Marco Enrico Bossi: Feuillet d’album Op. 111, for Cello and Piano

Composer(s)

Marco Enrico Bossi (b Salò, Lake Garda, 25 April 1861; d Atlantic Ocean, 20 Feb 1925). Italian composer, organist and pianist. Born into a family of organists, he studied with his father, Pietro Bossi (1834–96), then at the Liceo Musicale, Bologna (1871–3), and at the Milan Conservatory (1873–81), where his teachers included Ponchielli. In 1881 he was appointed organist at Como Cathedral, and in due course he won worldwide renown as one of the finest organists of the day. He moved to Naples in 1890 as teacher of harmony and the organ at the conservatory, later becoming director of the Licei Musicali in Venice (1895–1902) and Bologna (1902–11) and of the Liceo (Conservatorio from 1919) di S Cecilia, Rome (1916–23). He died at sea while returning from New York.

Bossi’s few completed operas had little success; but he won lasting respect, mainly in Italy, for his instrumental and choral compositions. Internationally he is remembered largely for his organ pieces, the best of which (e.g. the widely performed G minor Scherzo op.49 no.2) are still very effective. However, the Canticum canticorum was particularly highly praised in its time, in Germany as well as Italy. Today the work perhaps impresses more by sincerity and solid craftsmanship than originality, but the opening pages of Il paradiso perduto – a representation of chaos, with pulseless rhythms, bare 5ths and flattened 7ths – show that Bossi was capable of vivid poetic evocation, while Giovanna d’Arco, the most dramatic of his choral works, suggests that he had more sense of the theatre than his operas revealed. Among his orchestral pieces, a vigorous if slightly academic Organ Concerto and the elegant rather Wolf-Ferrari-like Intermezzi goldoniani have continued to be revived occasionally in Italy; and of the chamber compositions, the two violin sonatas have proved especially worthy of renewed attention: the profoundly expressive, subtle-textured slow movement of the second is one of Bossi's most inspired utterances.

With Martucci and Sgambati, Bossi led the revival of Italian non-operatic music at the turn of the century, and, like them, he turned to northern Europe for the main sources of his style: there are signs of the influences – not always fully assimilated – of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Franck, Brahms and (in more adventurously chromatic pieces such as the Konzertstück op.130) Reger. In his last years he showed little sympathy with the radical young; but such new departures as the very refined chromaticism of the Five Pieces for piano op.137 (1914), or the ladders of perfect 4ths in Santa Caterina da Siena, reveal that he was not wholly unreceptive to the new sounds of the 20th century.