Flavio Testi

Flavio Testi,
(b Florence, 4 Jan 1923). Italian composer and musicologist. He studied with Gedda and Peracchio at the Turin Conservatory, and took an arts degree at Milan University (1951).

He then worked for Suvini Zerboni and Ricordi while also composing, pursuing his interest in music history and working on various radio projects for the RAI. From 1972 he devoted himself to educational activities, teaching music history at the Padua Conservatory and then taking up teaching posts at the Milan and Florence conservatories.

Testi’s first vocal and instrumental works date from the mid-1950s. In La crocifissione, whose première at La Scala in 1954 attracted considerable attention, the influence of Stravinsky emerged strongly, along with an already personal dramatic sensibility, evident equally in such orchestral works as the Concerto (1954) and Divertimento (1956). The expressive vein of La crocifissione was taken up again in the Stabat mater (1957) and, much transformed, in New York: oficina y denuncia (1964). This García Lorca setting, with its rough-hewn blocks of sound, denounces the dehumanizing environment of the modern metropolis. The work coincided with the Testi’s conversion to the Marxist cause, and was followed by other compositions highlighting social and political concerns, including the Neruda setting Canto a las madres de los milicianos muertos (1967) and Cori di Santiago (1975). Testi’s operas evolve towards junctures of violent scenic-musical realism. L’albergo dei poveri (1966) displays a clearly characteristic attitude of rough dramatic purpose, confirmed in Il sosia (1981) and Riccardo III (1987), works which probe intensely into the psychology of their characters. In general Testi’s style, rather than adhering to the radicalisms of the post-Webern avant garde, re-elaborates and reflects, not without eclecticism, certain crucial 20th-century achievements, from Stravinsky and Bartók to early Schoenberg.