Event Details
Wed, April 18, 2018
18:00 – 19:30
VILLA SASSETTI
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Firenze, Italia
A talk by Matteo Sansone, Music Historian.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was a Jewish composer who was forced to leave Florence as a result of Mussolini’s 1938 racial laws, and then settled in Beverly Hills where he remained until his death.
In addition to film scores, orchestral music and works for classical guitar, Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s catalogue reflects his predilection for the art song, especially for Shakespeare’s poetry. He set 33 songs from his plays and over 30 sonnets. His art songs include poems by Dante, Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He also composed two operas based on two plays by Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well and The Merchant of Venice, and one based on Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Featured Biographies
Matteo Sansone
MUSIC HISTORIAN
Matteo Sansone studied piano and composition at the Conservatorio S. Pietro a Majella, Naples, and graduated in English from the Istituto Universitario Orientale. He received his PhD from Edinburgh University where he also taught for many years. He taught Italian at the University of Malta and at St. Andrews University. His main research areas are late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Italian opera with a focus on Verismo, and the relationship between opera and literature. His essays have appeared in «Music & Letters», «California Italian Studies», «Civiltà Musicale», «Early Music». He has co-authored a book on Italian and Maltese Music (Malta, 2001) and has written entries for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, International Dictionary of Opera, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. He taught “Italian Opera” at NYU Florence for many years.