John Allitt; Art historian & Donizetti scholar
Hyfler/Rosner
March 28, 2007 Wednesday
Stephen Cross
JOHN ALLITT;
Art historian and Donizetti scholar
John Allitt played a significant part in the cultural life
of Britain in three distinct fields: as a lecturer at the
Central School of Art (now Central St Martins)in London,as
an international expert on the music of Gaetano Donizetti,
and as a leading contributor to the work of the Temenos
Academy.
His early years were turbulent. Born in 1934 at Calais of
English parents, he fled with his mother before the German
armies at the age of six, diving behind a sugarbeet pile
when machine-gunned from the air. Between the ages of eight
and 12 he was seriously ill. In 1946 the family moved to
Milan, and Allitt had a vivid memory of being taken by his
father to the shed in which Mussolini had been shot by
partisans.
At school in Switzerland he heard his first Donizetti opera,
Don Pasquale - a defining moment. In Milan he drank in
performances at La Scala while still a boy, standing at the
back of a box and peering through the heads and hats at the
stage below. Later, he studied Art History and Italian
Literature at Leeds University. A failed marriage in Italy
left him a struggling single parent, until his second
marriage in 1970 and the birth of twin daughters proved a
source of lasting happiness.
From 1964 Allitt taught at the Central School of Art in
London. As Senior Lecturer in Art History, he joined the
painter Cecil Collins in presenting a very different view
from that officially sanctioned. Both viewed the
increasingly dated Modernism - hard-edged abstraction was
then in vogue - as empty of meaning and hostile to real
creativity: "a world where the soul wanders unadopted,
confused - dying", as Allitt wrote. They emphasised the
importance of the representative element in art as a vehicle
for the expression of the inner life, and a generation of
students, many of whom are painting today, responded with
enthusiasm.
During these same years Allitt was exploring the music of
Donizetti, travelling to the composer's home town of Bergamo
whenever possible. He discovered the neglected early
compositions of Donizetti and the importance of his teacher,
J.S. Mayr, a significant composer and theorist who was the
link between German music and Italian Romantic opera.
In 1973 Allitt became Founding Chairman of the Donizetti
Society and the first modern performances of forgotten works
by Mayr and Donizetti followed, at St John's, Smith Square,
and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. For Allitt, their music went
far beyond the Romantic expression of emotion: its roots
were metaphysical and could be traced back to the
Renaissance and the world of Petrarch. His first book,
Donizetti and the Tradition of Romantic Love, appeared in
1975; and in 1981 Allitt received a knighthood (Ordine di
Cavaliere) from the Italian Republic for services to
culture. Two subsequent books, J.S. Mayr: father of 19th
century Italian music (1989) and Donizetti: in the light of
Romanticism and the teaching of Johann Simon Mayr (1991),
are regarded as authoritative.
The third of Allitt's services to culture lay in his work
with the Temenos Academy, the movement led by the poet and
scholar Kathleen Raine and affirming that the arts, and
civilisation itself when properly understood, can only
flourish when drawing upon the resources of the spirit and
the depths of the imagination. Allitt frequently contributed
to the original journal Temenos Review (198191), and when in
1991 the Temenos Academy grew out of this he delivered one
of the three inaugural addresses. He served until shortly
before his death on its Academic Board and lectured on a
wide range of subjects - the Cambridge Platonists and
Traherne, Botticelli, Goethe, Martin Buber and others; but
his gifts found their fullest expression in the many
seminars he taught, above all those on the Divine Comedy, in
which he presented the fruits of a lifetime's loving study
of Dante's great epic.
John Allitt was a man of courtesy and conviviality, imbued
with the culture of Europe. Last year he published in Italy
La Musica Classica Inglese 1800-1960 and two further works
in Italian await publication, including one on the work of
Thomas Traherne. Behind all his activity there lay an eager
life of the spirit. Always deeply rooted in Christianity, in
1997 he entered the Orthodox Church together with his
beloved wife, Eleanor.
John Stewart Allitt, musicologist and cultural historian:
born Calais, France 13 May 1934; married 1962 Anna Lomazzi
(one daughter; marriage dissolved 1966), 1970 Eleanor Cobb
(two daughters); died Coventry 1 March 2007.