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Biography of Ottorino RespighiName: Ottorino RespighiBirth Date: 1879 Death Date: 1936 Place of Birth: N/A Nationality: Italian Gender: Male Occupations: composer Ottorino Respighi The rather conservative eclecticism of the music of the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) made it immediately popular. His skill in writing for orchestra was unsurpassed.The father of Ottorino Respighi was a professional musician and teacher at Bologna's Liceo Musicale, where Ottorino received his first musical training. He was a gifted violinist, and it was not until after his graduation from the conservatory that he definitely decided to be a composer rather than a violin virtuoso. Realizing that he needed a broader musical background than that supplied at home, he went to St. Petersburg to study with Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and later to Berlin to study with Max Bruch, a rather conservative German composer.After his return to Italy, Respighi was appointed professor of composition at the prestigious Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome, and in 1923 he became its director. Tours of Europe and the United States in 1925, 1928, and 1932, in which …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and Richard Strauss as well. In the third section of the Pines, Respighi introduces a recording of an actual nightingale's song into the score.Other compositions of Respighi are the operas The Sunken Bell, produced at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1928, Maria Egiziaca (1932), and La Fiamma (1934); a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, La Boutique fantasque (1919), written on themes by Gioacchino Rossini; and a Concerto Gregoriano (1922) for violin and orchestra, based on Gregorian chant. Further Reading There is no biography of Respighi in English, but his wife, Elsa Respighi, wrote a memoir, Ottorino Respighi (trans. 1962). He is discussed in Paul Collaer, A History of Modern Music (1955; trans. 1961), and David Ewen, The World of Twentieth-century Music (1968).Alvera, Pierluigi., Respighi, New York, N.Y.: Treves Pub. Co., 1986.Ottorino Respighi, Torino: ERI, 1985. Respighi, Elsa, Fifty years of a life in music, 1905-1955, Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1993. |