7 August

Alfredo Catalani - composer

Music from Loreley and La Wally lives on 

Opera composer Alfredo Catalani died on this day in 1893 in Milan at the age of just 39.  He is best remembered for his operas, Loreley, written in 1890, and La Wally, written in 1892, which are still to this day passionately admired by music experts.  Catalani was born in Lucca in Tuscany in 1854 and went to train at the Milan Conservatoire.  His work is said to show traces of Wagner and his style sometimes resembled that of Massenet and Puccini but his early operas were not successful.  Loreley premiered at the Teatro Regio in Turin in 1890. Later it was performed at Covent Garden in London in 1907 and in Chicago in 1919.  La Wally was first performed at Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1892 to great acclaim.  The opera is best known for its aria, Ebben? Ne andro lontana - Well then, I’ll go far away - sung when Wally decides to leave her home forever.  Read more…

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Giorgetto Giugiaro - automobile designer

Creative genius behind many of the world’s most popular cars

Giorgetto Giugiaro, who has been described as the most influential automotive designer of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1938 in Garessio, a village in Piedmont about 100km (62 miles) south of Turin.  In a career spanning more than half a century, Giugiaro and his companies have designed around 200 different cars, from the high-end luxury of Aston Martin, Ferrari, Maserati and DeLorean to the mass production models of Fiat, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Daewoo and SEAT.  The Volkswagen Golf and the Fiat Panda, two of the most successful popular cars of all time, were Giugiaro’s concepts.  In 1999, a jury of more than 120 journalists from around the world named Giugiaro “Designer of the Century.”  Giugiaro’s father and grandfather both painted in oils and Giugiaro became passionately interested in art. Read more…

Gerry Scotti - television show host

One-time politician who presented Chi vuol essere milionario?

Gerry Scotti, the record-breaking host of Italy’s equivalent of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?  and one of the most familiar faces on Italian television, was born on this day in 1956 in Camporinaldo, an agricultural village in Lombardy.  The presenter, whose career in television began in the 1980s, was also a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies between 1987 and 1992, having won the Lombardy 1 district in the Milan college for Bettino Craxi’s Italian Socialist Party.  But he is best known as the presenter of many shows on Italian television, mainly quiz shows. He fronted Chi vuol essere milionario? when it launched in Italy in 2000 and continued in the role after Italy’s entry into the single currency in 2002 required the show to make a subtle change of name. Originally Chi vuol essere miliardario – billionaire – the title was changed to milionario – millionaire – with a new top prize of 1,000,000 euro replacing the 1,000,000,000 lire of the original. Read more… 

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Vincenzo Scamozzi – architect

Follower of Palladio had his own distinctive style

The architect and writer Vincenzo Scamozzi, whose work in the second half of the 16th century had a profound effect on the landscape of Vicenza and Venice, died on this day in 1616 in Venice. Scamozzi’s influence was later to spread far beyond Italy as a result of his two-volume work, L’idea dell’Architettura Universale - The idea of a universal architecture - which was one of the last Renaissance works about the theory of architecture. Trained by his father, Scamozzi went on to study in Venice and Rome and also travelled in Europe. The classical influence of Andrea Palladio is evident in many of the palaces, villas and churches that Scamozzi designed in Vicenza, Venice and Padua.  His work influenced English neoclassical architects such as Inigo Jones and many others who came after him.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890-1915, by Alan Mallach 

With the passing of giants such as Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and with Verdi in decline, Italian opera at the end of the 19th century appeared to be on the wane. Then, suddenly, with the legendary premiere of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana in 1890, Italian opera entered into a period of enormous artistic creativity and commercial success. In The Autumn of Italian Opera, Alan Mallach chronicles the last years of Verdi and Catalani and the emergence of the Giovane Scuola (young school) of Italian composers led by the superstar composers Puccini and Mascagni, and including such lesser-known but important figures as Giordano, Cilèa, and Leoncavallo. Mallach carries their story through to the first World War and a new generation of composers, including Zandonai and Wolf-Ferrari, through the rise of musical modernism in Italy early in the twentieth century. In doing so he offers opera scholars and aficionados a detailed and richly textured perspective on an important but widely misunderstood period in Italian opera. Mallach places the emergence of the Giovane Scuola firmly within the great social and political upheavals of the time, which brought previously unexplored themes and exotic settings into the Opera House. The Autumn of Italian Opera is a landmark and highly readable work of scholarship that sheds light on the last great era of Italian opera.

Alan Mallach is a senior fellow with the Center for Community Progress in Washington, DC, who has worked in, studied and written about cities in the United States and elsewhere for over fifty years. He is an accomplished pianist, and has also published two books about Italian opera, including Pietro Mascagni and His Operas. 

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