

Ever so quietly, I tiptoed up to a waiter and gave him my ticket to have him point out my seat.

“Oh just sit where you want,” the waiter answered. “Can’t you see no one’s here?”

“Of course, but how can this be? Is it like this every evening?”

“More or less…”

“So Signor Zuccarello doesn’t draw an audience?”

“Who?”

“Signor Zuccarello.”

The waiter looked at the program.

“Ah, right,” he said. “No sir, who would you expect him to attract?”

Disheartened, I took a seat in an armchair.

The Italian star, taking three or four bows to no applause, retreated backstage. The orchestra made no sound. A sepulchral silence fell on the underground cafe.

Then, as if in a flash of madness, I was overcome by the temptation to break out in a deafening burst of applause to break, to shatter that silence, to make those few taciturn, oppressed, aspiring dead customers leap to their feet, terrified. Would they have thought I was crazy? But what was I? To  stay there for a short while more, in that underground void, in that deathly silence, wouldn’t I really have gone mad?

Suffocating, I stood up noisily, with an exasperated desire to speak loudly, to yell, to take it out on someone. And, as the waiter came up to me to ask:

“What is the Signore ordering to drink?”

“Nothing,” I answered loudly. “I’m not ordering anything! Didn’t you say Signor Zuccarello doesn’t draw anyone in? For starters, I’ll have you know that he drew me in!”

What I had imagined happened. Everyone, even the musicians in the orchestra, stunned, turned around to look at me. Several of them got up from their seats. The waiter, almost speechless, murmured:

“But I didn’t mean to offend you at all, Signore…”

“No, no,” I carried on indignantly and angrily. “Just so you know! And tell that to your director or the owner of the cafe, who does grand  ventures of this sort, setting up a cafe here, in a basement, to make his customers go crazy!”

At this point, a gentleman, upset and very pale, approached me. I stared at him, to stop him at a certain distance from me, and asked him haughtily:

“Are you the owner?”

“The owner himself, at your service.”

“Ah, excellent! Please do tell me if when you signed on Signor Zuccarello you told him that his name would have appeared up there in the street on that notice board struck by two electric lights!”

The owner looked at me stunned, and stammered:

“I… on the notice board… Signor Zuccarello?… yes sir… it’s customary…”

“Ah, it’s customary, is it?” I said, smiling triumphantly. “And therefore Signor Zuccarello knew about it? He knew and he described himself as a distinguished melodist all on his own, did he?”

“Yes sir, on his own. But I don’t understand…”

“I see that clearly,” I yelled, “I see clearly that you don’t understand anything! Excuse me, but what is up there?”

As I spoke, I pointed at a spotlight to shine on the artists performing at the front of the stage, located up high on the wall facing it.

At the unexpected diversion, everyone in the room burst out laughing and raised their heads to look at what I was pointing at, proudly frowning. More disconcerted than ever, the owner looked too, and answered:

“A spotlight…”

“Ah, it’s a spotlight? Yet you don’t think of turning it on to light the front of the stage for an artist like Signor Zuccarello? an artist who defines himself on his own as a distinguished melodist, even though he knows that his name will be on display up there, in the street, on that notice board blazing with light?”

My words were met by another burst of laughter. The owner was shaken. His initial amazement turned into irritation; maybe the suspicion that I was paid by Signor Zuccarello to play that part flashed through his mind. He shook angrily and said:

“But I don’t have to answer to you for whether I turn on or don’t turn on…”  

“No no, pardon me, pardon me,” I immediately interrupted him, turning all genteel. “You have to respect me as a customer attracted like a little butterfly to the light of that notice board of yours in the street, a customer who had faith in Signor Zuccarello and expects such joy from him, that you can’t even imagine!”

“But this…” the owner tried to interrupt me in turn.

I didn’t give him any time:

“This too for your benefit! Dear sir, here we’re in a basement, as you well know. Or rather, in a catacomb! Come on, give the order to turn on the spotlight, and do something else, always for your benefit. Invite all the customers, who are yawning in the room upstairs, to come down here, to hear Signor Zuccarello! For free, it doesn’t matter for one evening! It’s a real indignity that a distinguished melodist like him has to sing to empty seats!”

At this unexpected proposal of mine all those decrepit customers, already drawn back to life, joyfully clapped their hands, approving all together. The owner looked at me again for a moment, frowning and perplexed, then he smiled too, spread his arms, bowed, and ran upstairs to give the orders.

Shortly afterward, the room was almost full, noisy, anxious at the promise of an unhoped-for pleasure. The spotlight facing the stage began to sizzle, flickering, then it lit up. The orchestra started to play the prelude of the first romance, and Signor Zuccarello, wearing tails, a white tie, and white gloves, stepped forward beaming, met by a deafening applause.[11]

Ah, my dear friends, if only you’d seen him! Rather small, with a face that seemed carved into a bar of rose-colored barber’s soap, with something goatish about his thick, curly black hair and in his voice too, when he started to bleat passionately.

For me, the greatest proof, the clearest proof that I hadn’t been wrong about him at all, was this: he didn’t put a lot of effort into it at all. Just so much and no more, in his singing as in his gestures and smiles. He gave what he could, and knew perfectly how much he could give. During the pauses, smiling, he stuck out his tongue to wet his lips, and gracefully pulled the cuffs under his sleeves with two fingers.

Perfect!

But naturally, none of the spectators could recognize that perfection. I felt everyone keeping their disillusionment suspended in an expectation that turned, uncertainly, from me to him, from him to me. Luckily, a good final high note with an artful decrescendo, lifted and upheld our fortunes. I quickly began applauding enthusiastically, everyone applauded with me, and Signor Zuccarello came back on stage two or three times to thank the audience, bowing with a hand on his chest.

But understand, my friends, that saving Signor Zuccarello that evening wasn’t as important to me as saving “the absolute.” I really needed that! And I saved it, despite everything, I mean despite the fact that after the show Signor Zuccarello, extremely furious, came up to me almost waving his hands in my face, to ask me the whys and wherefores of what I had done, the danger to which I had exposed him of a resounding fiasco and also of making him lose his contract due to the unspeakable arrogance directed toward the cafe owner.

It was very difficult for me to calm him down, but I finally succeeded. Not only that, I was also able to make friends with him. For over an hour I walked with him through the already deserted streets, and had him go into a night spot[12] so he could carry on telling me about himself, his life, his hopes, his desires, while drinking a glass of beer.

Are you imagining he told me extraordinary things? You’re really idiots! He told me the most obvious, most common, simplest things in the world, ones that could be told by a person who had known how to find the right point inside himself, the infinitesimal, tiny point where he had inserted the seed that had made him a modest god, the master of his small world. He was happy and satisfied with everything, even to sing to empty chairs in that gloomy basement cafe. Because in that perfect equilibrium that only full satisfaction with oneself can give, he had understood that it was better for him to be a small, provincial god, that is, to take his modest divinity to the small towns in the provinces. All he needed for that and to increase his prestige was to be able to say he had sung in Rome, in one of Rome’s concert-cafes. Which one wasn’t important.

I had the greatest proof of his divinity, however, from a shadow that, as soon as we went out of the underground cafe, began following us at a distance through the deserted streets for over an hour. The shadow of a miserable woman, whom I was able to see clearly when she timidly opened the glass door of the night spot and crept inside ten minutes after we had entered, and went to hide in a corner at the back of the room; she was wearing a grease-stained black dress that had turned greenish, a little threadbare hat trimmed with a feather drooping on one side, an old, frayed scarf over her hunched shoulders, and a pair of raggedy men’s shoes on her feet.

I had noticed that while leaving, from time to time he had turned slowly and furtively to glance back, anxiously.

“But yes, I know!” I would have liked to tell him, to relieve him of that anxiety. “I know and it’s rightly so. Don’t think that I’m offended by the fact you keep your wife so at a distance, and she’s so wretched.”                

I was sure he still kept her with him not only to have her serve him, like a slave, but also to measure the path he had been able to travel; and I was equally sure that she did everything, without making a complaint, in order to keep him as a dandy.

Are you saying it wasn’t so? Let me repeat, friends, that you’re really idiots. You should know that after I accompanied Signor Zuccarello all the way to the entrance of his little hotel, as I was walking back, in the thick darkness of the street, that shadow gave me a deep bow. And I couldn’t help but think it was right for her to bow down to me like that, because that same god to whom I had paid homage wanted her to.