Ferdinando Fontana – journalist and playwright

Prolific writer produced the words for Puccini’s early operas 

Ferdinando Fontana (left), with Puccini
in a photograph taken in around 1885

The dramatist Ferdinando Fontana, who is remembered chiefly for being the writer of the libretti for the first two operas written by Giacomo Puccini, was born on this day in 1850 in Milan.

He became a journalist as a young man to help provide for his younger sisters, and while he was working for the newspaper Corriere di Milano he wrote two plays in Milanese dialect which were both successes.

Through his interest in the Scapigliatura artistic movement, Fontana became a versatile writer. The word scapigliato means ‘unkempt’ or ‘dishevelled’ and the movement was the equivalent of the French Bohemian idea. Fontana also produced poems, travel books, and articles for the Milanese daily newspaper Corriere della Sera.

After being introduced by the composer Amilcare Ponchielli to the young Giacomo Puccini, he agreed to write the libretti for his early operas Le Villi and Edgar.

Fontana had been forced to abandon his studies after the death of his mother and had to go to work to keep himself and his sisters. After having a series of menial jobs, he got a job as a proof reader for Corriere di Milano, where he first became involved with journalism and literature.

He travelled from New York to San Francisco with a journalist colleague and while he was in America he met the editor of an Italian language newspaper, to which he later contributed features.

Fontana wrote a libretto for an opera, Odio, that was being planned by Ponchielli but never actually composed, after which he wrote two libretti for the composer Alberto Franchetti.

Puccini was studying under Ponchielli at the Milan Conservatory at the time and the composer invited the young Puccini to stay at his villa, where he introduced him to Ferdinando Fontana.

The music and libretto for Le Villi,
Puccini's debut operatic work

The writer’s first libretto for Puccini was for Le Villi, Puccini’s first stage work, which was a big success after its premiere at Teatro Dal Verme in Milan in 1884.

Fontana went on to have a prolific writing output, and an article in 1886 in La Stampa recorded that at that time, the music for 13 libretti by Fontana were in the process of being composed as operas by 12 different composers.

It was while staying in an hotel in Caprino Bergamasco run by a fellow librettist that Fontana wrote the libretto for Puccini’s opera Edgar, which premiered in 1889. 

This, unfortunately, was not as successful as Le Villi. Puccini made several revisions but could not redeem the opera, which he eventually effectively disowned, although he blamed himself as much as Fontana.

The publisher Guilio Ricordi, who had commissioned a second opera from Puccini as a result of the success of his first, came under pressure to drop him after the disappointing reception for Edgar, which might have spelled the end of Puccini’s career. Happily, Ricordi stuck with him and was rewarded with Manon Lescaut, for which the libretto was written by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, which proved to be one of his most popular and enduring works. 

Fontana also translated foreign libretti for performances in Italy, including Franz Lehar’s Die lustige Witwe - The Merry Widow. 

Fontana was a committed socialist and took part in the demonstrations in Milan in 1889, which led to the massacre of protestors by troops led by General Fiorenzo Bava-Beccaris.

The massacre was part of a crackdown on Milanese citizens protesting about rising food prices, particularly bread, which had become so expensive due to wheat shortages that it was unaffordable for many families.  Official government figures put the number of deaths at 80, although some estimates claimed up to 400 people may have been killed.

During the repressions that followed the massacres, Fontana fled to Switzerland where he settled in Montagnola, a small town near Lugano. He was supported by local Liberal radicals, but as his health deteriorated, he reduced his literary output.  He died in Lugano in 1919 at the age of 69.

Corriere della Sera's headquarters in Via Solferini,
its Milan offices since the early 20th century

Travel tip:

Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s main daily newspapers with a circulation of around 250,000, has had its headquarters in the same buildings In Milan since the beginning of the 20th century, and therefore it is popularly known as "the Via Solferino newspaper", after the street where it is still located, which connects Porta Garibaldi with the Brera district, about 1.5km (1 mile) north of the city’s cathedral and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. When the newspaper was founded in 1876, it was produced in a building directly facing the Galleria. Its earliest editorial offices operated right beside the Galleria’s Piazza della Scala entrance. This proximity meant that the newspaper grew up literally on the edge of Milan’s most symbolic civic space, and the two became intertwined in the city’s cultural identity. As the name indicates, it was originally an evening paper. During the Fascist regime in Italy, it broadly supported Mussolini but tried to distance itself from the deposed dictator after World War Two, for a while going under the title of Il Nuovo Corriere della Sera, a name that it kept until 1959. Nowadays, its political agenda could be described as centre-right. 

The Chiesa di San Biagio in Caprino Bergamasco,
the town where Fontana wrote his libretto for Edgar

Travel tip:

Caprino Bergamasco, where Fontana was based when he wrote the libretto for Edgar, is a quiet hill town at the southern edge of the province of Bergamo in Lombardy, made up of clusters of old stone houses against a backdrop of of gentle slopes and cultivated fields, described as a town in which life moves at a measured pace, anchored by the rhythms of agriculture. The town has viewpoints that look towards the Adda valley on one side and the first foothills of the Bergamasque Alps on the other. It is the home of the Collegio Convitto Celana, an historic seminary that has long been associated with religious education and cultural life in the area. The parish church, the Chiesa di San Biagio, has some attractive frescoes and traditional Lombard religious architecture.  Nearby attractions include the Paderno d’Adda Iron Bridge - an engineering landmark spanning the Adda River, and Montevecchia - a hilltop village and nature reserve offering panoramic views and hiking trails.

More reading:

How Puccini took the baton from Giuseppe Verdi as Italy’s most celebrated composer

Giulio Ricordi, the music publisher who took the credit for ‘discovering’ Puccini

How Milan’s bread riots led to the assassination of Umberto I

Also on this day:

228: The death of Saint Martina of Rome

1629: The death of architect Carlo Maderno

1640: The death of Saint Hyacintha Mariscotti

1721: The birth of Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto

1935: The birth of actress Elsa Martinelli

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Alberto Franchetti - opera composer

Caruso sang his arias on first commercial record in 1902

Alberto Franchetti enjoyed his peak years in terms
of popular success around the turn of the century

The opera composer Alberto Franchetti, some of whose works were performed by the great tenor Enrico Caruso for his first commercial recording, was born on this day in 1860 in Turin.

Caruso had been taken with Franchetti’s opera, Germania, when he sang the male lead role in the opera’s premiere at Teatro alla Scala in Milan in March 1902.

A month later, Caruso famously made his first recording on a phonograph in a Milan hotel room and chose a number of arias from Germania and critics noted that he sang the aria Ah vieni qui… No, non chiuder gli occhi with a particular sweetness of voice.

A friend and rival of Giacomo Puccini, Franchetti had a style said to have been influenced by the German composers Wagner and Meyerbeer. He was sometimes described as the "Meyerbeer of modern Italy."

Despite the exposure the success of Germania and the association with Caruso brought him, Franchetti’s operas slipped quite quickly into obscurity.

Blame for that can be levelled at least in part at the Fascist Racial Laws of 1938, which made life and work very difficult for Italy's Jewish population.

Franchetti (left), pictured with his friends and fellow
composers Pietro Mascagni and Giacomo Puccini

Franchetti's works were banned from performance during Fascist rule. His fellow composer Pietro Mascagni made a personal plea for tolerance on his behalf directly to Benito Mussolini, but it fell on deaf ears.

Franchetti was the son of Baron Raimondo Franchetti, a Jewish nobleman. He studied in Venice, then at the Munich Conservatory under Josef Rheinberger, and finally in Dresden under Felix Draeseke.

His first major success occurred in 1888 with his opera Asrael, followed in 1892 by Cristoforo Colombo, which many consider to be Franchetti's best work. It did not, however, match the popularity of Germania, the libretto for which was written by Luigi Illica, which went on to be performed worldwide.

Illica is said to have offered his libretto of Tosca to Franchetti. It is not clear why it was taken up instead by Puccini. Some opera historians believe Franchetti was working on the opera but that Puccini asked the publishing house Ricordi to let him have it and that Franchetti was persuaded that the violence in the story made it unsuitable for an opera.

Another version - thought to have the Franchetti family’s seal of authenticity - is that Franchetti waived his rights to the opera because he felt that Puccini would make a better job of it.

Franchetti’s family home in Florence was the substantial Villa Franchetti, in Via Dante Da Castiglione, a short distance from the Giardino di Boboli (Boboli Gardens), where he would host lavish banquets for his friends from the artistic world. Puccini, Mascagni and the actress Eleonora Duse were regular guests.

During his life, substantial changes were made to the property, with the addition of an annex that served as a concert and dance hall, as well as stables in the grounds.  He decorated and furnished the house with the advice of his brother, Giorgio, a wealthy art collector who at the time owned the Ca d’Oro, the sumptuous palace on the Grand Canal in Venice.

Franchetti, who was director of the Florence College of Music from 1926 to 1928, died in Viareggio in 1942 at the age of 81. His music has been revived recently with new recordings of Cristoforo Colombo and Germania by the Berlin Opera.

He was married twice and had five children, one of whom, his son Arnold Franchetti, was a member of the Italian Resistance in the Second World War before emigrating to the United States and becoming a composer as well as a professor at the University of Hartford, Connecticut.

The Villa Franchetti-Nardi as it looks today

Travel tip:

After Franchetti’s death, the Villa Franchetti had a chequered history. It was seized by the Germans, who established it as a command post, during the Second World War, by which time the family’s financial fortunes had suffered badly. After the war it was rented for a few years before being largely abandoned in 1960 and falling into a state of disrepair.  The villa, which has had the status of "Historical Residence of Italy" since 1991, was rescued from its near-dereliction by its current owner Gustavo Nardi. Now known as the Villa Franchetti-Nardi, it opened its doors as a hotel in 2009.

The beautiful facade of the Ca d'Oro on Venice's Grand Canal

Travel tip:

The Palazzo Santa Sofia, one of the older palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, is known as Ca' d'Oro - golden house - due to the gilt and polychrome external decorations which once adorned its walls. Built between 1428 and 1430 for the Contarini family, since 1927 it has been used as a museum, the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti, named after Alberto’s brother, who acquired the palace in 1894 and personally oversaw its extensive restoration, including the reconstruction of the Gothic stairway in the inner courtyard that had been controversially removed by a previous owner. In 1916, Franchetti bequeathed the Ca' d'Oro to the Italian State.

More reading:

Enrico Caruso - 'the greatest tenor of all time'

How one great opera made Pietro Mascagni immortal

The brilliant talent of Eleonora Duse

Also on this day:

1587: The birth of singer and composer Francesca Caccini

1916: The birth of actor Rossano Brazzi

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