Ennio Porrino - composer

Premature death robbed Italian music of great talent

Ennio Porrino is seen by some as
one of the greats of Italian opera

The composer Ennio Porrino, best known for his symphonic poem, Sardegna, and his opera, I Shardana, was born on this day in 1910 in Cagliari.

Porrino was critically acclaimed, his operas earning comparisons with the great Giacomo Puccini, although to some his reputation has been tarnished by his association with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime. He was only 49 when he died in Rome.

His 1941 opera, Gli Orazi, has been interpreted as a ‘hymn to fascism’ by some critics, while his piece, The March of the Volunteer, was used by Mussolini’s short-lived Italian Social Republic as its anthem.

Little is known of Porrino’s early years. It is thought that his family moved to Rome when he was a small child and most accounts of his life begin with his studies at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, which he attended from the age of 17 and where he graduated in 1932.

He also studied with the composer Ottorino Respighi, who was keen to see his potential realised.  Respighi would be a significant influence on Porrino’s own work.

Porrino was not slow to make an impact in Roman musical circles. In 1931 he won an opera competition organised by the Giornale d'Italia newspaper. Two years later, his overture for orchestra, Tartarin de Tarascon, won the Accademia di Santa Cecilia’s own competition for the 25th anniversary concerts at the Teatro Augusteo, where it premiered under the baton of Bernardino Molinari. 

Porrino studied under the violinist and
composer Ottorino Respighi (above)

Molinari was the conductor in January of the following year when Porrino’s  symphonic poem Sardegna was performed for the first time. A tribute to a homeland Porrino was yet to understand and appreciate, Sardegna was based largely on the nostalgic tales passed to him by his Sardinian mother. The piece was widely appreciated and performed numerous times in Italy and abroad, as well as being included in the Italian music section of the 1935 Hamburg International Festival. 

Like Respighi, who died in 1936, Porrino championed an Italian national music movement faithful to its classical roots. He openly opposed modernist composers such as Alfredo Casella.

However, some academics argue that there was a dark side to Porrino’s enthusiasm for traditional Italian music, citing an article he wrote for an antisemitic journal, La difesa della razza - The Defence of Race - in 1938.

Under the title, La musica nella tradizione della nostra razza - Music in the tradition of our race - Porrino argued that Italian music was a fundamental component of Italian culture and national pride, but that it had been corrupted by internationalism, which was generally recognised as code for Judaism. 

His opposition to Casella, it has been suggested, might have had as much to do with the latter’s opposition to Mussolini’s despised race laws as his music. Casella also happened to be married to a French woman from a Jewish family.

Porrino was also excited by Mussolini’s dream of restoring Rome to its former grandeur as the heart of his Fascist empire and his promotion of what he saw as the masculine, dynamic values of so-called romanità (Roman-ness).

Gli Orazi told the story of the feud between the
Orazi and Curiazi families in 7th century Rome

In was in this context, perhaps, that Porrino wrote Gli Orazi, which is the story of a conflict between the Roman family of Horatius (Orazio) and that of Curiatius (Curiazio), from Alba Longa, just to the south of Rome, when the two cities are at war during the seventh century.

The one-act opera concludes with a victory for the Orazi in this feud and a celebration of Rome’s defeat of Alba in the war.  Porrino collaborated with the librettist Claudio Guastalla on Gli Orazi, as he had in completing Respighi’s unfinished opera, Lucrezia, after Respighi’s death. Guastalla, though he regarded himself unequivocally as Italian, was the son of Jewish parents and his name ultimately disappeared from the credits.

Nonetheless, Gli Orazi was staged with great success at La Scala in Milan in February 1941.  

After the fall of Mussolini and the defeat of the Fascists, the immediate post-war years saw Porrino devote more time to academic work than to composing. He was appointed professor of composition at the Rome Conservatory, and became a full member of both the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and the Luigi Cherubini Academy in Florence.

In 1946 he was appointed substitute librarian in the Library of the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples, where he also taught composition.  Later, he became director of the Pierluigi da Palestrina Conservatory of Cagliari, and conducted orchestral and choral performances in Naples and Venice.

Sardinia is dotted with the remains of nuraghe,
conical stone towers as old as the Shardana

He returned to opera composition triumphantly with I Shardana, a 1959 work set among the warrior race that spent much of its time defending Sardinia from foreign invaders during the Bronze Age.

Inspired by what Porrino had learned about his homeland after returning as an adult, the opera is regarded as one of the most important in Italy post 1945 and confirmed Porrino’s reputation, according to some critics, as the greatest Italian musician since Puccini.

It came as a profound shock, then, just a few months after I Shardana’s premiere at Teatro San Carlo in Naples, when it was reported in September 1959 that Porrino had died, following a sudden illness. He had been in Venice only a few days earlier, when his work La bambola malata, described as a pantomime, had been performed at the Venice International Festival of Contemporary Music.  

He left a widow, Malgari, a painter and theatrical designer, and a daughter, Stefania, born in 1957, who became a playwright and stage director in adulthood.

An orchestral performance inside the modern
Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome

Travel tip:

The Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, was established in 1565. It was founded in Rome by Pope Sixtus V at the Church of Santa Maria ad Martires, better known as the Pantheon. Over the centuries, many famous composers and musicians have been members, among them opera singers Beniamino Gigli and Cecilia Bartoli. Since 2005 the Academy’s headquarters have been at the Parco della Musica in Rome, which was designed by the architect Renzo Piano, in Viale Pietro de Coubertin in the Flaminio district, close to the location of the 1960 Summer Olympic Games.

A view from the sea similar to that which the
writer D H Lawrence might have experienced

Travel tip:

Cagliari, where Porrino was born, is Sardinia's capital, an industrial centre and one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean. Yet it is also a city of considerable beauty and history, most poetically described by the novelist DH Lawrence when he visited in the 1920s. As he approached from the sea, Lawrence set his eyes on the confusion of domes, palaces and ornamental facades which, he noted, seemed to be piled on top of one another. He compared it to Jerusalem, describing it as 'strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy.’  What he saw was Cagliari’s charming historic centre, known as Castello, inside which the city’s university, cathedral and several museums and palaces - plus many bars and restaurants - are squeezed into a network of narrow alleys.

Also on this day:

1526: The birth of mathematician Rafael Bombelli

1920: The birth of film director Federico Fellini

1950: The birth of magazine editor Franca Sozzani

1987: The birth of motorcycle racer Marco Simoncelli

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Carlo Maria Giulini - conductor

Boy violinist who became a maestro of the baton

Giulini conducted some of the world's
great orchestras in a long career

Carlo Maria Giulini, who conducted many of the world’s great orchestras in a career spanning 54 years, was born on this day in 1914 in Barletta, a town on the Adriatic coast 66km (41 miles) north of the port city of Bari.

Appointed musical director of Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1953, he went on to become one of the most celebrated conductors of orchestral performances, developing long associations with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia of London in particular, as well as the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

He became renowned for projecting serene authority from the podium, as well as his selfless devotion to the score. A handsome man who was always impeccably tailored, he had a magisterial presence. Initially most recognised for the breadth and detail he brought to the operas of Verdi and Mozart, he eventually became as well known for his orchestral repertoire.

Carlo Maria Giulini was born to a Neapolitan mother and a father from Lombardy. Although born in the south of Italy, he was raised in Bolzano, which was part of Austria until 1915. For Christmas in 1919, when he was five, Giulini was given a violin and he progressed rapidly thanks to local instructors, notably a pharmacist who was also a violinist, whom he nicknamed Brahms.

Giulini with his wife Marcella de Girolami, to whom
he was married for more than half a century

When the distinguished Italian violinist and composer Remy Principe gave a recital in Bolzano in 1928, he invited Giulini to study with him at Italy's foremost conservatory, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He soon won a place in the academy’s prestigious orchestra.

He played under such giants of conducting as Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, and Otto Klemperer. Giulini’s first public performance was the Brahms Symphony No. 1 under Walter.

In 1940, Giulini won a competition with the prize of a chance to conduct the St. Cecilia orchestra. However, before the concert took place at which he was due to conduct, he was drafted into the Italian army and sent to the front in Croatia, in spite of being unequivocally opposed to Benito Mussolini and a committed pacifist. He refused to fire his gun at human targets.

In 1942, on a 30-day break in Rome, he married Marcella de Girolami, his girlfriend since 1938. They would remain together until her death 53 years later.

Giulini began his career mainly conducting
opera, first for the Rai radio orchestra 

In September 1943, the Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces was signed, but the occupying Nazis refused to abandon Rome. When Giulini's Italian commander ordered his troops to fight on, Giulini went into hiding, living for nine months in a tunnel underneath a home owned by his wife's uncle, along with two friends and a Jewish family. There were posters around Rome showing his face with instructions that he be shot on sight.

After the Allies liberated Rome in June 1944, Giulini - one of the few conductors not tainted by associations with Fascism - was chosen to lead the Accademia's first post-Fascist concert, held in July 1944. On the programme was the Brahms Symphony No. 4, which would become almost his signature work, one that he conducted 180 times over the course of his career.

In 1948, Giulini conducted his first opera, a production of Verdi’s La Traviata for Italian radio, before conducting his first theatre production of the same opera in Bergamo in 1950.

After hearing Giulini’s radio broadcast of Debussy's La mer, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini asked to meet Giulini and recommended him to be musical director at La Scala. He took up the post in 1953, although in the event he resigned after members of the audience jeered Maria Callas during a run of operas in 1956.

In 1958, Giulini conducted a highly acclaimed production of Verdi's Don Carlos at the Royal Opera House in London - directed by Luchino Visconti - and although he returned to Covent Garden several more times, and to other venues in Europe, he became so disillusioned with some of the modern visual interpretations of classic works that he effectively quit opera in 1965 to concentrate on orchestral works. Even the Metropolitan Opera in New York could not persuade him to change his mind.

Giulini, who worked into his 80s, had a long association
with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

In 1955 he made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, leading to a 23-year association with the orchestra, of which he was principal guest conductor from 1969 to 1972 and continued to appear with them regularly until 1978. In 1956, he began his association with the Philharmonia of London.

In addition to his role in Chicago, he was music director of the Vienna Symphony from 1973 to 1976. From 1978 to 1984, he served as principal conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, launching his tenure there with performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

In addition to being in great demand as a guest conductor of major orchestras around the world, Giulini made numerous recordings with the Philharmonia in London.

Two Mozart recordings, Don Giovanni and Le Nozze Di Figaro, brilliantly produced by Walter Legge, were recalled as exceptional. The recordings that followed during the early 1960s reflected a London concert repertory that included music by Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Ravel, as well as brilliant Rossini overtures and memorable performances of the Verdi Requiem.

Giulini often said that he found the public role of being a conductor uncomfortable and that ideally he would prefer to do no publicity at all. Yet he had an eccentric side that appeared to enjoy fame, to the extent that during his time in Los Angeles he would sometimes be spotted driving around in an open-top Mercedes, wearing sunglasses, a flowing scarf and a large hat that could scarcely fail to get him noticed.

His later years in America were marred somewhat by the ill health and eventual death of his wife in 1995, not long after which, in 1998, he announced his retirement, returning to Italy and living in the area around Brescia in Lombardy, where he died in 2005 at the age of 91.

The city of Bolzano is set against a backdrop of
 stunning Alpine views

Travel tip:

Bolzano, where Giulini grew up, is a city in the South Tyrol province of northern Italy, also known as Alto Adige. It is in a valley amid hilly vineyards. A gateway to the Dolomites mountain range in the Italian Alps, it has a medieval city centre, where can be found wooden market stalls are laid out with Alpine cheese, ham and dark, seeded loaves. Bolzano us the home of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, which features a Neolithic mummy called Ötzi the Iceman. Nearby is the imposing 13th-century Mareccio Castle, and the Duomo di Bolzano with its Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

The beautiful 14th century Basilica di Santa
Maria Maggiore in Barletta

Travel tip:

Giulini’s home town of Barletta is a working port with modern suburbs and an attractive historic centre, where one of the most famous sights is an ancient bronze 'Colossus', thought to be the oldest surviving bronze Roman statue. The identity of the figure the statue represents is not clear but one theory is that it is the Byzantine Emperor Marcian and that the statue’s original home was in Constantinople.  Barletta has a beautiful 12th century cathedral, renovated in the 14th century, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

More reading:

How a chance opportunity changed conductor Arturo Toscanini's life

The life of the passionate maestro Riccardo Muti

Why Luchino Visconti was known as the aristocrat of Italian cinema

Also on this day:

1740: The birth of composer Giovanni Paisello

1946: Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III abdicates

2013: The death of fashion designer Ottavio Missoni


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Severino Gazzelloni - flautist

Lead player with RAI orchestra considered a great of Italian music

Severino Gazzelloni was regarded as one of
Italy's finest flautist

The flautist Severino Gazzelloni, who for 30 years was the principal player of his instrument in the prestigious RAI National Symphony Orchestra but who had a repertoire that extended well beyond orchestral classical music, was born on this day in 1919 in Roccasecca, a town perched on a hillside in southern Lazio, about 130km (81 miles) south of Rome.

He was known for his versatility. In addition to his proficiency in classical flute pieces, Gazzelloni also excelled in jazz and 20th century avant-garde music. As such, many musicians and aficionados regard him as one of the finest flute players of all time.

Gazzelloni also taught others to master the flute. His notable pupils included the American jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy and the Dutch classical flautist Abbie de Quant.

The son of a tailor in Roccasecca, Gazzelloni grew up in modest circumstances yet had music around him from a young age as his father played in a local band.  He taught himself music and became fascinated with the flute as an instrument, acquiring the technique to play it simply by practising for endless hours on his own.

Severino Gazzelloni's golden flute was made for him
by a craftsman in Germany

By the age of seven, his father considered him good enough to sit alongside him in the band, whose conductor and musical director, Giambattista Creati, recognised him as a musician of natural talent and great potential.

With Creati’s encouragement, Gazzelloni developed as a performer over the next few years and in 1934, at the age of 15, obtained a place at Italy’s premier conservatory, the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he graduated in 1942 under the guidance of the accomplished flautist Arrigo Tassinari.

During the war years he stayed in Rome, finding work in the orchestra at a variety theatre, where he met Alberto Semprini, who would go on to become director of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra.

When Gazzelloni played with that orchestra for the first time in 1944, it was called the Radio Roma Orchestra, led by Fernando Previtali. His debut appearance began an association that would last until the mid 1970s.

Gazzelloni was as comfortable playing jazz as he
was with classical music

He began to give solo recitals in 1945, launching his solo career with a tour of Belgium. His debut as a soloist in an Italian venue did not come until 1947, when Italy was beginning to get back on its feet after the devastation of the Second World War, and Gazzelloni gave a performance at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome.

His interest in avant-garde music developed after he had met the Venetian-born composer Bruno Maderna, through whom he was introduced to the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik - a summer school for ‘new music’ - that was held each year in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt.

Gazzelloni went to Darmstadt for the first time in 1952 and taught there continuously from 1956 to 1966.

In those years he developed friendships and professional relationships with some of the leading lights of the 20th century avant-garde movement, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Franco Donatoni, Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, Luciano Berio and Sylvano Bussotti.

The composer Igor Stravinsky composed
music for Gazzelloni

Berio, the experimental composer who was a pioneer of electronic music, Boulez, Maderna and Igor Stravinsky - the Russian-born pianist considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century - all wrote pieces specifically for Gazzelloni, who was nicknamed “the Golden Flute” - in part in recognition of his virtuosity but also because he did actually own a gold-plated flute, made for him by a German craftsman in 1956.

Gazzelloni is said to have enjoyed the informality of the jazz scene and one of his most successful tours came in 1976, when he was accompanied by the eminent classical pianist Bruno Canino and a jazz combo that comprised some of Italy’s top names, including the jazz piano player Enrico Intra, the saxophonist Giancarlo Barigozzi, bass guitarist Pino Presti, drummer Tullio De Piscopo and lead guitarist Sergio Farina.

At his peak as a soloist, Gazzelloni played as many as 250 concerts a year, as well as teaching at the Academy of Santa Cecilia and at the Chigiana Academy in Siena.

He died in Cassino, not far from Roccasecca, in 1992 in a clinic where he had been undergoing treatment for a brain tumour.

Two years after his death, the municipality of Roccasecca launched a musical festival in his honour and the event, the International Festival Severino Gazzelloni, is today an annual month-long event staged in August and September, supported by the Licinio Refice Conservatory of Frosinone and the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, with sponsorship from businesses in the area.

The remains of the castle at Roccasecca

Travel tip:

The town of Roccasecca occupies a strategic position at the entrance to two narrow gorges that provide access to the Valle di Comino below the slopes of Monte Asprano. It has a castle built in the 10th century at the behest of the Abbot of Montecassino. The abbot later put the castle in the control of the D’Aquino family and it was there that Tommaso D’Aquino, the Dominican friar who was canonized as Saint Thomas Aquinas fifty years after his death, was supposedly born in 1225. The castle fell into disrepair in the 17th century.

The entrance to the Conservatory
of the Academy of Santa Cecilia

Travel tip:

The National Academy of Santa Cecilia is one of the oldest musical academies in the world. It was founded in Rome by Pope Sixtus V in 1585 at the Church of Santa Maria ad Martires, better known as the Pantheon. Over the centuries, many famous composers and musicians have been members of the Academy, which lists opera singers Beniamino Gigli and Cecilia Bartoli among its alumni. Since 2005 the Academy’s headquarters have been at the Parco della Musica in Rome, which was designed by the architect Renzo Piano, but the historic conservatory in Via dei Greci remains, offering preparatory courses, and also houses the Italian Institute for Music History.



More reading:

How avant-garde composer Luigi Nono saw music as a form of political expression

Why Pino Presti is an important figure in Italian contemporary music

The brilliance of classical flute player Leonardo De Lorenzo

Also on this day:

1905: The birth of Michele Navarra - practising doctor and Mafia boss

1932: The birth of academic and novelist Umberto Eco

1948: The birth of anti-Mafia activist Giuseppe Impastato


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Stelvio Cipriani – composer

Musician wrote some of Italy’s most famous film soundtracks

One of Stelvio Cipriani's first jobs was as
piano accompanist for the singer Rita Pavone

Stelvio Cipriani, an award-winning composer of film scores, was born on this day in 1937 in Rome.

One of his most famous soundtracks was for the 1973 film, La polizia sta a guardare (also released as The Great Kidnapping). The main theme was used again by Cipriani in 1977 for the film, Tentacoli, and also featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof in 2007.

Although Cipriani did not come from a musical background, he was fascinated with the organ at his church when he was a child.

His priest gave him music lessons and then Cipriani went to study piano and harmony at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome at the age of 14.



His first job was playing in a band on a cruise ship and then he became the accompanist for the popular Italian singer, Rita Pavone.

Cipriani with actress Antonella Lualdi
at the Giffoni film festival in 1975

Stelvio wrote his first movie soundtrack for the 1966 spaghetti western, The Bounty Killer. This was followed by a score for The Stranger Returns in 1967, starring Tony Anthony. He wrote for other films starring Anthony, as well as for many poliziotteschi - Italian crime films - a type of film popular in the 1970s.

Stelvio was awarded a Nastro d’Argento for Best Score for the 1970 film The Anonymous Venetian.  This is still considered one of the best and most famous Italian film soundtracks.

In an interview in 2007 Cipriani revealed that he had composed music for Pope John Paul II and was working at the time with Pope Benedict XVI.

Cipriani wrote Il Tema di Karol, a piano solo dedicated to Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II, which was released on CD in 2013.

The composer will celebrate his 81st birthday today.

The Via della Conciliazione, looking towards the basilica
of St Peter, was conceived by Mussolini

Travel tip:

The Rome Cipriani was born into in 1937 had been radically changed by the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini after he became Prime Minister in 1922. The classical city had been built between the first century BC and the fourth century AD, the Christian city between the fourth and the 18th centuries and Mussolini wanted to build la Terza Roma, the third Rome, which would be an Empire for modern times. One of the major changes ordered by him was the building of the Via della Conciliazione, the wide avenue along which today’s visitors approach Saint Peter’s Basilica from Castel Sant’Angelo. It was commissioned by Mussolini to be a symbol of reconciliation between the Holy See and the Italian state after the Lateran Treaty was signed. Roughly 500 metres long, the vast colonnaded street designed by the architect Marcello Piacentini was intended to link the Vatican to the heart of Rome. At the time it had the opposite effect as local people were upset by the many buildings and houses that had to be demolished causing residents to be displaced.

The new headquarters of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia
were designed by the architect Renzo Piano

Travel tip:

The St Cecilia Academy, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, where Cipriani studied music in the 1950s, is one of the oldest musical academies in the world. It was founded in Rome by Pope Sixtus V in 1585 at the Church of Santa Maria ad Martires, better known as the Pantheon. Over the centuries, many famous composers and musicians have been members of the Academy, which lists opera singers Beniamino Gigli and Cecilia Bartoli among its alumni. Since 2005 the Academy’s headquarters have been at the Parco della Musica in Rome, which was designed by the architect Renzo Piano.

More reading:

The composer who created the sounds of The Godfather

The brilliant film music of Ennio Morricone 

Rita Pavone - the precocious star who conquered America

Also on this day:

1561: The birth of Jacopo Peri, composer of the first opera

1799: The poet and revolutionary Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel is hanged

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Antonio Cotogni – baritone

Singer who moved the composer Verdi to tears

Antonio Cotogni's voice was admired
by the composer Giuseppe Verdi

Antonio ‘Toto’ Cotogni, who achieved international recognition as one of the greatest male opera singers of the 19th century, was born on this day in 1831 in Rome.

Cotogni’s fine baritone voice was particularly admired by the composer Giuseppe Verdi and music journalists wrote reviews full of superlatives after his performances.

Cotogni studied music theory and singing from an early age and began singing in churches and at summer music festivals outside the city.

He made his opera debut in 1852 at Rome’s Teatro Metastasio as Belcore in Donizetti's L’elisir d’amore.

After that he did not sing in public for a while, concentrating instead on building up his repertoire.

After singing in various Italian cities outside Rome he was signed up to sing at Rome’s Teatro Argentina in 1857 in Lucia di Lammermoor and Gemma di Vergy, also by Donizetti. Later that year he performed in Verdi's I due Foscari and Sanelli's Luisa Strozzi at Teatro Rossini in Turin. He met the soprano Maria Ballerini there and married her the following year.

His major breakthrough came in 1858 when he was asked to take the place of the famous baritone Felice Varesi in Nice.

Varesi’s fans felt that Cotogni, who was virtually unknown, should not have been chosen to replace the popular singer.

Cotogni in the role of Enrico in
Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor

He was engaged to sing Antonio in Donizetti’s Linda di Chamonix but was greeted with noises and whistling before he had sung a word.

The audience fell silent as he sang his opening aria and gave him thunderous applause afterwards demanding an encore. His performance revealed him to be a master of his art and Antonio became one of his signature roles.

Cotogni made his debut at La Scala in Milan in 1860 and after overcoming his initial nerves, he won over the notoriously critical audience.

He appeared at the leading opera houses in Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, Moscow and Saint Petersburg and became particularly popular with London audiences, performing at the Royal Opera House regularly from 1867 to 1889.

The famous baritone gave his last operatic stage performance in 1894 in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Saint Petersburg.

Cotogni became a celebrated vocal teacher in retirement, teaching first at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and then at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

He taught dozens of celebrated singers during his retirement between 1894 and 1918, the year in which he died in Rome just before the armistice ended World War I.

Cotogni sang most of the major Verdi baritone roles and the composer himself praised the beauty and strength of his voice. Verdi heard him privately in several of the key pieces from Don Carlo and was moved to tears by his singing of Rodrigo’s death scene. Verdi had his own nickname for Cotogni, calling him mio ignoratino - my little ignoramus - which he used not in an insulting way but in teasing the singer for his unfailing modesty, humility and deference.

Cotogni was an exceptional teacher and was able to pass on to his pupils what Verdi had said to him about the arias and elements of the operas that had been changed in rehearsal.

Cotogni (second row, middle) with his class at the St Cecilia
Academy. Beniamino Gigli is on the right at the back.

Working with him was the young Luigi Ricci who would later become a vocal coach. Ricci took meticulous notes on information that Cotogni passed on to his pupils about things that had been changed in rehearsal but had never been officially recorded, as well as traditions begun by singers from the previous century.

Ricci eventually compiled a four-part collection, Variazioni-cadenze tradizioni per canto, which recorded this information for posterity.

At the age of 77 Cotogni recorded a duet with a much younger tenor for the gramophone. Although his voice was not the same as when it had moved Verdi to tears, it is a permanent reminder of the singer who had entranced audience throughout Europe for 40 years. It is also the oldest voice ever recorded for the gramophone as Cotogni had been born in 1831.

Via dei Genovesi in Trastevere

Travel tip:

Antonio Cotogni was born at number 13 Via dei Genovesi in the Trastevere district of Rome and there is a commemorative plaque on the house. Trastevere, once a working-class part of the city, is now one of Rome's most fashionable neighbourhoods, certainly among young professionals, who are attracted by its pretty cobbled streets and the wealth of inexpensive but chic restaurants.

The Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Via dei
Greci is part of the Academy

Travel tip:

The St Cecilia Academy - Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia - where Cotogni taught singing, is one of the oldest musical academies in the world. It was founded in Rome by Pope Sixtus V in 1585 at the Church of Santa Maria ad Martires, better known as the Pantheon. Over the centuries, many famous composers and musicians have been members of the Academy, which lists opera singers Beniamino Gigli and Cecilia Bartoli among its alumni. Since 2005 the Academy’s headquarters have been at the Parco della Musica in Rome, which was designed by the architect Renzo Piano.

More reading:

The death of Giuseppe Verdi - how Italy mourned the loss of a national icon

The brief but sparkling career of 19th century soprano Marietta Piccolomini

Antonio Scotti - the Neapolitan baritone who sang for 35 seasons at The Met

Also on this day:

1464: The death of Cosimo de' Medici, founder of a dynasty

1776: The birth of Francesca Scanagatta, the girl who pretended to be a man to join the Austrian army


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Ottorino Respighi – violinist and composer

Talented Bolognese brought a Russian flavour to Italian music

Ottorino Respighi brought a Russian flavour
to 20th century Italian music

The musician Ottorino Respighi was born on this day in 1879 in an apartment inside Palazzo Fantuzzi in the centre of Bologna.

As a composer, Respighi is remembered for bringing Russian orchestral colour and some of Richard Strauss’s harmonic techniques into Italian music.

He is perhaps best known for his three orchestral tone poems Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals, but he also wrote several operas.

Respighi was born into a musical family and learnt to play the piano and violin at an early age.

He studied the violin and viola with Federico Sarti at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna and then went to St Petersburg to be the principal violinist in the orchestra of the Imperial Theatre. While he was there he studied with Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and acquired an interest in orchestral composition.

One of Respighi’s piano concertos was performed at Bologna in 1902 and an orchestral piece by him was played at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York the same year.

Respighi played one of his own piano
concertos in New York in 1925

His operas brought him more recognition and in 1913 he was appointed as professor of composition at the prestigious St Cecilia Academy in Rome, a post he held for the rest of his life.

Respighi’s Roman compositions, written between 1916 and 1928, sought to reflect the sensual, decadent climate of the city depicted by Gabriele D’Annunzio in his poetry.

The composer was also interested in 16th and 17th century Italian music, which he transcribed for orchestra from compositions written for old instruments, such as the lute.

In 1919 Respighi married one of his pupils, Elsa Olivieri-Sangiacomo, who was a singer and composer.

He performed in New York for the first time in 1925, playing one of his own piano concertos at Carnegie Hall.

Respighi continued to go on tour and to compose music until his health deteriorated in 1936. He died that year at the age of 56 in Rome. A year after his death his remains were moved to his birthplace, Bologna and reinterred at the city’s expense at the Certosa di Bologna.

The Palazzo Fantuzzi in Bologna, where Respighi was born

Travel tip:

The Palazzo Fantuzzi, where Resphigi was born, is a Renaissance-style palace in Via San Vitale, close to the Church of Santi Vitale e Agricola. It is also known as Palazzo degli Elefanti because of the sculpted, elephant decorations on the façade. The Palace was designed in 1517 by Andrea da Formigine. Part of the palace is now used for art exhibitions.

Before the move to the Parco della Musica,
the Academy was in Campo Marzio

Travel tip:

The St Cecilia Academy - Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia - where Respighi taught and also met his wife, is one of the oldest musical academies in the world. It was founded in Rome by Pope Sixtus V in 1585 at the Church of Santa Maria ad Martires, better known as the Pantheon. Over the centuries, many famous composers and musicians have been members of the Academy, which lists opera singers Beniamino Gigli and Cecilia Bartoli among its alumni. Since 2005 the Academy’s headquarters have been at the Parco della Musica in Rome, which was designed by the architect Renzo Piano.

More reading:

The powerful voice of mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli

The poetry and politics of Gabriele D'Annunzio

Anselmo Colzani, Italian star of the New York Met

Also on this day:

1950: The birth of tennis star Adriano Panatta 

2006: Italy win their fourth World Cup by beating France

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Sergio Tòfano – actor and illustrator

The many talents of stage and screen star

Sergio Tòfano as Professor Toti, in Luigi
 Pirandello's comic play Pensaci, Giacomino!

Comic actor, director, writer and illustrator Sergio Tòfano died on this day in 1973 in Rome.

He is remembered as an intelligent and versatile theatre and film actor and also as the creator of the much-loved cartoon character Signor Bonaventura, who entertained Italians for more than 40 years.

Tòfano was born in Rome in 1886, the son of a magistrate, and studied at the University of Rome and the Academy of Santa Cecilia. He made his first appearance on stage in 1909.

He soon specialised as a comic actor and worked with a string of famous directors including Luigi Almirante and Vittorio de Sica.

  

He became famous after his performance as Professor Toti in Luigi Pirandello’s comic play, Pensaci, Giacomino! 

Also a talented artist and writer, Tòfano invented his cartoon character Signor Bonaventura for the children’s magazine, Il Corriere dei Piccoli, signing himself as Sto.

Signor Bonaventura made his first appearance in 1917. The character wore a red frock coat and a hat and his fans interpret him as showing how good people, despite making mistakes, can avoid the bad outcome they seem fated to experience, even in complicated situations, because there is always hope.

Tòfano's invention, the cartoon
character Signor Bonaventura

After the Second World War Tòfano continued to act, working with important directors such as Luchino Visconti and Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan performing in plays by Ibsen and Shakespeare. He also took parts in plays by Molière and Goldoni at the Teatro dei Satiri in Rome.

Tòfano has a string of film and television credits to his name, his most successful films including Goffredo Alessandrini’s 1934 comedy Seconda B, the Raffaello Matarazzo drama Giù il Sipario (1940) and Partner (1968), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and based on the on the novel The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He continued to act until his death at the age of 87, having survived his wife, Rosetta, a costume designer he married in 1923, by 13 years.

Before 1935, Rome University's base was in
the Palazzo della Sapienza, near Piazza Navona
 

Travel tip:

Rome University, where Tòfano studied, is often known simply as La Sapienza, which means ‘the wisdom’.  It can trace its origins back to 1303, when it was opened by Pope Boniface VIII as the first pontifical university. In the 19th century the University broadened its outlook and started to offer more than just ecclesiastical studies. Today’s campus was built near the Termini railway station in 1935. Rome University now caters for more than 112,000 students.

Travel tip:

The Piccolo Teatro della Città di Milano, where Tòfano performed regularly after it was founded in 1947, was Italy’s first permanent repertory company. It now operates from three venues in Milan, the Teatro Grassi, the Teatro Studio and the Teatro Strehler.

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Graziella Sciutti - operatic soprano

Vivacious performer who became a successful director

Graziella Sciutti became an opera star in the 1950s

The operatic soprano Graziella Sciutti, a singer known for a vivacious stage presence and engaging personality who excelled in the work of Mozart, Puccini and Verdi, was born on this day in 1927 in Turin.

The daughter of an organist and pianist, she grew up in a bilingual household, speaking both Italian and her mother’s native tongue, French. Her early childhood was spent in Geneva in Switzerland before the family moved to Rome, so that she could attend the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, which is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious musical institutions.

Sciutti wanted to play the piano like her father but it became clear she had a notable voice and she caught the eye as a soloist when she was still a student.

She was asked at the last moment to appear in a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, the up-and-coming Austrian who would become one of the greatest conductors in the world.  It was a daunting prospect, forced on her at short notice after another singer became ill, but she rose to the challenge and won accolades as a result. 

It led her to be spotted by Gabriel Dussurget, founder and leading light of the Festival at Aix-en-Provence Festival, who had enough confidence in his new discovery to cast her in 1951 in the one-woman opera, Menotti's The Telephone, a role regarded as a test for a young, immature singer.

Sciutti's vivacious character made her
a popular performer in Italy and beyond

Her ambition at that stage was to be a concert singer and she was unsure at first whether she could master the dramatics of opera, yet she was to return to Aix many times. It was there, in fact, that she began to acquire her association with the heroines of Mozart, singing Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), Despina in Così Fan Tutte and Zerlina in Don Giovanni with distinction.  

In 1954, she made her debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, playing Rosina in Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). In subsequent years she enchanted audiences as Nannetta in Verdi's Falstaff and again visited the Mozart roles of Susanna and Despina.

Sciutti undertook the role of Carolina in Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto (The Secret Marriage) in the inaugural performances of the Piccola Scala, the small theatre in Milan that adjoined the famous Teatro allaScala, in 1955.  At one stage she was nicknamed ‘the Callas of the Piccola Scala’.

Some critics felt her voice to be too thin for her to be seen as one of the great sopranos but she had the technique to project to all corners of the theatre and, for all her early doubts, she had the acting skills to make up for any shortcomings in her voice. Pretty and petite in comparison with many singers, the innocence, perkiness and coquetry demanded of many of her roles seemed to come naturally.

Her debut at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden followed in 1956. In 1961 she appeared on stage in America for the first time at the San Francisco Opera, going on to make her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York soon afterwards.

Sciutti excelled in the arias of Mozart, Bellini and others

At the Vienna State Opera she sang many of her best roles, including Nannetta in a staging of Falstaff conducted by Leonard Bernstein and directed by Luchino Visconti.

Sciutti was a regular at the Salzburg Festival for 20 years, her Mozart interpretations always in demand. Her final appearance there came in 1972 as Norina in Donizetti's Don Pasquale, conducted by Riccardo Muti.

Her voice proved enduring enough to appear at Glyndebourne even at the age of 50 as Elle in Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. This was a production she also directed, paving the way for a new career.

She directed Figaro and L'Elisir d'Amore for Canadian Opera and in 1983 her production of Puccini’s La Bohème at the Juilliard School won praise.  A year later she directed at the Met for the first time. Her 1995 staging of La Bohème at the New York City Opera won her an Emmy Award after it was broadcast on live television.

Always eager to pass on her knowledge to opera students and would-be performers, she taught at both the Royal College of Music in London and the Lyric Centre in Chicago.

She married an American singer, Robert Wahoske, in 1955, but they divorced in 1960.  She died in Geneva in 2001, a few days before what would have been her 74^th birthday, and was survived by her daughter, Susanna.

The historic headquarters of the Accademia
was in central Rome, near Piazza di Spagna

Travel tip:

Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia is one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, founded by a papal bull (public decree) issued by Pope Sixtus V in 1585. Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of music. Its historical headquarters was in Via Vittoria, not far from Piazza di Spagna, but since 2003 it has been headquartered in Viale Pietro de Coubertin at the Renzo Piano-designed Parco della Musica in Rome. It has had a permanent symphony orchestra and choir since 1895. Alumni include Beniamino Gigli, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ennio Morricone and Cecilia Bartoli.

An audience at the Piccola Scala in 1978

Travel tip:

The Piccola Scala, next to Teatro alla Scala, the opera house in Milan considered to be one of the world’s great opera venues, was opened in 1955 as a theatre dedicated to ancient works that were suited to a fairly intimate setting.  It had room for no more than 600 people. As well as Cimarosa's Matrimonio Segreto, early productions included works by Handel and Monteverdi. Later it staged operas by contemporary composers, including Nino Rota, who was better known for his film music but actually wrote the score for 11 operas.  Sadly, the theatre closed in 1985 after the capacity was reduced to 350 because of new regulations, too small to make it economically viable.

More reading:

How mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has helped revive lesser-known composers

Giacomo Puccini - musical genius who assumed Verdi's mantle as Italy's greatest

Maestro Muti shows no signs of slowing down

Also on this day:

1598: The birth of astronomer Giovanni Riccioli

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