Rossini, Donizetti, Ponchielli, Cilea, Golinelli, Fumagalli, Catalani: 19th-Century Italian Music for Piano Four Hands

Duo Morelli-Simonacci: Gabriella Morelli and Giancarlo Simonacci both studied at the “Santa Cecilia” Conservatoire in Rome, where they were born, later specializing with Carlo Zecchi at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.
Since their firt appearance together, alongside the traditional repertoire they have made a name for themselves as promoters and interpretes of lesser-known works. As such they have often provided listeners with the first ever perrformances in modern times. They also pay particular attention to contemporary music, and many of today’s composers have dedicated works to them.
They regularly perfom at important festivals and concert cycles, both in Italy and abroad. They have numerous recordings for RAI, Discoteca di Stato italiana, Vatican Radio, and for the Fonotipia, Edipan, Irtem. Mr. Classic, Domanimusica and Brilliant Classics.
They have taught at the Conservatoires of Sassari, Frosinone and Rome.

Alfredo Catalani (1854-1893) was an Italian composer born in Lucca. After studying in his native city, Paris and Milan, he became an important figure in Italian opera in the generation before Puccini. His best-known stage works include Loreley and La Wally. His music combines Italian lyricism with an interest in the orchestral and dramatic language of northern Europe.

Amilcare Ponchielli: (b Paderno Fasolaro [now Paderno Ponchielli], 31 Aug 1834; d Milan, 17 Jan 1886). Italian composer. He was the most important opera composer (Verdi apart) between the mid-19th century and the advent of the so-called ‘Giovane Scuola’.

Francesco Cilea: (b Palmi, Reggio Calabria, 23 July 1866; dVarazze, nr Savona, 20 Nov 1950). Italian composer and teacher. The son of a prominent lawyer, he was intended by his father for the same profession; however, the influence of Francesco Florimo, the famous archivist and friend of Bellini, procured him entry to the Naples Conservatory in 1879, where his teachers included Paolo Serrao, Beniamino Cesi and Giuseppe Martucci, and his fellow pupil Umberto Giordano. There he made rapid progress, becoming a maestrino in 1885. His Suite for orchestra (1887) was awarded a government prize and on 9 February 1889, his final year, his opera Gina was performed at the conservatory. Despite a poor libretto the editor Sonzogno thought sufficiently well of it to commission from him an opera on a fashionable low-life subject. La tilda was given with moderate successs at the Teatro Pagliano, Florence, with Rodolfo Ferrari as conductor and with Fanny Torresani in the title role. Sonzogno included it in his Italian opera season mounted later that year in Vienna, where it earned the gratifying approval of Hanslick. Cilea spent three years on the composition of his next opera, L’arlesiana, to a libretto based on Alphonse Daudet’s play, for which Bizet had supplied incidental music. The text of Rosa Mamai’s aria (‘Esser madre è un inferno’) was provided by Grazia Pierantoni, the wife of the senator in whose house Cilea was staying at the time. The opera was well received at its première at Sonzogno’s Teatro Lirico, Milan, where it helped to launch Caruso on his international career. Not until the following year, however, did L’arlesiana achieve its definitive three-act form.

In 1900 Cilea began work on his most famous opera, Adriana Lecouvreur, whose subject appealed to him because of its 18th-century ambience and its mixture of comedy and pathos. The première proved another triumph for Caruso as well as for the composer. At a season of operas mounted by Sonzogno at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, in 1904, Alfred Bruneau singled out Adriana Lecouvreur as the worthiest product of the Italian ‘giovane scuola’. A projected collaboration with Gabriele D’Annunzio on Francesca da Rimini came to nothing owing to Sonzogno’s unwillingness to meet the poet’s financial demands. In his search for a subject that would offer a choral dimension Cilea turned to Gloria, a story of star-crossed lovers set in 14th-century Siena at the time of the siege. Despite the advocacy of Toscanini the opera was cooly received and failed to circulate; nor did a revised version of 1932 to a new text by Ettore Moschini fare substantially better. A last operatic attempt,Ritorno ad amore, foundered on Renato Simoni’s failure to complete the libretto. From then on Cilea ceased to compose for the stage. His only other large-scale work was the ‘Poema sinfonico’ Il canto della vita for tenor, chorus and orchestra, written to a text by Sem Benelli in commemoration of the Verdi centenary in 1913. The previous year Leopoldo Mugnone had conducted a revival of L’arlesianain Naples, for which he had persuaded the composer to enlarge the part of Vivetta and cut the aria of Rosa Mamai and her scene with L’Innocente. The result so disappointed Cilea that he withdrew the score from circulation for the next 20 years. It was not heard again until a radio transmission in 1932. The Museo Cilea in Palmi contains the manuscript of an unpublished ‘Intermezzo arlesiana’ dated 1938.

Until his retirement in 1935 Cilea pursued a distinguished career in musical education. He taught harmony and the piano at the Naples Conservatory from (1890–92), and held the chair of harmony and composition at the Istituto Reale (later the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini) in Florence (1896–1904). In 1913 he assumed the directorship of the Palermo Conservatory, moving to that of the Naples Conservatory, a post which he held for nearly 20 years. He was elected to the Academy in 1938. Though justifiably proud of his record as a teacher, he regarded it as secondary to his operatic career, which he believed to have been blighted by the intrigues of others.

More of an all-round musician than most of his colleagues of the ‘giovane scuola’, Cilea shows a lighter touch. Besides Bellini, his chief gods were Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. An accomplished pianist, his keyboard writing is always inventive, and several of his pieces composed between the wars show an attempt to come to grips with the styles of Ravel and Casella. If his operas conform to the manner of Mascagni and his school, they never descend to brutal excess. Thematic recurrence plays an important part in them, even though the motifs themselves are rarely very theatrical. If Adriana Lecouvreur remains his most popular opera, largely due to its appeal to the aging prima donna, his best-loved single aria is the ‘Lamento di Federico’ from L’arlesiana, to this day one of the gems of the tenor repertory.

From The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Gaetano Donizetti (Bergamo, 29 November 1797–8 April 1848) was an Italian composer whose operas helped shape the bel canto repertory of the nineteenth century. He achieved international success in both comic and serious opera, developing a personal dramatic language between the operatic worlds of Rossini and Verdi.

Born into a family of modest means, he received his early musical education at the charitable school established in Bergamo by Simon Mayr, who remained his teacher, mentor and supporter. Mayr arranged further study with Stanislao Mattei in Bologna. Donizetti’s first professional operatic commission, Enrico di Borgogna, was performed in Venice in 1818. Following the success of Zoraida di Granata in Rome, he began working in Naples in 1822, maintaining a demanding succession of commissions while also writing for other Italian theatres.

Anna Bolena established his international reputation in 1830. The following decade brought such enduring works as L’elisir d’amore, Lucrezia Borgia and Lucia di Lammermoor. His writing combines melodic immediacy with a keen understanding of theatrical pace, character and vocal expression. Close collaboration with singers was central to his working methods. Although exceptionally prolific, he continually adapted his musical and dramatic approach to the requirements of different theatres, performers and audiences.

His later career extended to Paris and Vienna, with operas including La fille du régiment, La favorite, Linda di Chamounix and Don Pasquale. Alongside his operas, he composed sacred music, songs, orchestral pieces and chamber works, including string quartets and music for wind instruments. Serious illness curtailed his final years, and he returned to Bergamo before his death in 1848. His elder brother Giuseppe, a military musician who worked in Constantinople, was a different composer.

Gioacchino Rossini: (b Pesaro, 29 Feb 1792; d Passy, 13 Nov 1868). Italian composer. No composer in the first half of the 19th century enjoyed the measure of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim or artistic influence that belonged to Rossini. His contemporaries recognized him as the greatest Italian composer of his time. His achievements cast into oblivion the operatic world of Cimarosa and Paisiello, creating new standards against which other composers were to be judged. That both Bellini and Donizetti carved out personal styles is undeniable; but they worked under Rossini’s shadow, and their artistic personalities emerged in confrontation with his operas. Not until the advent of Verdi was Rossini replaced at the centre of Italian operatic life.

Polibio Fumagalli was an Italian organist, pianist, composer and teacher, a member of a distinguished family of musicians. Appointed professor of organ at the Milan Conservatory in 1873, he taught musicians including Marco Enrico Bossi and Giovanni Tebaldini. His extensive output encompasses sacred and organ music, piano works, chamber music and operatic paraphrases. His music for piano four hands includes a Divertimento on Bellini’s I puritani, Op. 92. He died in Milan in 1900.

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.