Salvatore Gambardella

Salvatore Gambardella belonged to Naples's popular music rather than to its opera house, and helped make the modern Neapolitan song what it is. His working life coincided with the Piedigrotta festivals, the illustrated song sheets, the cafés-chantants and the publishing houses that carried local songs across Italy and out to the emigrant cities. 'O marenariello, Comme facette mammeta?, Ninì Tirabusciò and Furturella are the best known of them; writing with Neapolitan poets including Salvatore Di Giacomo, he produced pieces in which dialect, gesture and tune cannot be separated. The melodies sound improvised, but each phrase is cut to the accents of the language and to the singer who would carry it. He died at forty-two. He had come into the theatrical circles of the city from behind the counter of Vincenzo Di Chiara's hardware shop, and the success of 'O marenariello in 1893 brought him to the publisher Ferdinando Bideri and to lessons with Achille Longo. Ferdinando Russo and Ernesto Murolo supplied verses as well as Di Giacomo, and from 1903 he directed the summer song seasons at the Teatro Nuovo. He died in Naples in 1913.