'A vucchella

Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote the Neapolitan words in 1892, on a wager with the dialect poet Ferdinando Russo, who doubted that a poet from the Abruzzi could manage the idiom. The lines waited fifteen years for their music: Tosti set them in 1907, by which time he had long been established in London as singing teacher to the royal family. The song is short and almost conversational, the diminutives of the text — little mouth, little rose — carried by a melody that stays deliberately within a narrow compass.