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Composer of the Month - November, 2003

Ottorino Respighi, 1879-1936
by Daryl Lee

Ottorino Respighi was born in 1879 in Bologna, Italy, into a family of trained musicians. At the age of twelve he began his own formal musical education at the Liceo Musicale, where he studied for ten years, taking his diploma in violin performance. At the end of this period, he made summer visits to St. Petersburg, where he studied with Nicolay Rimsky-Korsakov.  From there, he moved to Berlin and studied with Max Bruch. During these years, he was a performer as well as a composer, playing violin, viola, and piano. He finally settled down in Rome in 1913 to a life of composition and education.  As an educator, he achieved the status of director of Santa Cecilia Conservatory from 1924 to 1926. He cut short his tenure there to pursue full-time his composition and performance career.

He was a prolific composer in a variety of genres. His works include eight operas, two ballets, thirteen symphonies, eight concerti, five choral works, and eleven pieces for chamber orchestra. Respighi bridged the past and the present with his great love and respect for older musical forms.  Concerto gregoriano (1921) captured the nature of Gregorian plainchant in a violin concerto.  Many regard him as the last significant Italian composer; the irony is that he built his collection on the forms of centuries before.

The mainstream of Respighi's compositions were the symphonic poems, most often capturing the spirit of some well-recognized Italian theme, such as Pini di Roma (The Pines of Rome) and Fontane di Roma (The Fountains of Rome).

This year's MOS Christmas program includes Respighi's Laud to the Nativity, which uses a text written by Jacopone de Todi , a 13^th century Franciscan monk who had dedicated his life to writing praise poetry (laude) after the tragic loss of his pious wife.  As with much of his symphonic composition, this work reaches into the past to include forms of madrigal, chant, and melodic forms similar to those of three hundred years earlier.

Respighi's wife, Elsa, survived him by sixty years.  Those sixty years were an extension of the years they had shared.  She had given up a promising career of her own as singer-composer, in order to assist her husband in his career. After his death, she continued to do so, promoting his work and establishing the Respighi Fund in Venice to maintain interest in his life and works.

For further reading on Ottorino Respighi:
http://www.sfsymphony.org/templates/composer.asp?nodeid=246
http://www.cesil.com/0898/enbass08.htm
http://www.operaitaliana.com/autori/biografia.asp?ID=29
http://www.classicalarchives.com/bios/codm/respighi.html
http://www.classical-composers.org/cgi-bin/ccd.cgi?comp=respighi
http://www.karadar.com/Dictionary/respighi.html
http://www.bcg.org/Program_Notes/Lecture/Joy.html

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