1879–1936
Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) was an Italian composer, conductor and musicologist from Bologna. He is known for the symphonic poems Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals, and for his orchestral versions of early music. For pianists he left a sonata, a nocturne and other pieces at the Intermediate+ level.
Respighi was born in Bologna on 9 July 1879 into a family that loved music and the arts. He was the youngest of three children. His father, Giuseppe, worked for the post office, played the piano well and taught music at the Philharmonic Academy of Bologna. His mother came from a family of well-known sculptors.
At first the boy showed little interest in music, which came only when he was almost eight. His father taught him the basics of piano and violin, and then he began formal violin lessons with a teacher. When that teacher struck his hand with a ruler over a mistake, he abruptly gave up the lessons, returning to them later with a more patient teacher.
One day his father came home to find him confidently playing Schumann's Symphonic Studies, a piece he had learned in secret. As a pianist, Respighi remained self-taught.
In 1891 the family moved to another flat, where Respighi had a study of his own. There he collected books and grew curious about geography, science and languages. As an adult he read literature in eleven languages.
From 1891 Respighi studied at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna. His violin and viola teacher was Federico Sarti, and his composition teacher was the school's director, Giuseppe Martucci. He also worked with the musicologist Luigi Torchi, from whom he inherited an interest in Italian music of the 16th to 18th centuries.
In June 1899 Respighi received his diploma in violin playing, performing Paganini's Le Streghe at his exam. Soon afterwards he joined the orchestra of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna and played the violin there for several seasons.
After his diploma Respighi set off for Russia. He played in the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg and for five months studied composition and orchestration with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he greatly admired. He later returned to Russia once more for performances. For a time he also worked in Moscow, and during his years in Saint Petersburg and Moscow he learned Russian.
Back in Bologna, Respighi was awarded his composition diploma. His final exam piece was the Preludio, corale e fuga, composed with advice from Rimsky-Korsakov, and it was a great success.
In Bologna Respighi performed at the Teatro Comunale and took part in the touring chamber quintet of Bruno Mugellini. He set poems by Ada Negri and Carlo Zangarini as songs for voice and piano, and Nebbie is perhaps the best known of them. In 1905 he completed Re Enzo, his first opera, a comedy.
Respighi gave concerts in Germany for a time. Working as an accompanist at the singing school of the Hungarian soprano Etelka Gerster strongly influenced his later vocal music. His version of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna for voice and orchestra, finished in 1906, brought him his first success abroad when it was performed in Berlin in 1908. The conductor Arthur Nikisch arranged a concert in which it was performed with the singer Julia Culp.
That success encouraged Respighi to make more versions of older music. His opera Semirâma had its first night in November 1910 at Bologna's Teatro Comunale and met with considerable success; no earlier work of his had been professionally staged. He then took over Torchi's composition class at the Liceo.
In January 1913 Respighi moved to Rome to take up a professorship in composition at the Santa Cecilia school of music. His students included the composers Vittorio Rieti and Ennio Porrino, the pianist Pietro Scarpini and the organist Fernando Germani. The bustle and crowds of the city unsettled him: he grew withdrawn, felt homesick and slept irregularly.
One of the students in his class on fugue and composition was Elsa Olivieri-Sangiacomo. They married in January 1919. The couple shared a love of Gregorian chant: Respighi would often ask Elsa to sing him monodies, at times for up to two hours. Their home from 1921 was a flat in the Palazzo Borghese, and they called it I Pini.
In 1923 Respighi became director of the Santa Cecilia conservatoire. He disliked the administrative work and left the post in 1926, but he continued to teach a composition course there until 1935.
In March 1917 Fountains of Rome, Respighi's first orchestral tone poem, had its first performance at Rome's Augusteo theatre; it reflected his impressions of four fountains of the Eternal City. The reception was lukewarm, and the composer was disappointed. That December Rome also heard the first of the three Ancient Airs and Dances suites for orchestra; in them he freely reworked lute pieces by Italian composers of the 16th century.
In February 1918 the conductor Arturo Toscanini asked Respighi to pick a piece for twelve concerts in Milan. He settled on Fountains of Rome. The concerts triumphed and established Respighi among Italy's foremost composers of the early twentieth century. So began a long, if sometimes uneven, working relationship with Toscanini.
For Sergei Diaghilev Respighi orchestrated the ballet La Boutique fantasque, based on piano pieces by Rossini. In 1924 the second poem, Pines of Rome, was premiered in Rome and became one of his most widely performed works. In all, Respighi wrote nine operas.
Around the middle of the 1920s Respighi's fame reached well beyond Italy, and he travelled widely, conducting his own works and appearing as soloist in his piano music. In December 1925 he visited America for the first time. On 31 December, at Carnegie Hall, he played the piano part in the first performance of his Concerto in modo misolidio for piano and orchestra. The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam gave him a concert series of his own in March 1926, and Belgium held a festival of his music in 1931.
In May 1927 Respighi travelled with his wife to Brazil to give a series of concerts devoted to his music in Rio de Janeiro. The trip inspired his orchestral Impressioni brasiliane. In November 1928 he played the piano himself at Carnegie Hall in the premiere of his Toccata for piano and orchestra, while Willem Mengelberg led the New York Philharmonic. Roman Festivals was first heard in New York on 21 February 1929 under Toscanini.
After finishing Roman Festivals, Respighi felt that he could no longer write works on so large a scale, and he turned more often to smaller ensembles. In 1932 he became a member of the Royal Academy of Italy.
In January 1934 his opera La fiamma was premiered at the Rome Opera, with the composer conducting. In June 1934 Respighi and his wife made a month-long sea voyage to Argentina, where he conducted the same opera again, and he then visited Uruguay, where orchestral concerts were set up for the radio. The last work he finished was his arrangement of Benedetto Marcello's cantata Didone.
Ill health had forced Respighi to cancel several engagements by May 1935, among them a trip to conduct concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. By November he had finished a piano draft and most of the orchestration of his opera Lucrezia, but declining health made him stop work. In January 1936 he was found to have subacute bacterial endocarditis, an infection of the heart that could not be treated at the time.
Respighi died in Rome on 18 April 1936, with his wife and several friends beside him. In the spring of 1937 his remains were moved to Bologna, to the Certosa cemetery. Lucrezia was finished after his death by Elsa and his former pupil Ennio Porrino, and was completed in 1937.
Orchestral music holds the main place in Respighi's legacy. His path led from impressionism to neoclassicism. He wrote operas, ballets, orchestral suites, choral and chamber works, and transcriptions of Italian music of the 16th to 18th centuries. World fame came from three orchestral tone poems about Rome: Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals. The suite The Birds is based on Baroque pieces that imitate birds.
Respighi's orchestral works include the Trittico Botticelliano, inspired by three paintings by Botticelli, the Impressioni brasiliane and the Church Windows. He also wrote concertos: one for violin and orchestra (Concerto gregoriano), one for piano and orchestra (Concerto in modo misolidio), and the Concerto a cinque for strings with oboe, trumpet, violin, double bass and piano. He finished the opera Marie Victoire in 1913, but it was not staged until 2004.
Respighi's vocal music includes works to words by Shelley and Gabriele D'Annunzio. The Christmas Lauda is a cantata for three soloists, mixed chorus and a chamber ensemble. Respighi also wrote string quartets, among them the Doric Quartet.
Respighi returned to early music more than once. From Torchi he inherited an interest in Italian music of the 16th to 18th centuries, his version of Monteverdi brought him his first international success, and the Ancient Airs and Dances suites are built on early pieces, lute pieces among them. He also loved Gregorian chant. His list of works includes Three Preludes on Gregorian Melodies for piano, and three movements of the orchestral Church Windows are based on them.
Respighi also worked a great deal with other composers’ music. In 1906 he finished the earliest of numerous arrangements of music by composers of the 1600s and 1700s. Among them are two sonatas for harpsichord and viola d’amore based on music by the Bolognese composer Attilio Ariosti, and a collection of pieces by Nicola Porpora, Giuseppe Tartini and Francesco Maria Veracini for violin and piano, transcribed in 1908. Free orchestral transcriptions of pieces by Rossini make up his Rossiniana. Rachmaninoff, approached through the conductor Koussevitzky, agreed to let Respighi orchestrate several of his Études-Tableaux and revealed the programmes behind five of them, which had until then stayed secret. The first performance of the Cinq Études-Tableaux came in November 1931, played by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky.
Our site has five pieces by Respighi, all at the Intermediate+ level. For solo piano they are Sonata piano (fa m), Nocturne, 3 preludios sobre melodias gregorianas and Antiche Danze Ed Arie. The fifth piece, Piano Concerto p1, is written for piano and orchestra. You can begin with the sonata or the nocturne, and then move on to the preludes on Gregorian melodies and the piece Antiche Danze Ed Arie.