Goffredo Petrassi, Composer; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Leading Italian modernist composer
John CG Waterhouse
Wednesday March 5, 2003
The Guardian
· This obituary has been revised since its author's death in April 1998
The composer Goffredo Petrassi, who has died aged 98, was a leading Italian
member of the second generation of modernists. In the English-speaking
world, his contemporary Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-75) has been better known.
However, in his own country, Petrassi, who took robustly Stravinskian and
Hindemithian neo-classicism as the starting point for a long, varied,
creative journey that continued into the early 1980s, was just as highly
regarded. After Dallapiccola's death, he became the grand old man of Italian
music.
Despite his humble peasant origin in a village near Palestrina, east of
Rome, Petrassi's talents showed themselves early. In 1913, he became a
chorister in the capital, where his contacts with Renaissance and Baroque
art and music left a lasting impression, reflected later in the fine,
large-scale choral works of his early maturity. However, his formal
education was interrupted by the need to earn a living, and, from 1919, he
worked in a well-stocked music shop, where he was still able to widen his
musical horizons.
His eclectic interest in modern artistic developments (not only in music)
dated from those years, and, by the mid-1920s, his alert cultural curiosity
had impressed enough influential people to win him help in resuming his
studies. By 1928, he was able to enter the Rome Conservatory as a mature
student of composition.
He sprang to international fame in 1933, when his tense, compelling Partita
For Orchestra became Italy's only contribution to the International Society
for Contemporary Music's festival in Amsterdam. The work was quickly taken
up by conductors in other countries, and his status as one of the bright new
hopes of Italian music was assured.
Among Petrassi's subsequent orchestral compositions, the most famous are his
concertos for orchestra, starting with the extrovert, brilliantly scored
First (1933-34), a close stylistic relative of the Partita, and ending with
the formidably complex Eighth (1970-72), whose turbulent intensity was
linked, in the composer's mind, with fears arising from the deterioration of
his sight.
The intervening concertos range from the relatively gentle, intimate Second
(1951), whose beginning has a pastoral grace of exceptional delicacy, to the
intricate, esoteric Seventh (1961-64), in which, as in many of his works of
the period, Petrassi drew unexpectedly close to the styles of such postwar
avant-garde composers as Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and Roberto Donatoni,
modernists of a further generation.
In between, the Fourth Concerto For Orchestra (1954) shows him at his most
Bartokian, while the Third and Sixth (1952-53 and 1956-67) make intermittent
use of post-Schoenbergian, 12-note techniques, in a manner utterly different
from Dallapiccola's.
The finest work of the series is arguably the Fifth (1955), whose sombre,
haunting eloquence is enhanced by a recurrent quotation from the composer's
Coro Dei Morti (1940-41) - the darkly powerful, dramatic madrigal for male
chorus, brass, three pianos, double basses and percussion which was his
response to Italy's entry into the second world war.
The Coro Dei Morti remains one of Petrassi's supreme achievements, and his
large-scale choral works in general form another outstandingly important
thread in his output. In the relatively early Psalm IX (1934-36), he
responded freely to the examples of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and Symphony Of
Psalms, reinterpreted in an exuberant spirit, in which overtones of fascist
pageantry can perhaps be detected.
After the war, however, the deep disillusionment of the Coro Dei Morti
transformed his outlook almost beyond recognition; Noche Oscura (1950-51) is
a memorably moving setting of St John of the Cross, pervaded by contrapuntal
textures of great subtlety and by a religious feeling that does not exclude
an insistent awareness of the darker side of reality.
The same is true of Petrassi's last, and most difficult, large choral work,
Orationes Christi (1974-75), which is likely to remain beyond the powers of
all but a few highly experienced choruses.
It is in big works that Petrassi is at his best; his smaller pieces can seem
disappointing by comparison - a fact which may have contributed to their
limited circulation outside Italy. There are, however, many exceptions,
including some popular little choral settings of Edward Lear.
Petrassi was also active as a conductor, an administrator (from 1937 to
1940, he directed the Teatro La Fenice, Venice), and - most famously - a
teacher. In 1959, he took over the advanced composition course at the
Accademia di Santa Cecilia, previously taught by Ottorino Respighi and
Ildebrando Pizzetti, and inherited from Petrassi in 1974 by Donatoni.
British composers who studied with Petrassi include Kenneth Leighton, Peter
Maxwell Davies, Gordon Crosse and Cornelius Cardew, whose diverse creative
outlooks bear witness to the liberating nature of his teaching.
He married his wife Rosetta in 1962, and they had a daughter.
· Goffredo Petrassi, composer, born July 16 1904; died March 2 2003
· This obituary has been revised since its author's death in April 1998
Rich Clancey
+ Goffredo Petrassi
+ Leading Italian modernist composer
Can anyone recall a single theme from any of his works? I
hope I leave something more substantial behind when I go
than hours of cacaphony.
--
rich clancey r...@world.std.com
Louis Epstein
: Goffredo Petrassi
: Leading Italian modernist composer
: John CG Waterhouse
: Wednesday March 5, 2003
: The Guardian
: This obituary has been revised since its author's death in April 1998
: The composer Goffredo Petrassi, who has died aged 98, was a leading Italian
: member of the second generation of modernists. In the English-speaking
: world, his contemporary Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-75) has been better known.
[SNIP]
: Goffredo Petrassi, composer, born July 16 1904; died March 2 2003
: This obituary has been revised since its author's death in April 1998
One of those cases where they ask someone to write an obituary years
before the person dies...and the writer winds up dying before the subject.
-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.