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Portrait of Debussy.

9: Debussy and Italian Music


John C. G. Waterhouse
The Musical Times, Vol. 109, No. 1503. (May, 1968), pp. 414-418.
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Portrait of Debussy-9

John C. G . Waterhouse

DEBUSSY AND ITALIAN MUSIC

In this series of articles we attempt to build a composite portrait of Debussy the musician through
examination of the various impressions he left on the
music of other composers: in general, and also in
particular b.v documentation of what works they
heard, and when, their statements, and the reflections
found in their own compositions.
During the first few decades of the 20th century the
Italian musical world, like the British, tended to be
parochial in outlook: the more progressive trends in
northern European music were not wholly resisted
but were accepted only with suspicion, and the
public was often curiously arbitrary in what it would
welcome and what it would reject. For example
when, in 1915, Alfredo Casella first introduced the
second suite from Daphnis et Chlot and Petrushka to
an Italian audience, both at the same concert, the
former was received in glacial uncomprehending
silence while the latter aroused wild applause.'
Nor was this ambivalent, unpredictable attitude
confined to concert-goers: it extended through every
level of Italian musical life. On the one hand, many
intelligent musicians were so insidiously affected by
xenophobic prejudices surviving from the Risorgimento, reinforced by World War 1, and further
enhanced under Fascism, that their resistance to
foreign influences was as thoroughgoing as they
could make it-though even they could not immunize themselves c ~ m p l e t e l y . ~On the other hand,
there were men like Casella and, later, Dallapiccola
who, though not as purely 'internationalist' as some
of their earlier opponents suggested, wereprofoundly
interested in, and receptive to, the whole range of
northern European music, while still holding fairly
definite views about what was 'relevant to Italian
sensibility'. It is against the background of such
conflicting attitudes to foreign music that one should
view the changing fortunes of Debussy's music and
influence south of the Alps.
Debussy's works first became widely known in
Italy during the decade 1904-14, when the Italians'
receptivity to foreign trends seemed to be growing
and when the renewed xenophobia of the war years
and their aftermath was still to come. I n 1907 the
first important Italian article on Debussy appeared
in the Rivista musicale italiana;3 in the following
year Pelltas et Melisanrie reached La Scala and was
soon taken up by other Italian opera-houses; and
one has only to skim through the pages of a
periodical like La nuova niusica4 to see that by 1909
'For an account of this historic concert, Casella's first in Italy
after his exile, see Mario Labroca's note 'Roma 1915' in
L'Approdo Musico;e (19581, 111, 57-60.
For a sample of some of the more reactionary, parochial
attitudes current in Italy in the 1930s see the notorious Manifesto of Dec 17, 1932, published in several Italian newspapers,
signed by Pizzetti, Respighi, Zandonai and others, and partly
reproduced in the Italian edition (not the English translation)
of Elsa Respighi's Ottorino Respighi (19541, pp.265-267.
BVincenzo Tommasini's 'Claude Debussy e 1'Impressionismo
nella Musica', xiv, 157f
4Florence, 1896-1919

Italian performances of Debussy's non-theatrical


music were quite common.
Not unexpectedly, there soon appeared a number
of young Italian composers of varying merit, all
born in the 1880s or late 70s, in whose music
Debussy's influence is obvious, sometimes overwhelming: to start with a few lesser-known examples,
Debussian tendencies can be seen in one form or
another in the early tone poems of Francesco
S a n t o l i q ~ i d o ;in
~ the sometimes highly sensitive
piano pieces of Luigi P e r r a c h i ~in
; ~the tiny 'imagist'
songs (probably their composer's best works) of the
over-prolific Vincenzo Davico; in the whimsical.
at times grotesquely dissonant early compositions of
Piero Coppola; and not least in the refined, aristocratic music of the unjustly neglected Vincenzo
Tommasini, whose orchestral diptych Chiari di tuna
(1914) ranks among the best early products of
Italian Debussyism.
Even some of the more adventurous of the
popular opera composers showed growing awareness of new possibilities opened up by Debussy's
art. Outstanding was, of course, Puccini, whose debt
to Debussy has been admirably analysed by Mosco
Carrier.' If Puccini's more chauvinistic contemporaries Mascagni and Leoncavallo, and even the
slightly more cosmopolitan Giordano, showed no
comparable response to Debussian methods, one
can see scattered signs of his influence in the operas
of such younger but still fundamentally traditional
composers as Zandonai and Lualdi.
Detailed analysis of Debussy's influence on such
lesser lights is impossible here. But before we turn
to the major figures a word should be said about the
Debussian qualities to be found in two comparatively minor Italians who came to prominence
during the decade before World War I. Franco
Alfano, who spent a short period in Paris around
the turn of the century, nonetheless first made his
name with the relatively conservative opera Risurrezione (1903) whose main affinities are with Puccini
and Giordano. Yet even there one can perhaps
detect Debussian touches, at least in the sophisticated, multi-coloured orchestration; and there can
be no doubt about the crucial role of Debussy's
influence in moulding Alfano's best later style,
which is far from being the mere reflection of older
Italian composers that those who only know
Risurrezione and his ending for Puccini's Turandor
too readily assume. In his works after 1910 Alfano's
debt to Debussy could be almost too explicit, rg in
some of his songs.R But in at least a few composi:for example Crepusrolo srrl Mare, 1909 or earlier

a'La notte dei morti' from the ,VOI,PPoemeffi of 1917-20 is a

particularly favourable specimen, which deserves to be known;

Perrachio also wrote a book L'op~rapianisficad i Debussy (1924).

?see MT June 1967, pp.502-5

T h e subtle and deftly expressive Perch* siedi 1 6 . . . ? (1934).

one of Alfano's many refined settings of Italjan translations, of

Tagore may be taken as a sample ot thls more expllcltly

~ e b u s i i a nside of his style at its not wholly derivative best.

tions of his best period (~1914-25),and above all in


his finest opera Sakuntala (1914-20), Debussian influences interact in a truly creative manner with
others deriving from composers as various as
Grieg, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Richard Strauss,
and Ravel, to produce a luxuriant, sometimes turbulent musical idiom showing incidental (probably
coincidental) affinities with Bax and Szymanowski.
In the Cello Sonata (1925-arguably Alfano's best
instrumental work), for instance, the softly chiming
parallel fifths of the opening inevitably recall La
carl~@drnle
etigloutie. But before long we become
aware that such Debuss)isms are just one component in an iridescent musical language with a
physiognomy of its own.
The Debussian elements to be found in the work
of Ottorino Respighi, by contrast, are slight and
superfici:.l: Respighi's understanding of Debussy's
aims seems to have been limited,%nd he tended to
treat the French composer's music simply as one
source among many from which to draw those
variegated harmonic and orchestral colour-effects
that make up his eclectic, essentially decorative and
'sensory' art.
The principal Italian composers of the generation who emerged during the decade leading up to
World War I (the generaziowe de11'80, as it is called
in Italy) were all quite deeply conscious of at least
some of the implications of Debussy's work: however different they may have been in temperament
and outlook. lldebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968),
Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) and Gian Francesco
Malipiero (01882) all responded to the musical
climate of their formative years, in which Debussy's
influence was becoming \ o prominent. Yet they
were also typically Italian In their slight ambivalence
towards non-Italian music, and in their growing
awareness of Italian sides of their personalities with
which Debussian methods could only be reconciled
after substantial modificat~ons(an experience shared,
up to a point, by some of the more whole-heartedly
Debussian lesser composers listed earlier).
Pizzetti's attitude towards Debussy, as towards
many other composers, is made abundantly clear in
his many critical writings. The revealing essay on
Debussy in his Musicistc cot~retnpornt~ei
(1914) is
mainly about Pellias-not unexpectedly, in view of
Pizzetti's lifelong obsession with operatic theorizing. After declaring his profound respect for
'In ;I letter to the slnger Chiarina Fino-Savio (Nov 16, 1914)
quoted in Elsa Respighi's biography (Itallan edn, p.78), ~ e s p l ~ h i
declared his sympathy for Dehussy's music 'up to a certain
point in his output, after which the search for novelty is exaggerated and too self-conscious (iroppo riccrcaio)'.

Debussy's exquisite harmonic and orchestral imagination, Pizzetti goes on to express grave doubts
about the enervating tendencies of the French composer's art ('But is this, is this what art should give us?
Is this what we should ask of it-that it should
stifle our will to live?. . . Should not art rather exalt
life and humanity to a higher plane?'). Yet despite
these drastic reservations, so typical of the more
'moralistic' side of Pizzetti's nature, there can be no
doubt that Pell@asprovided an important model for
his own operatic techniques. I t is true that the
much-vaunted declamaro pizzetriano-that
fluid,
flexible declamation, against a continuously
evolving but relatively subsidiary orchestral backcloth, which forms the basis of all his published
operas-owes a good deal to other composers too,
from Peri and Caccini to Wagner and Mussorgsky.
But passages like ex 1, from the moving final act of
Fedra (1909-12), show that the Debussian model was
often the overriding one. The resultant operatic
methods, so beautifully expressive in Pizzetti's best
early operas, carried within themselves a danger of
monotony, all too apparent in his inferior later ones:
but then (dare one say) this danger is present even
in Pell6as itself.
Pizzetti was never much interested in harmonic or
orchestral innovations for their own sakes, and his
response to these aspects of Debussy's art was
limited. Mildly Debussian dissonances, a Debussian
fluidity in the rhythms, and incidental Debussian
undertones in the modal turns of phrase are,
admittedly, widespread.
Yet thoroughgoing
Debussian echoes are rare, though one can find a
few, as in parts of the colourful but uneven and
uncharacteristically 'hedonistic' incidental music for
d'Annunzio's play La Pisanella (1913). Moreover.
even such Debussian traits as one can see in Pizzetti's earlier works were to become increasingly
absorbed or watered down in his later music, in
which he was affected up to a point by the renewed
xenophobic prejudices of the time: his signing of the
1932 manifesto was at least symbolic.
Casella's response to Debussy's influence could
hardly have been more different from Pizzetti's.
His long residence in France during his formative
yearsl0 gave him special advantages over his more
stay-at-home compatriots: he wrote later that as
early as 1898 his first contacts with Debussy's music
had aroused in him 'a sudden infinite enlargement
of my musical receptivity'.ll In due course he got to
"'He enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire at the age o f 12, and
finally returned to Italy only in 1915.

"see his autobiography I $egret; della yiara (1941); in English.

;\lirsic in n1.v trnle (1955), pp.53.57-8

know Debussy personally and made a systematic


study of all Debussy's works he could lay hands onthis being just a part of his avid investigation of all
the stimulating new trends in the current musical
scene, from the Russian nationalist composers
through Strauss and Mahler to Bartok, Schoenberg,
and Stravinsky. Casella had from the beginning a
strong 'technician's' interestlz in the innovations of
his contemporaries, and it was above all as a technical innovator that Debussy interested him: he was
never much affected by impressionist aesthetics, still
less by the shadowy world of a work like Pellkas.
In view of the early date of Casella's discovery of
Debussy, one is perhaps surprised by the lateness of
the app:arance of Debussian qualities in his worksthe main model for his first known pieces was the
music of his teacher Faure, and even such nonFrench influences as Rimsky-Korsakov's and
Strauss's asserted themselves earlier than Debussy's.
Yet, once established, the Debussian elements in
Casella's style became fundamentally important,
and showed themselves in a wide variety of waysranging from minor plagiarisms like the use of a
fragment of La n?arseillaise (cribbed from Feirx
d'artifice) in the fourth movement of Pagine di
guerra (1915) or of part of The keel row (cribbed from
Gigues) in the seventh of the Undici pezzi infantili
(1920), to the systematic use of Debussian harmonic
building-stones in textures of sometimes quite unDebussian tension and aggressiveness, in which the
French composer's influence joins hands with those
of the Stravinsky of The rite of spring, of the young
Bartok, even of the 'freely atonal' Schoenberg.
This sort of mixture is found above all in the
strangely tortured music of Casella's so-called
'second manner'-the music of that period around
World War I when he leapt right into the extreme
avant-garde, with highly interesting if seldom wholly
satisfactory results. Ex 2, from the first ('In mod0
funebre') of the Nove pezzi for piano (1914), is
typical, illustrating his characteristically violent
transformation of Debussian techniques: half-concealed beneath the thick, coagulated dissonances and
pounding double-dotted rhythms we can sense a
surprising likeness to the infinitely more reticent and
tender sounds of, say, Danseuses de Delphes-dearly
perceptible if, for example, one plays the right hand
part alone and quietly.13 In short, these strange,
'*Not for nothing did he waver, as a child, between music and
science: he tells us (op cit, p.26) that his mother used to punish
him for not practising his scales by forbidding him access to his
electro-chemical laboratorv!
'*For comments on this intriguing resemblance, no less illuminating for being facetious ('corpses of Delphic dancers.
made heavy by an outlandish process o f mummification'), s;e
Gastone Rossi-Doria's article on Casella's piano music in L a
rassrgna musicale (Casella number, May-June 1943). reproduced
in the symposium Alfredo CasrNa (ed d'Amico & Gatti, 1958),

sometimes clumsy and eclectic, yet often oddly


evocative and compelling pieces in Casella's 'second
manner' put Debussian techniques to new uses
which Debussy himself would hardly have foreseen
in a nightmare. We have here one of the nearest
approaches ever made to bridging the vast gulf
between Debussy and Schoenberg, whose width
Robert Henderson so rightly emphasized.14
From 1917 the tide of Casella's 'second manner'
began to recede, though its after-effects can be seen
scattered throughout his later production. In due
course the Concerto for string quartet (1923-4)
established his 'third manner': influenced to some
extent by the provincial Italian environment to
which he had returned, Casella now favoured the
idea of 'a music unquestionably Italian in idiom . . .
in which one meets, rather than the influences of
this or that foreign composer, the old ancestral
shades of Frescobaldi, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Rossini'.15 His rejection of modern foreign
influences, including that of Debussy. was far less
complete than these aggressively nationalistic
words would lead one to suppose (Casella never
became the small-minded chauvinist that certain
wrong-headed schools of thought in Italy have
recently claimed him to be: he was still fighting for
acceptance in Italy of the music of Schoenberg and
others even during the most crudely patriotic
Fascist years). Yet his growing belief in 'the incompatibility of certain modem foreign expressions with
our spirit'lG ensured that from the mid-1920s onwards Debussy's influence ceased to be as central to
his make-up as it had been previously. though it was
never completely eradicated.
G. F . Malipiero, the third leading composer of the
generazione deN'80, has also long shown deep
though not unqualified sympathy for Debussy's
music. In the section 'Ricordi e Pensieri' (selected
from his miscellaneous writings) in that fascinating
scrapbook L'opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero.17
he at one point declares that Debussy's music is
'indispensable' to him; but at another he implies a
certain disagreement with whole-hearted Debussyism by suggesting that the French composer 'could
have founded a new school if his sensibility had been
less refined and exceptional: the Debussian period
began and ended with Debussy'. Which doesn't
alter the fact that features of obviously Debussian
origin recur, in one form or another, from his
earliest important compositions to his most recent.
For example, while systematic use of the whole-tone
scale is totally absent from Malipiero's work, one
finds
shapes,
very
poignant and subtle ones, based on at least a seg14'Debussy and Schoenberg', MT March 1967, pp.222-5.

~ c ~ ~ ~
' ~ ~ ~ . ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ $
~
~$
":,': ,
" ~ ~ ~ ~'Yrom
~ , an
" ~ article
~ ~ ,in " Musikbliifter
: " , I ~ des
~ ~Anbruch
~ ~ (19251, later
Casella.s more extreme innovations
the parallel by
with those of the cubists-a comparison backed up by some of
Casella's own remarks in I s e g r e t i della giara (,kIusic in m y time,
p.102).

incorporated in Casella's book 21126 (1930): in the latter the


quoted passage appears On p'87
"21 -26, P.23.
"ed Scarpa & Furlan (1952), pp.301 and 345

nlent of it: exx 3a and 3b (respectively the opening


motifs of the first set of Inlpressioni dal vero of
1910 and of Magister Josephus, 1957) are typical.
The atmosphere evoked by such 'hexatonal' outlines is never in the full sense Debussian: the texture
is usually firm rather than evanescent, and the
plaintive emphasis on tritonal relationships may
recall, rather, certain comparable patterns in
JanaEek (whose music Malipiero seems not to have
discovered till after World War I but has since come
to admire greatly).ls It remains unliltely that
shapes deriving from the nhole-tone scale would
have had so strong an influence on Malipiero's style
had he not absorbed important lessons from
Debussy.

Even the more overtly archaic, neo-modal facets


of Malipiero's melodic style, though profoundly
indebted to early Italian nlusic from Gregorian
chant to Monteverdi and beyond, nevertheless often
seems to hover around the deceptively fine border
which separates archaisms deriving directly from
pre-classical sources from others refracted through
the 'archaizing' side of Debussy. This ambiguity is
especially noticeable when, as so often in Malipiero's
music u p t o about 1930, modal shapes are associated
with organum-like parallel triads: a study of one of
his most beautiful works, the calmly Giottoesque
'mystery' Sun Francesco d'Assisi (1921), will give an
idea of this ambivalence. Certain particular phrases
by Debussy seem to have left widespread impressions on Malipiero's work: again and again, for
instance, we find shapes whose sobbing downward
acciaccaturas recall those in the desolate little oboe
d'amore tune that echoes through Gigues (ex 3c).
This uncannily haunting melody's progeny (nearly
always thoroughly 'Malipierianized', yet recognizable even so) can be seen in countless Malipiero
scores: they wind their luminously melancholy way
through much of Sun Froncrsco, and, perhaps most
poignantly of all, they are associated with that
mysterious, tormented symbolic figure I1 Disperato
in Tortleo tlotturtlo (1929)--ex 3d, from the latter
work, is typical.
Malipiero's use of parallel triads, in fact, is sometimes hardly more Debussian than Vaughan
Williams'~.'~ In his most turbulently dissonant
music of the World War I period-parts of Pause
del silenzio 1 (1917), Sette canzoni (1918-19) and
Pantea (1919)--clashing streams of parallel triads
l b ~ n f o r m a t i o snupplied by Malipirro himself in conversatlorls 1
had wlth him In May 1963
'Ocf Peter J. Pirie's remarks, MT J u l y 1967, p.600

A selection of works by
ITALIAN COMPOSERS
from the

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ALFANO Franco
Sakuntala: Danza e Finale
BETTINELLI Bruno
Cioncerto da camera. for small orchestra

Sinfonia d a camera : Corale ostinato

Sinfonia Breve

CASELLA Alfredo
.A Notte alta. for piano and orchestra
Le Couvent sur l'eau: 3 Frammrnti sinfonici
O p 19 for soprano and orchestra
La Donna serpente : Frammenti sinfonici
GHEDINI Giorgio Federico
.Adagio e .\lleg-ro da concerto

.\rchitetture

C:oncerto a cinque. for \vood\vind and piano

Ouverture pour un concert

Partita, in 5 tempi

MALIPIERO Gian Francesco


L'.%sino d'oro. for baritone and orchestra

La Cena. for chorus and orchestra

Dialoghi. I to \'I11

Serenata for bassoon and I O instruments

2nd Sinfonia "Elegiaca"

NIELSEN Riccardo
\-arianti; for orchestra
PETRASSI Goffredo
Concerto for orchestra
Salmo IX. for chorus, strings. brass. percussion and
2 pianos
PIZZETTI Ildebrando
.Assassinio nella cattedrale : Intermezzo
Canti della stagione alta. Concerto for piano and
orchestra
Concerto dell'estate
Filiae Jerusalem; Adjuro Vos.
Cantata for
Foprano, female chorus and orchestra

3 Preludi sinfonici per "Edipo Re"

RESPIGHI Ottorino
Balfagor : Ouverture
CIoncerto in ..\ minor. for piano and orchestra
Impressioni Brasilliane
Maria Egiziaca. for solos, chorus and orchestra
5letamorphoseon
ROTA Nina
Concerto for strings
TEST1 Flavio
Crocifissione, for male chorus and strings
ZAFRED Mario
C:oncerto for piano and orchestra

4th Sinfonia. in Honour of the Resistance

Full scores and complete parts can be obtained on


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are hurled against one another in a manner owing


as much to The rite ofspring as to Debussy (ex 4);
and even in a calm, euphonious post-war work like
Sun Francesco such passages still put in brief
appearances, notably in the 'fire' scene and its
prelude. At other points in Sun Francesco, and
elsewhere in Malipiero's calmer music, organumlike parallel triads take on a rapt, ethereal quality
reminding one fairly directly of VW, though
Debussian models are usually at least dimly perceptible in the background. Of the leading composers of the generazionede11'80, Malipiero is the one
who probably learned most from Debussy-which
has not prevented him from being, at his all-toorare best, easily the most original of the three.
The composers so far discussed were all on the
way to maturity by 1914. The ensuing war years
obstructed international communications and threw
the musical world into confusion; and though renewed prejudices against foreign music were
naturally directed more against Germany than
against France, Debussy's ltalian reputation suffered a setback. By the time the musical world
returned to normal after the war, the fashion for
full-scale Debussyism was passing even in France;
and before long the March on Rome inaugurated a
further era of Italian nationalism.
Lt would be an exaggeration to say that Italian
Debussyism disappeared at once: minor composers have continued to pour forth unimportant
sub-Debussian trifles right down to the present day
(Piero Rattalino even named Debussy as the single
most important model for minor 20th-century
Italian piano music)."'
Yet from about 1915
onwards most of the more significant new Italian
composers tended to receive their Debussian influences indirectly through Casella, Malipiero, and
other older Italians: even those in the facile music of
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco mostly seem to have
been filtered through the personality of his teacher

Pizzetti. Such Debussian qualities as may lurk in


the mature works of Giorgio Federico Ghedini and
Goffredo Petrassi are so transformed as to be unrecognizable; and the central figures of the recent
Italian avant-garde can more logically be studied
from this point of view alongside such Debussyminded foreigners as Boulez.
Only one major Italian composer remains to be
considered here. Luigi Dallapiccola has told us that
the music he was composing in his teens was so
deeply indebted to Debussy that in 1921 he gave up
composition for four years, so that Debussian
methods could 'sink in' and become a fertilizing
rather than enslaving influence." In his unpublished
works of the years 1925-31, still in manuscript, the
melodic style is usually impregnated with Italian
archaisms parallelling those in Pizzetti and Malipiero; yet one repeatedly notices harmonic and
instrumental touches which seem to derive directly
from Debussy. In due course other, more turbulent
transalpine influences entered Dallapiccola's style:
he discovered Schoenberg in 1924 (Pierrot Lu11air.e).
Webern in 1928, Busoni in 1933, Berg in 1934. All
of them eventually left marks on his music, though
Rusoni's and Berg's influences asserted themselves
more immediately than those of the other two. Yet
never at any time did these more 'modernistic'
trends oust the longer-established Italian and
Debussian facets of Dallapiccola's style.
Even after his adoption of serizl technique in 1942
one can still detect Debussian elements in Dallapiccola's language, not only in his refined, sensuous
instrumentation, so singularly un-Viennese in
sound, but also in various harmonic and melodic
features. The organum-like parallel 5ths at the
beginning of the Cinque ,frammenti di SafJo (1942)
are an extreme case, but the fact that they sound so
well in their context is indicative; while the infinitely
delicate, euphonious fabric of a passage like ex 5,
from the Quattro Liriche di Antonio Machado ( 1948),
is closer to the world of, say, Debussy's 7roi.c
Poimes de S:&phane Mallarn~Pthan to anything by
the Schoenberg school: one notices, for instance,
that the piano part owes its flavour partly to the fact
that in every chord at least three notes outline a
segment of the whole-tone scale. All in all, Dallapiccola's music of the 1940s, and even, more indirectly, his works written since then, show clearly
that his 'archaic-Italian-cum-Debussian' beginnings
have had a lasting effect, which no amount of
Bergian or Webernian serialism is ever likely to
eradicate.

"cf Roman Vlad's Luigi Daflapiccola (1957) p.55n2; Dalla'"'La musica pidnistica itdliana tra il 1900 e il 1950', Rassegna
piccola has enlarged on this in conversations l'had with him in
ntrrsical~Cirrr i (1967), XX,'I , 13-20
May 1962 and November 1963.
copyright rnusic eiantples reproduced by Xinrl permission of Ricardi ( e x x 1, 2, 3a, b, d , and 4 ) and Scltott ( e x 5)

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