Core 'ngrato: canzone napoletana [Ungrateful Heart: Neapolitan Song]. Milano: Ed. Ricordi, 1947.
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Cordiferro’s well-known “Core ’ngrato” has been sung and recorded by Andrea Bocelli, Luciano Pavarotti, Franco Corelli and Roberto Alagna, and others, and remains a favorite. See Francesco Durante’s essay on this website, “Riccardo Cordiferro: An Italian American Archetype.” Though the family was Calabrian by birth, the Siscas had built their reputation in Italy as masters of the Neapolitan dialect, as here.
Composer Salvatore Cardillo (1874-1947) was Italian-American, having emigrated to the U.S. from Naples in 1904. He and Cordiferro also collaborated one more time, with Oi luna [O Silvery Moon], published in 1921. That a work whose music and lyrics both were created by Americans was nevertheless published in Italy is testament to the prestige of Ricordi.
Emigrating with his family to America in 1892, soon thereafter Cordiferro founded the weekly literary magazine La Follia di New York, together with his father Francesco (1839–1928), who was also a poet (q.v. his Lu Ciucciu, in Calabrian dialect), and with his brother Marziale. The work for La Follia, combined with his intense literary productivity, absorbed Cordiferro completely, and gave him a vehicle by which to publish several of his works, such as La vendetta (q.v.). Approbation for the magazine’s notable success on the East Coast led him to make frequent trips throughout the country and beyond to give theatrical presentations and poetry readings, and to engage in debates, very often with political overtones.
Though not committed to any one strain of leftist thought, Cordiferro maintained close contact with anarchist and socialist circles, which resulted in more than one arrest and constrained him to resign from directing La Follia. In 1895, his drama, Il pezzente [The Tramp], ran for hundreds of performances and became a standard in the repertory of amateur players in revolutionary political circles. See Durante, “Riccardo Cordiferro,” pp. 21–22.
Beyond the political, Cordiferro was perhaps more drawn to satire, the comical, and the sentimental, including songs and Neapolitan impersonations. He wrote poetry all his life, and dedicated himself to comic theater. Cordiferro was principally responsible for the flourishing of colonial poetry: by his decisions of who to publish in La Follia, he became the arbiter between old world and new world literary styles, effectively, a guarantor of the new literary culture of the Italian American colony. He was among the collaborators of Carlo Tresca’s radical newspaper, Il Martello (The Hammer) even into the 1930s.
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