Giulio Viozzi

Viozzi, Giulio
(b Trieste, 5 July 1912; d Verona, 29 Nov 1984). Italian composer. Of the Italian composers born between the ‘generation of the 1880s’ and the postwar avant garde, Viozzi has a place of special interest for the quantity and quality of his large, diverse output.

At the beginning of the 1950s, he moved from an initial involvement in chamber music towards theatre and orchestral music, scoring an important and immediate double success with the comic opera Allamistakeo, performed at La Scala under Maazel and at the recommendation of Sabata, and the orchestral Ditirambo. These works made clear the personal nature of Viozzi's musical language, in which references to Straussian vitality, the folk palette of Bartók and the sonic exuberance of Stravinsky and Prokofiev are combined with a sturdy rhythmic force and, even more, the evocation of the magical and surreal. This linguistic cocktail served the composer extremely well both in opera, not only in Allamistakeo, but also in his tragic masterpiece, Il sasso pagano, and in orchestral and chamber music.