Stefano Golinelli

Stefano Golinelli (b Bologna, 26 Oct 1818; d Bologna, 3 July 1891). Italian composer and pianist. He studied the piano and counterpoint in Bologna with B.

Donelli, and also had brief instruction in composition with Vaccai. In 1842 Ferdinand Hiller was passing through Bologna and advised Golinelli to take up a concert career; he considered him to be the best Italian pianist of his day and also praised him as a composer. Schumann himself was interested in Golinelli’s music and commended his 12 studi in the 1844 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Golinelli subsequently made brilliantly successful concert tours of Italy, performing in Naples, Florence, Milan, Genoa and Palermo; he also toured France, Germany and England, where he performed with Piatti and Sivori at the London Musical Union in 1851. He acquired a reputation throughout Europe both as a performer and as a composer, reaching his peak during the years 1845 to 1855; some acclaimed him ‘the Italian Bach’. In 1840 Rossini nominated him professor of piano at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, a post that he held until his retirement in 1870, after which he devoted himself entirely to composition.

One of the leading exponents of the 19th-century Italian piano school, Golinelli wrote more than 200 piano pieces. They are elegant and melodically inventive, particularly when cast in a short, even miniature, form. Their graceful lines and fresh harmonies contribute to their lyrical, Romantic character not immune from elegiac sentimentality and recalling some of Chopin’s more overworked devices. The longer works show a closer and at times overwhelming similarity to German models; in other works the rapid, manneristic sketch predominates. In the whole of his output a didactic aim is often apparent, with a pseudo-Classical, rather solid pianistic style that recalls Clementi and Beethoven. Golinelli was one of the first to repudiate the vacuous tricks of virtuosity particularly prevalent at the time in fantasias and variations on opera themes; his main achievements were to forge musical links between northern European and Italian cultural spheres, and to restore to Italian music a certain classicism and sense of tradition.