Tarantella

The Tarantella (Italian; Spanish Tarantela) is a folk dance originating from southern Italy. It is characterized by fast music in 3/8 or 6/8 time.

The vernacular derives the name from "Tarantula" or "Lycosa Tarentula", a spider found in Italy and the Mediterranean, whose name in turn derives from the city of Taranto in Puglia. "Tarantella" would then be called "little tarantula" in origin. The bite of the tarantula is painful, but not the trigger of tarantism. This is rather associated with the poison of the European Black Widow (Latrodectus tredecimguttatus). The wild dance was supposed to be a therapy: The musicians came to the patient's house or to the marketplace and began to play; the bitten person danced until he was completely exhausted in order to drive the poison out of his body.

According to legend, the rhythmic dance, accompanied by guitars, was also performed in Andalusia (Almería) when people were stung by scorpions or spiders. Unproven is a connection with the flamenco style Taranta.

The first written documentation of the dance goes back to Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) and can also be found, for example, in Gaspar Sanz (LA Tarantela) in 1674. In the 19th century, at the time of Romanticism, instrumental music took up this musical form. Composers who dealt with the Tarantella are for example Franz Schubert, Gioachino Rossini (La Danza), Fanny Hensel (Il Saltarello Romano), Franz Liszt, Sergei Rachmaninow, William Henry Squire, Alexander Borodin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Frédéric Chopin and the US-American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk ("Grand Tarantelle for Piano & Orchestra").

In the operetta "A Night in Venice" by Johann Strauss (Son), Caramello, the duke's Venetian barman, asks the audience to dance in his entrance song (No. 4): "Eine neue Tarantelle zeig' ich hier Euch auf der Stelle..." (I'll show you a new tarantella here and now...), whereby the rhythm of the tarantella can be heard in other parts of the operetta. Kurt Weill composed the court scene of his opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny as a tarantella. The second movement of John Corigliano's First Symphony (1990) is called a tarantella, and Elliot Goldenthal, in his ballet Othello (1998), uses one of fourteen minutes duration to depict the development of Iago's plot against Othello. Franz Josef Degenhardt took up the dance in terms of both content and playing technique in 1963 in his eponymous piece "Tarantella" from the album "Rumpelstilzchen". Today well-known composers are for example Otello Profazio, Beppe Junior, I Calabruzi, Mino Reitano, Pino Di Modugno, Eugenio Bennato, Renzo Arbore, Enza Pagliara, Manekà, Nidi D'arac, Ariacorte, John Serry senior and Alla Bua.

Tarantella Dances (Le Tarantelle)

Tarantella is a term designation of several dances (ital. Tarantelle with respective designation of origin, calabrese etc.):

• Pizzica (Apulia)
• Tarantella del Gargano (Puglia)
• Taranta (Apulia)
• Viddaneddha (Calabria)
• Tarantella Guappa (Calabria)
• Zampugnaru Onoratu (Calabria)
• Piglia o cane (Campania)
• Tammuriata nera Campania
• Tarantella Molisana (Molise)
• Tarantella Lucana (Basilicata)
• Quadriglia (Basilicata, Sicily)
• Curdedda (Sicily)
• Maranzanata malandrina (Sicily)