Ottorino Respighi
    

(b. Bologna, July 9, 1879; d. Rome, April 18, 1936)

Italian composer. His orchestral works - including suites for chamber ensemble, as well as some of the largest and gaudiest symphonic blockbusters ever written— stand as the most successful contributions to the repertoire by any Italian of the 20th century.















Born into a musical family, he received his musical education at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna. Between 1900 and 1903, while working as an orchestral violist in Russia, he had the opportunity to study composition and orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov, whose colorful palette would have a profound impact on his own approach to scoring. (In 1902, he studied briefly, though without much benefit, with Max Bruch in Berlin.) From 1903 to 1908 he continued to make his living as a violist, playing in orchestras as well as in the Magellini Quartet, while composing on the side. In 1913, after failing to land a permanent teaching position in Bologna, he was appointed professor of composition at the Liceo Musicale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he would live the rest of his life; in 1919 he married one of his students, the singer and composer Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo (1894-1996). In 1932 the government of Mussolini honored him with a membership in the Reale Accademia d’Italia. While the extraordinary popularity of his symphonic poems Fontane di Roma (Fountains of Rome; 1915-16) and Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome; 1923-24) made it unnecessary for him to hold a “day job” during the 1920s and 1930s, he nonetheless served as director of the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia (successor to the Liceo) from 1923 to 1926, and taught an advanced composition class at Rome’s prestigious Accademia di Santa Cecilia until the year before he died. From the mid-1920s he traveled extensively, appearing frequently as pianist and conductor in performances of his own music.
 

After Puccini, Respighi was the most famous Italian composer of his day. Though he dutifully and repeatedly sought success in the operatic sphere, none of the eight works he completed in the genre has attained a place in the repertoire; some have never even been performed. As an orchestral colorist, however, he was unsurpassed. He deservedly achieved worldwide fame with Fontane di Roma, whose brilliant pictorialism he trumped in the even more successful Pini di Roma, complete with a recorded twittering nightingale and offstage flugelhorns depicting the advance of a triumphal consular army.  Both works partake of the harmonic subtleties of Debussy, Ravel, and Richard Strauss, but are decked out in splashy orchestrations that recall the Russians—Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky in particular. Following the breakthrough with Fontane di Roma, Respighi showed his range in scores reflecting a variety of approaches: In 1917 he produced the first of three collections of Antiche danze ed arie per liuto (Ancient Dances and Airs for Lute), spirited transcriptions for small orchestra of Italian Renaissance lute pieces; in 1918, he wrote a breezily scored ballet for Diaghilev called La boutique fantasque, based on music by Rossini. The luminously scored Vertrate di chiesa (Church Windows) and Trittico botti-celliano (Botticelli Triptych) appeared in 1925-27, followed in 1928 by the sumptuous Impressioni brasiliane (Brazilian Impressions) and in 1932 by the unabashedly opulent ballet Belkis, regina de Saba (Belkis, Queen of Sheba), a tour de force of symphonic belly dance that repays Respighi’s debt to Rimsky-Korsakov with exuberant interest.

Respighi had an intimate side as well, which he showed in II tramonto (1918), a lovely chamber cantata (text by Shelley) for mezzo-soprano and %% string quartet, and in his Violin Sonata (1917). His pronounced antiquarian streak is exhibited not only in the Antiche danze ed arie but in a number of works that make use of plainchant and church modes—including Tre preludi sopra melodie gregoriani (1919-21), the Concerto gregoriano (1921) for violin and orchestra, the Concerto in modo misolidio (1925) for piano and orchestra, and Detail from the Quartetto dorico (1924) for string quartet—as well as in the charming 1928 orchestral suite Gli uccelli (The Birds), based on Baroque keyboard pieces. Whether in works such as these, where his touch was light as a feather, or in more grandiose efforts—not least Feste romane (1928), the over-the-top three-quel to Fontane di Roma and Pini di Roma— Respighi showed his mettle as an orches-trator, developing an arsenal of effects that Hollywood soundtrackers have been looting ever since.