Valentino Bucchi

Valentino Bucchi(b Florence, 29 Nov 1916; d Rome, 9 May 1976). Italian composer. He studied with Frazzi, Corrado Barbieri and Dallapiccola at the Florence Conservatory, where he was awarded the diploma in composition in 1944; he also took a degree in philosophy at the University of Florence.

From 1945 he taught in the conservatories of Florence, Venice and Perugia, and he was later artistic director of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana (1958–60) and director of the Florence Conservatory (from 1974). He worked as a music critic for various daily newspapers, including La nazione and Avanti!.

Non-conformist in character with an ironic burlesque streak, Bucchi has occupied a unique position in Italian 20th-century music. Equally removed from the avant garde and from tradition, he developed a compositional technique based on the play of permutations, a collage of elements drawn from a broad, heterogeneous spectrum, mixing classical and popular, old and new features. Following a series of pieces inspired by the tragedy of World War II and the Resistance (La dolce pena, Pianto delle creature, Cori per la pietà morta) characterized by vehement vocal phrases and violent juxtapositions of voices and instruments, Bucchi went on to use more moderate means of expression. In 1952 he turned to early music, re-writing Li jeus de Robin et de Marion by Adam de la Halle and Laudes evangelii, a kind of sacred stage work which draws on the melodies of medieval laudes. With these works, Bucchi made a decisive move towards simplifying his musical language; this led both to further achievements in the theatrical domain and also to a small number of instrumental compositions of a concertante type, essentially playful in character, for example the Concerto grottesco for double bass and strings (1967). From this point on, Bucchi formed his own personal style based upon an aesthetics of simplicity, defined by d’Amico as using ‘minimum means’.

Bucchi’s interest in the theatre, which marks all his work, had a particularly fruitful result in the one-act Il contrabbasso (1954), based on a Chekhov short story. The strange narrative is matched by Bucchi’s acute sense of irony, together with an underlying bitterness and a disconcertingly simple musical language. In his next operatic piece, Una notte in paradiso (1960), a treatment of an Italian folktale collected by Italo Calvino, the humorous style reflects popular culture: an approach already seen, if with a surrealist character, in the evocation of folk myth in Il giuoco del barone (1939). In Una notte, Bucchi experiments with a fusion of technical devices and stylistic ‘levels’ – popular song, jazz, art music – which is also fundamental to Il coccodrillo (1970), after Dostoyevsky. In this, his last work for the theatre, Bucchi eschews a conventional dramatic sequence. Instead the action is split into 32 episodes and matched by a multiplicity of artistic means: spoken sections, rhythmic recitative, song, orchestral music, recorded sound, the projection of filmed sequences, mime and dance. In his works of the 1970s, Bucchi abandoned montage techniques, and devoted himself to exploring new sound worlds, including microintervals and clusters. His final compositions, Lettres de la religieuse portugaise and Colloquio corale, draw the threads of all his previous works, including the expressive tension of the postwar operas, together.